🗓️ Big Bothy Walk: The Final Day
📍 Northern Highlands
🏚️ Coiremor
Under the coil of Seanna Bràigh, I reached the end.
I've slept in crofthouses, lodges, barracks, stalkers huts, schoolhouses, valverooms, blackhouses, coastguard stations, stables and deer larders. The small corners of history; the stories of Britain's ordinary people.
Once a drunken stalker would weave his bike home up the Lairig Ghru, whilst in Ballachulish a wrongly condemned man was hanged. In the Borders, a balladeer spoke to fairies, and in Moidart a Jacobite sympathiser fled to find his family and escape. A hermit painted the walls of his Sutherland refuge whilst a conman on Loch Long charged tourists for photographs, claiming to be the oldest man in Scotland.
Labourers lived in quarters now said to have the best view in Cumbria, and Snowdonian quarrymen lined their floors with paper in a futile effort to keep warm. Drovers moved their cattle south, resting overnight in the Kielder Forest, whilst schoolchildren crossed burns on stilts to reach their classrooms. Isolated shepherds received a twice yearly delivery of paraffin and wheat, and blacksmiths stashed sandwiches in the cupboards of their high hillside shops.
Many of these buildings carry the names of whole communities. Places where the people were evicted and buildings rubbled. A history now only preserved in the names of these singular shelters.
I hope in 104 stories, you began to understand their sanctity. Both as the refuges they are today, and in preserving a past that is arguably far more relevant than that of kings and palaces. The history of the people that you or I might have been. In their survival, we retain the stories of ourselves.
I crossed a final threshold after fifteen months, the threshold of a stables now sliced into three. I was met by six brilliant men I hadn't known at all when I set off from Hawick last June. I have watched two nights draw in over Seanna Bràigh, but now it's time to leave. To sweep the floor, empty the ashes, take away the burnt out candles, leave one more postcard, and close a door behind me.
I shall see thee in a bothy, one day x
🏚️THE BOTHY CODE
.uk
🙋🏻RESPECT OTHER USERS
- Don't hog a bothy. Be considerate of other visitors and make them feel welcome.
- Leave the bothy in a clean, tidy state.
🏡RESPECT THE BOTHY
- Don't vandalise the bothy
- Remove all rubbish. Don't bury rubbish
- Don't leave ANY food
- Close all windows and doors and make sure the fire is fully out before you leave
- Report any damage you have either noticed or accidentally caused. You can make a bothy report on the MBA website.
🌲RESPECT THE SURROUNDINGS
- If there is no toilet please bury human waste out of sight - Use the spade provided, keep well away from the water supply and never use the vicinity of the bothy as a toilet
- Never cut live wood or damage estate property.
- Respect all fire-related signs
📝RESPECT THE AGREEMENT WITH THE ESTATE
-The MBA are guardians of the bothies, responsible for their maintenance. The buildings are still owned by the estate and agreements have been signed for their use. If these agreements are repeatedly broken, the estate can close the bothy
- Respect restrictions during lambing and stalking seasons
- Remember bothies are only available for short stays. For extended stays, contact the estate for permission.
6️⃣RESPECT THE RESTRICTION ON NUMBERS
- Individual groups of more than six are asked to avoid bothies to avoid aforementioned bothy hogging
- Bothies are not available for commercial use (including sponsored posts and paid partnerships on social media)
***
There are currently 104 MBA bothies with locations and up to date information published on the Mountain Bothies Association website. There are hundreds of others where the owners/caretakers have NOT made the location public. When visiting these non-MBA bothies please act with restraint and discretion when discussing them and their whereabouts and do not publish locations or names publicly on social media. These bothies do not have the same resources, nor the same charitable status. One issue and they can and will lock their doors.
Please use social media for good and inspire and educate your followers to follow the bothy code and, if possible, to contribute to the MBA.
🥾 Affric Kintail Way Day 3
We had bumped into Sandra two days ago as we departed; a jolly old lady in a Fair Isle jumper who had been keen and proud to remind Chrissy that Scotland had no law of trespass.
"I used to live in Affric Lodge" she'd boasted "Whatshername, the Middleton sister, lives there now"
"Pippa?"
"Yes, she married that Matthews man didn't she?"
"Do you like your gossip Sandra?"
She'd sighed "Oh I do, I really do"
I pointed out Affric Lodge as we passed it; regal on its jut of land, viewing the length of the loch between the hills. I wish we had pressed Sandra more about what brought her there.
The trees thinned out as the mountains came in, and with them waves of mist and rain. The track flooded in the dips and the ground sodden. I think that Matthews man needs to sort out his land irrigation.
