Category: Author Interview

Join author Kat Hill on a journey across England, Scotland and Wales to explore 15 remote bothies, and uncover the beauty, history and stories of these wild shelters. In this stirring book of adventure, peace, wilderness and refuge, she intertwines her own story of heartbreak and new purpose, while taking into consideration the environment, what we owe to it, and why we all crave escapes into the remote.

Kat Hill is a Senior Lecturer in History at Birkbeck College, London, and her current research project is focusing on questions of landscape, people, and heritage in the bothies of the Scottish Highlands, as well as non-conformist religious communities in Europe, America and the Global South. She holds a PhD from the University of Oxford in 2011, where she also received a British Academy Postdoctoral Award, and she authored the prize-winning book, Baptism, Brotherhood, and Belief: Anabaptism and Lutheranism, 1525-1585. 

We recently chatted with Kat about what inspired her to write this book, how technology is changing the bothying experience, what she thinks the future holds for bothies and more. 

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Firstly, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to write a book about bothies?  

I’m a writer and researcher living on the northern tip of the Isle of Skye. If I am not reading or thinking up project ideas, I am either out in the hills or beavering away at my other role, working with local communities for Highlands Rewilding. In my past life I was an academic historian (as well as an international Brazilian Jiu Jitsu competitor), but last year I took voluntary redundancy from academia to pursue my writing and creative practice more fully, as well as aiming to do something good for the world in an age of climate crisis and environmental breakdown. That need, to work on something to do with the living world, was part of the inspiration for writing Bothy. I’d grown weary of academic life, and London in particular, my personal life was a mess, and I felt disconnected and unsettled. And then I got invited to a bothy, Cadderlie to be precise, on the edge of Loch Etive.  

When I first went to Cadderlie, I never intended to write a book about bothies. But I loved the whole experience, and the more I found out about them, the more drawn I was to these shelters. They embodied so many things I was interested in – landscape, our connection to place, environmental histories, material histories of people and the living world, and just generally being active and outside. Finally, the plans I had for quite some time to change direction and escape the life I was living came to fruition. Especially with that weird caesura that Covid provided, I had space to make notes and think, and in that time, I found the ability to write in a way I had not thought possible. I did an MA in Environmental Humanities alongside my job, kept chipping away at the work and was lucky enough to find an amazing agent. This book is not a memoir per se, though there’s quite a bit of my life in it, but I would say it’s a personal response both to the challenges of my own life and to the crises we see around us.  

Were there any authors or books in particular that inspired you when you set out to write Bothy?  

There’s a real mix of things that shaped my writing, as I am sure is the case for any writer, but one of the things I most enjoyed in the process was taking inspiration from an eclectic mix of authors and books. Too many to name, but I’ll give a flavour. Nature and travel writing has always felt like such an obvious go to. I remember my mum introducing me to Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts when I was younger and his combination of learned observation and vivid writing about the world captivated me. Other travel writing like Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley always spoke to me. As for more recent nature/travel writers, I love Cal Flyn’s work, Rebecca Solnit, Judith Schalansky’s books, and Nick Hayes’ Trespass, and I have immersed myself in environmental writing from so many people. To name a few – Robin Wall Kimmerer, Anna Tsing, Kathleen Jamie, Robert Macfarlane, and Andri Snær Magnason.  

But there were also personal elements to the book, and so when I was thinking how you deftly discuss your life and its meaning, it was to writers such as Deborah Levy, Amy Liptrot and Helen Macdonald that I turned. Fiction and literature shaped the work, too, novels like The Overstorey or Ursula Le Guin’s novels, short stories and essays. And I’ve always loved poetry, though I am not sure I am bold enough to write it for others – although, who knows? – and countless collections sit on my shelf, from Edna St. Vincent Millay to Alice Oswald, Rainer Maria Rilke to Liz Berry.  

