My first night in a mountain bothy, by Isla Scholefield

An original contemporary blog.

I had read about bothies for years before I finally slept in one. For anyone who has not come across them, a bothy is a simple stone shelter left unlocked for walkers, usually miles from the nearest road. There is no electricity, no running water and no booking system: you turn up, and if there is space, you stay.

The walk in to the bothy at Glen Ardach took me just under four hours from the car park, most of it along a forestry track and the last part across boggy ground where I sank to my ankles twice. When I pushed open the door, two cyclists from Leeds were already there, boiling water on a tiny gas stove. The building had one room downstairs with a fireplace and a wooden sleeping platform upstairs, reached by a ladder.

The rules, written on a laminated card pinned to the wall, were short. Carry out all your rubbish. Leave dry kindling for the next visitor. Never cut live wood. I had carried a bag of coal on my back for exactly this reason, and by eight o’clock the fire was roaring and the three of us were drying our socks on the mantelpiece.

I barely slept. Mice scratched behind the panelling and the wind found every gap in the window frame. But when I climbed down the ladder at dawn and opened the door, the whole glen was white with frost and a stag was standing in the river, and I understood at once why people keep coming back.

(a) How long did the walk to the bothy take the writer? (b) Who was already in the bothy when the writer arrived? (c) What had the writer carried on her back so that she could light a fire?