Heads down and hoods up against the rain, the bright green exterior of the Alltbeithe Hostel glowed against the landscape. Whilst we sheltered around the side, we didn't dare go in, knowing the fire and the smell of bacon would be just too hard to tear ourselves away from. We had a bothy to get to.
The red roof of Camban finally waved our finish for the day. It's had a toilet built since I was last here; perfectly positioned to observe the deer by the burn below and the birds soaring on the wind of the hills across.
A couple of cyclists came through hoping to reach Morvich that evening, taking brief respite, followed a few hours later by a girl doing the Highland Trail 550 intending to press on through the night; she radiated such heat from her endeavour that her entrance misted the windows and warmed up the room. But we were alone in the night, barely observing any hours of dark at all.
❤️@chrissyraider
🥾 Affric Kintail Way Day 2
After what we considered a well deserved breakfast in Cannich, Chrissy and I wound our way up to the woods that brought us to Dog Falls and onwards to the lochside paths. Battered occasionally by the rain, and never quite sure which layers would be the most appropriate. Peeking through the trees as we approached our 15 miles for the day, we spotted a hidden bay. A small trample through the woods showed we weren't the first to find it, and thankfully, for the second night in a row, it stayed dry as we pitched our tents.
In the late afternoon a strong burst of sun warmed us, as we looked up to the shrinking hats of snow on the rising Affric hills across the loch, reflecting to the water like landscapes caught inside a globe. Just waiting to be shaken and storm and stir again.
❤️@chrissyraider
🥾Affric Kintail Way Day 1
It had been three years since Chrissy and I last saw each other after she had intercepted the Welsh portion of my bothy walk. We had van camped by a reservoir on New Year's Eve to see in 2023 together with face masks and curry. A lot has happened for both of us since then.
The Affric Kintail Way is a trail I had done a fair while ago - I remembered it being easy, generally flat, simple to navigate and increasingly lovely; an ideal set of descriptors for lengthy natters and catch ups. The trail was opened in 2015, creating a waymarked route between the shore of Loch Ness and the sea through forests, by lochs and peaceful glens.
The weather came in bursts of rain and sun as we set off from Drumnadrochit, Chrissy newly fortified with a pink Highland coo hot water bottle. We wound our way through the woodland, smattered briefly by hail. A few walkers came through other way, apologising to Chrissy for the weather as if anyone comes up to Scotland for sun. After ten miles we found a pitch by the babble of a burn for the night, a cuckoo chirping inquisitively as we broke his peace.
❤️@chrissyraider
The memorial is overgrown and neglected. Weeds have broken the grey ground slabs and trees pushed in at the walls, concealing in the shadow. We had followed vague directions down a dusty, rough side road until a glimpse of the white gate; rust swallowing the colour from the joins.
The small town of Norvalspont was named for an entrepreneurial Scot who constructed a ferry, a ‘pont’, here. The ferry is long gone, and the name is better known in history as a place becoming unremembered. A concentration camp.
The Boer guerilla campaign during the Second Anglo Boer War had proved difficult for the British to beat. A scorched earth campaign was enacted, and any Boer support systems removed. Farms were blazed, livestock slaughtered and all women and children removed, placed with other political prisoners in newly built camps.
200,000 people were held in these 109 camps, half of which were black Africans. In the overcrowded camps, the prisoners were starved and subjected to inadequate shelter, hygiene and medical care. Disease ran rife with typhoid and dysentery spreading amongst the malnourished prisoners. 40,000 people are estimated to have died in these camps, though the number could be far higher.
Norvalspont was an overflow, built to relieve the camp at Bloemfontein. A grey monument sits in a concrete courtyard listing around 250 names of women and children, three quarters of which were children under the age of 15. Measles, scarlet fever and diphtheria likely the cause of most of the deaths, with the full number believed to be twice what has been listed.
The plinth erected to mark tragedy into perpetual poignancy is losing this battle with time. We bumped away down the dirt track, and in only a few seconds it had disappeared
Sehlabethebe has been a UNESCO world heritage site, as an extension of the uKhahlamba Drakensberg Park, since 2013. Noted for it's habitat supporting both cape and bearded vultures, and especially for the 65 sites of San rock art that document 4,000 years of life an early herding and gathering existence until the arrival of the settlers.
We asked at the gate where, in the 65,000 square hectares of the park, we could find the rock paintings. They didn't know and there was no map.
I scoured the northwestern facing sandstone overhangs for the faded bulk of an eland or the wide jump of a hunter. Red ochre, black charcoal and ash white sank into the porous sandstone and stained, still coloured millennia later. As with any art there is variance, between the paintings created by shamans in a spiritual trance state, and the more ordinary recordings of dances and hunts and amateur scrawls of enthusiastic youngsters.