At the heart, too, I have always drawn inspiration from my academic background and academic writers, mainly historians and archaeologists, for example Natalie Zemon Davis, Tim Ingold and Jane Bennett, but also philosophers. If you don’t know Timothy Morton’s book Dark Ecology, then I highly recommend it. I also always looked to those whose work is accessible beyond the world of scholarly writing. I was given a great lesson in that by my academic mentor Lyndal Roper, a historian of sixteenth-century Germany, and at the back of my mind was always the sensitive, layered, textured approach she had to writing about past lives. 

People find solace and healing in all sorts of activities and all manner of things. Why do you think bothies were the thing that helped you at a time when you needed it?  

It was a particular mix of things that made bothies so meaningful for me. I’d not been to Scotland much before Cadderlie, so part of it was being able to spend time outdoors and simply be active in beautiful landscapes. I grew up in Shropshire, so especially when I went to the Welsh bothies it felt like I was rekindling a connection to the younger version of myself. But they also stirred the historian’s interest in me because in the bothies there are visitor books which are left for anyone to sign, and these are a startling, intriguing record of ordinary lives. Given the chance to write a poem, draw a doodle or write out a life history, most people do. I’ve worked so often with archival documents that give hints of past lives and material histories of human stories that these felt like such a rich source.  

I felt an immediate connection to the people on these pages. And I loved that, because bothies arrived in my life at a turning point, when I needed that connection. It was a funny, difficult time personally for me when I found bothies. I was struggling with what direction to take, and I am not going to lie, the previous decade had been dark, difficult, and filled with depression and anxiety. On the outside everything looked great. I was doing really well in my academic career, I was living in London in Hammersmith, I was competing in, and winning, BJJ tournaments all over the world. But underneath was a bone-deep exhaustion. The long aftermath of a divorce and then the trauma of a difficult, fractious, toxic relationship had taken its toll. I found bothies as I came out of that. I entered a new relationship and prised myself away from the life that was making me unhappy, I loved some of the anonymity yet intimacy that bothies gave – you never know who’s going to be there which produces a strange kind of bond with fellow travellers- and the respite they provided from normal rhythms of life was welcome. You have to lead a pretty simple life with only camping gear and what you carry with you, even if that retreat into plain living is a manufactured choice. 

This process for me wasn’t sudden and revelatory. One thing I talk about in the book is that you don’t just go out into nature and find a cure. But there’s little doubt that the company of the living world (and finding time for connection, consideration, and above all perhaps, play) is soothing and healing. Everyone’s bothy experience will be different but for me, in these places, I was able to reshape myself after a difficult decade as someone who was once again creative, outdoorsy, adventurous, a nature lover, kind to others- someone who was happy.  

Do you think that technology and social media have changed the bothying experience? 

For example, now you can discover the details and locations of individual bothies online and then use a GPS to find your way there with ease. I never knew bothies before they were on Google maps, blogs and Instagram, so that’s always been my experience of the bothy world. But it’s certainly easier to find them now than it was in the 1970s or 1980s. It’s a different world, but I guess the key question for lots of bothy users is whether that alters or fundamentally destroys the bothy experience. Some would say yes, and I understand the frustration. Influencer posts about the same tourist spots in the world are wearying. And there is a very important debate to be had about responsible access to landscapes and environments, or the damage we can do as tourists. Working as I do in the rewilding sphere part of the time, I am often at the sharp end of these conversations about the tensions between human and non-human interests in a place, local and non-local needs. 

However, I also don’t think that all of the online stuff is bad in the bothy world. To survive, they need to be used and a new generation is part of that. Bothies are rooted in the desire for access to the countryside and in the working class ‘revolution’ for leisure and recreation in the hills that followed World War One. Expensive hotels and fancy tours were out of reach for working young men and women who suddenly had a bit more time for leisure, but bothies were free. So I find the private club notion of bothies, of pulling up the ladder after you, more than a little problematic as it seems to go against the idea of access and the right to roam.  

Some bothies have shut due to claims of overcrowding and parties – though I have never really seen raucous behaviour myself – but it’s all too easy to blame people without a voice as the culprits. Without labelling all landowners as evil either, this is really a debate about rights to the outdoors, access and how we develop responsible, caring relationships to landscapes. I think bothies can be part of that.  

