Fin Campbell has made the same journey several times each year since he was a few months old. Through the pine woods surrounding Glenmore Lodge, around the shores of emerald-tinted An Lochan Uaine, and up to a small, stone building tucked into the lower western slopes of Meall a’ Bhuachaille. This is Ryvoan bothy; and Fin, alongside his dad Kevin and another long-time Mountain Bothies Association (MBA) member Allan Moore, is its official Maintenance Organiser.
“Fin came along on his first visit to Ryvoan in a papoose when he was a baby,” says Kevin, who’s been looking after the building for the past 20 years. “He’s been sleeping in bothies since he was one or two years of age. His first overnight was at Phawhope bothy in the Borders, and he’s never looked back. Two years ago, he was asked to become the Maintenance Organiser alongside Alan and myself. Initially we said no. We came up with a number of challenges he had to undertake to prove to us what he could do physically and mentally in the mountains. It was only when he achieved those that we agreed to it – now he’s the MBA’s youngest Maintenance Organiser.”
Bothy culture is a way of life for Kevin, who was introduced to the Scottish mountains and the rudimentary stone shelters that lie in their folds by his own father when he was a child. By 16 he was visiting bothies regularly of a weekend “as a way of getting out of the steelworks”. Then he travelled the world, climbing in far-flung mountain ranges but always returning to Scotland and its bothies when the mountaineering season was done. Hiking up to a remote bothy with a bag of coal – roughly the same weight as a pack full of old-school mountaineering gear – was good fitness training.
“I spent seven years in Africa; but just before I went away, my father and I went to Staoineag bothy,” he remembers. “We found that the internals had been getting a bit of work done to them, but they hadn’t been finished. So instead of going hillwalking in November (it was really cold and snowy), we actually completed all the wood panelling inside the bothy. That panelling is still there today.”
Kevin was given free membership to the MBA; and when he returned from Africa, he began looking after a bothy called Shiel of Castlemaddy in the Borders. Bothies in southern Scotland, he says, tend to suffer more from antisocial behaviour. Shiel of Castlemaddy was already “in the last chance saloon” when Kevin began caring for it, and it wasn’t long before the MBA decided to give it up as an unsustainable proposition.
You might think, reading some of the negative publicity around bothies that does the social media rounds, that the story of Castlemaddy is a common one; perhaps repeated ever more frequently as the popularity of bothying rises. Not so, says Kevin. “A few years ago, the MBA were bound by their charitable status in Scotland to publish the grid references of all their bothies so that they could continue to be registered as a charity. Then came the advent of various guidebooks, and bothies started to be talked about on social media. In my opinion, though, that hasn’t damaged the bothy portfolio. It’s probably helped it. Bothies are in a much better condition and they are looked after more, and I’d say a lot of that is because of social media and different people using them.”
In particular, Kevin has noticed an uptick in the number of women visiting bothies. On one particularly memorable night, he arrived at a bothy to find “six ladies dressed in fluffy pyjamas. Within a few hours, I was wearing fluffy pyjamas as well – one of their friends hadn’t turned up and so they had a spare pair.”
And that isn’t the only strange story he has to tell from several decades of bothying. “You have to be a little bit eccentric to use a bothy. I was up at Ryvoan to paint the floor one November and I met a ‘gentleman of the road’ – probably one of the last down-and-out travellers living in the UK. He’d walked all the way from Manchester and he was sleeping underneath a Glasgow Herald. Anyway, we chatted and then he went away down towards the campsite at Glenmore Lodge and came back with whisky, cold chips and steak. But the guy didn’t drink anything at all – he ended up painting the walls for me.
“I’ve met all sorts in bothies and I can honestly say I’ve not had many bad nights, although I’ve had some sleepless ones! People should know what to expect. You’re sharing a common space, there’ll be people sitting, drinking whisky, making fires and talking. You might not get a lot of sleep. But if you arrive at a bothy in the winter, you’ll probably be offered a kettle that’s already been boiled and maybe something to eat and everything will be good in the world. That’s the kind of community we’d always had, and it still continues.”
The connection Kevin and Fin have to Scotland’s bothies and their surrounding mountains matters more to them now than ever before. In late December, they lost Debbie – Kevin’s wife and Fin’s mother – very suddenly. They made the decision to scatter her ashes partly at Ryvoan and partly at Cadderlie bothy where Kevin and Debbie got engaged.
By the time you read this, a memorial table and benches will be installed in Ryvoan, waiting to welcome the next generation of bothy-goers. And if you see Kevin and Fin up there, maybe giving the place a clean or painting a peeling window… “Don’t be shy – say hello!”
The Mountain Bothies Association relies on volunteers, and always needs help from hill-loving folk to keep its huts in good condition. Find out more at mountainbothies.org.uk.