Back near Injisuthi, ancient art had cluttered the caves. Bowmen lock in a battle and a family sits around a fire of an evening. Slowly weathering away, most not instantly seen. New characters arrived on the walls only a few hundred years ago, sat on horseback. The paintings then dwindle and, eventually, disappear.
When my dad was a teenager, he hitch-hiked across South Africa to the headquarters of the National Parks Board and slept in the doorway until they opened. He asked to speak to someone in charge and began to outline why they should give him a job.
They, rightly, laughed and told Bob to get lost, go home, and go to school.
He became an accountant instead. He would still like to be a ranger.
The ragged Maluti mountains heave into verdant pyramids and incise sharply - like an axe taken to the land. Thabana Ntlenyana in the northeast scans above the others for its lofty equal. None higher will be found until Kilimanjaro, many countries away.
Water falls from the summits into the Senqua River. In South Africa the waterway carries the name of the Dutch House of an English King, but ‘Senqua’ is not freedom from colonial branding, also meaning Orange. A masked, mealy mouthed compromise.
My father grew up on tales, in fiction, folklore and true adventure, of the Orange. A number of years ago we drove to the mouth, just north of Alexander Bay, still heavy with the fenced sprawl of diamond and copper mines. Proceeding through the boom gates to the beach, we lingered too long on the shrinking sands and had to run, and then drive, through the incoming sea to escape the tide.
The Basutho see the Mountains as living, sacred beings; a space where the spirits of ancestors reside next to the supernatural and the divine. Legend has it that in times of need the mountains have grown taller to protect from attack.
The weather may reflect the current temperament of their peering guardians. A endless rain may speak to disagreement in the spirit realm. Sunshine to contentment. Like those from the Celtic otherworld, Tìr nan Òg, not all who reside there are eternally benevolent. Mischief makers play tricks, lure away children, and hide needed items revelling in the human frustration of those who's attention has lapsed.
We woke from our camp to inch thick frost. My father had stubbornly refused my offers of a hot water bottle, down blanket or even my mat to place atop his campbed - I, after all, always automatically prepare for Scottish conditions. My hiking pole, stuck into the ground outside my tent, was now a pointed stalactite and the water in our bottles frozen solid.
It's a lot sometimes, to act in respect and reverance of my own culture's ancestors, let alone everyone else's. Whatever we had done to displease the Mountain Guardians extended to the battery of the truck that just gave silence to the turn of the key again and again and again.
🚙 The Sani Pass
TheSani Pass climbs steeply up 1,332 metres, connecting the border posts between South Africa and Lesotho. Rather than winding or meandering, it sharply slams its way up 13 switchbacks with a route like a drunk hen party staggering up Rose Street at 2am.
“Dad, I'm going to go over there and do a cringey millennial pose. Please keep the horizon straight, and do not zoom in”
Bob can now follow half a set of photographic instructions.
There aren't that many straightforward routes to cross between the two countries, this side at least. The hills are vertiginous and gnashing - tall teeth snarling from the jaw of the land. The pass now known as Sani that now sits upon the bucket list of many 4x4 enthusiasts was for hundreds of years simply the least treacherous route to take by foot. Its development in 1913 to become a trade-facilitating mule track was quite the upgrade. Spare mules were brought along, so common was it for one or two to tire and fall along the way. You could identify the pass from looking at the sky miles away - vultures circled in their masses overhead waiting for another unfortunate beast to tumble.
The first person to drive up Sani, supposedly, was former spitfire pilot Godfrey Edwards in 1948. However if you are aided by numerous labourers loaded up with ropes, blocks and tackle, did you really drive it?
Improvements were made to make it accessible to vehicles, but even today you are only allowed up in a four wheel drive with low range capability. This doesn't appear to be particularly enforced - a small, zippy city car was beginning his ascent as we completed, whilst we were greeted near the top by a loud, old pick up loaded up with portaloos; clearing down after the RMB Ultratrail Drakensberg trail running race. The route did not include the pass. There is a hiking trail alongside allegedly but I can't imagine its particularly popular.
It used to be that drivers would celebrate with a drink (just the one) at the pub just past the Lesotho border, but new ownership has insisted on reservations and generally taken away the fun. They've talked about tarmacking the pass for years, and now it seems it might actually happen.
My dad told me he had been banned from joining the Mountain Club of KwaZulu-Natal back in the day because he attempted to steal 16 bricks from a hut building workparty. Apparently he needed them to 'build shelves' in his first studio flat.
Whilst he promises me he can actually afford to buy real shelves these days, I'm not sure I'd risk inviting such potentially outrageous behaviour at one of our Mountain Bothies Association workparties. It's not a great look for me Bob.