Some bothies remain secret and I, for one, am not going to plaster them over the internet. But I have seen so many young people with a copy of Geoff Allan’s Bothy Bible in hand, loving the outdoors, and that makes me happy. I am sure information sharing has changed the experience of bothying but nothing is ever static in the world. Indeed, perhaps it’s a particularly human thing to be nostalgic for the moment just past, to get misty eyed about days gone by, rather than live in the present moment and to enjoy that for what it is. It makes me think of a line from an Office US episode from Andy Bernard: ‘‘I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.’  

How important do you think isolation is to the spirit and experience of the bothy? 

 There’s a really touching story, I talk about in the book which comes from a bothy visitor book entry. A man has returned to a bothy which he used to come to with his wife, their last trip of such a kind before she died of cancer. For him, as for so many others, the bothy may be relatively remote and cut off from some of the comforts of modern life but it’s not isolation per se that makes it special. It’s fellowship, companionship, love. Of course, there is a kind of isolation. But isolation from what is the key, as it’s not from people and places in a secluded wilderness, often quite the opposite as you will normally meet a new acquaintance. Some people do love being in a bothy alone and I have had delightful, quiet evenings by myself or with just a friend, but also plenty of entertaining nights with strangers. 

But even when you are alone, you aren’t really isolated because you are connected to the place around you, from the bothy mouse to the howling wind, to bellowing stags to querulous birds. Besides, bothies only exist because these were, and are, lived, worked landscapes. To imagine you are in an isolated wilderness is to do them a disservice. 

What do you think the future holds for bothies? Will they forever be old stone buildings, or will they evolve to include less traditional and/or newly built structures?  

I’d say bothies already are evolving in new ways and there are some new MBA bothies opening up, more cottages reclaimed and restored. I’d like to think there will always be stone bothies withy smoky walls and wooden floors because they have given me so much. But the bothy idea has been taken in many different directions: such as artistic residencies run by Bothy Project, or the wonderful Taigh Whin bothy and house run by partners Sarah MacLaren and Sophie Howarth, which offers low-cost holiday accommodation for people working for the common good – carers, community workers, teachers. This place (the house of gorse, it means) is a beautiful reimagining of the idea of shelter and connection in a bothy.  

And then there’s the luxury tourism bothy which is pretty far away from a traditional bothy, but I guess in some ways draws on the ideas of simplicity and shelter. The idea of a hut, a shelter, a shieling is malleable and changing but also speaks to a basic need for refuge or rest. So, the idea continues to have power, increasingly so perhaps in a fractured and complex world. And there’s a future to the bothy there, not just a past. The delicate balance of past and present is at the heart of bothy life, the retreat from modernity whilst knowing that this retreat is in some way dependent on the contrast the simple life provides with the contemporary. If there was no city or phone signal to escape from then I think bothies would be a whole different prospect.  

That’s why I think there’s a future for humble bothies of the stone wall variety, alongside the fancier versions, as they have lessons to give us about what matters. They ask us to question what we need, what makes us happy, and what we can do without.  

 

Finally, what is occupying your time at the moment (professionally and/or personally)? And can we expect more books from you in the future?  

Life has been really busy, professionally and personally. I’ve just moved to Skye so I am enjoying settling into the new house: filling up bird feeders, painting walls and walking to the beach. In between writing and reading, I have a part time role as a community engagement co-ordinator for Highlands Rewilding so I have been learning more and more about the practical implications of changing land use, climate change and the delicate balance between people and places.  

I don’t think I can ever imagine not writing though, so there’s plenty of scribbling too, some articles and grant pitches but also new book ideas. There will definitely be another book! Having moved about 15 times in ten years, it’s wonderful to have a home again and that’s starting to shape my writing too. When I was working in academia, I did a tonne of research on Amish and Mennonite migrations, so maybe there will be something about home and finding our place in this world.  

