Guides · Journal · 19 July 2026
The bothy code: how free mountain shelters actually work
Open shelters survive in Britain's hills on volunteers and good behaviour alone. How bothies work, how to use one well, and where to start.
Somewhere in a glen a long walk from the nearest road stands a stone cottage with no lock on the door. Inside: a sleeping platform, a fireplace, maybe a shovel and a visitors' book. It costs nothing, takes no bookings, and belongs in effect to whoever walks in that night. This system should not work. It has worked for sixty years.
What a bothy is
Most British bothies are abandoned shepherds' cottages and estate buildings, left over from the emptying of the hills. From 1965 the Mountain Bothies Association (MBA), a charity run entirely by volunteers, began restoring them with the owners' blessing: the estate keeps the building, the MBA maintains it, and the door stays open for anyone. Around 100 shelters are looked after this way across Scotland, northern England and Wales, with others maintained privately or by estates.
To be clear about what "shelter" means: four walls, a roof, and usually nothing else. No water, no electricity, no loo (the shovel is not decorative), no warden. A bothy is camping with the tent replaced by masonry.
The code
The MBA's bothy code is short, and the whole system balances on it:
- Leave it as you found it, or better. Pack out everything you carried in, and any rubbish worse-mannered visitors left.
- Respect the building and the fire. Burn only what's appropriate, never strip live wood, and make sure the fire is out. Bothies are lost to carelessness more often than to weather.
- Respect other users. The bothy is nobody's private base camp. Groups of six or more, and any commercial use, need the owner's permission; late arrivals get floor space made for them.
- Respect the estate. These are working landscapes; follow stalking notices and keep dogs in hand.
- If it's full, that's the hills. Carry a tent. A bothy is a bonus, never a plan A.
The unwritten additions matter as much: leave dry kindling for the next arrival if you can, and write something in the book. The visitors' books are the great unread literature of the British hills: weather reports, midge counts, occasional poetry, the odd proposal.
Where to start
First-timers do better at the accessible end: a bothy an hour or two's walk in, visited as a lunch stop or a deliberately short overnight, before committing to a remote one in November. The MBA website lists locations; part of the culture is that the last mile of finding them is your own work. Go once as a day visitor and read the book, and you'll understand the institution better than any article can manage.
Collecting them
Inevitably, people keep count. Bothies suit the collecting instinct unusually well: there's a bounded list, they're scattered across the best walking country in Britain, and each one is a story rather than a tick. Atlas tracks nearly 200 bothies and shelters and logs a visit when your GPS track reaches one, which has a pleasing side effect: the record shows not just that you went, but which nights, and by which improbable route.
The collection is the excuse. The point is a stone room, a fire, and weather on the other side of a wall that someone repaired for free so that you could be there.
Related
Atlas matches your Strava or GPX archive against every UK peak, trail and trig point. Find out free.