I am also embarking on a multiyear interdisciplinary project with photographer Nicholas J R White on places of shelter and refuge across the world, places where people stay for a short while. We’ve just got back from the Shiant Isles in the Minch, a beautiful place. Soft in summer, I imagine, but we were there at the time of the season’s changing when there’s still harshness in the air, winds cold, seas wild and sun shining. It’s already provided lots of food for thought. I am also out in the US later this year for a fellowship at the IAS at Princeton, so I might find my way up to some fire lookouts à la Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac.  

So, lots to keep me busy. Life is starting to settle again. I am in a happy place, surrounded by loving people. And I might even start some BJJ classes again. 

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Bothy is published by William Collins and is available to pre-order from our bookstore.

Ponds, pools and puddles are a common sight in our landscape and play a very important part in sustaining wildlife. In Volume 148 of the New Naturalist Series, the authors provide a comprehensive survey of the variety of plants and animal life for which they are a habitat, and discusses the way in which they are used, their importance, and compares their major variations in life cycles. Ponds, Pools and Puddles makes an invaluable contribution to raising awareness of these popular, yet frequently underrated freshwater habitats and gives them the attention they rightly deserve.

Jeremy Biggs and Penny Williams work for Freshwater Habitats Trust, a wildlife conservation charity focused on reversing the decline in freshwater biodiversity. They have been involved in numerous research projects, publications and conferences on the ecology and management of ponds and other freshwater habitats.

We recently had the opportunity to talk to Jeremy and Penny about how they became interested in ponds, whether they think technological advances will play an important role in future pond research and more.

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Can you tell us how you both became interested in ponds and pond life?

P: I had a wonderful early experience at primary school: we had a trip to a local pond in Southborough, Kent and caught a Three-spined Stickleback. The teacher brought a couple back to a classroom tank and I watched in amazement as the beautiful azure blue and orange male made a nest and fanned the eggs with his tail.

J: I was interested in wildlife from my teens, particularly birds, but it was at university (Royal Holloway, University of London) that my interest in freshwater was awakened. Crucial for me was an inspirational teacher – the late Dr Nan Duncan – who ran one of the best courses there was on freshwater biology.

I found your definition of a pond interesting as there appears to be so many ways of deciding what constitutes a pond. Can you talk us through the process that you went through to decide on the parameters for your definition?

P: After working on ponds for a couple of years it became clear that we needed an easy-to-use definition, particularly to deal with the inevitable question: is it a pond or a lake? It also had to include temporary ponds, which were hardly recognised in the UK at the time. So, at Freshwater Habitats Trust we went for an area-based definition because that’s easy to measure. We set 2 ha as the pond/lake cut off, as this seemed to best capture the difference between the two. The ‘wet for at least four months of the year’ is included as this is roughly the time needed for ponds to develop a wetland plant community. That means that you should be able go to a basin that’s wet or dry at any time of year and tell if it is a pond. In practice, the lower limit is a little flexible: we use 1m² to include tiny pools and garden ponds, but for practical reasons use 25m² for national counts of ponds where it’s impractical to count every little countryside puddle.

It’s clear that the first national pond survey paved the way for gaining a more in-depth understanding of pond classifications, species, ecological preferences and more. What do you think the next step is in gaining an even greater understanding of ponds, and do you think modern, technological research methods will play a big part in this?

P: Current policy, legislation and general awareness of the importance of ponds now lags way behind our knowledge of pond ecology – so although there is still an enormous amount more to find out about pond biology, I think the greatest need is for knowledge that shows the importance and value of ponds for protecting freshwater biodiversity. For example, we need evidence about how high-quality pond creation and restoration can be used, at a landscape scale, to maintain healthy freshwater metapopulations, prevent extinctions and enable the spread of species that may be increasingly isolated by pollution and climate change. This is a real focus for Freshwater Habitats Trust, where we’ve been championing the importance of small waterbodies – and ponds in particular – for more than three decades.

Modern technology will undoubtedly play a part in this: DNA, and eDNA in particular, may be a game changer, although we are some way off from using it for the purpose that I would love: routine monitoring of all waterbodies (rather than just rivers) to get a real understanding of what is happening to freshwater biodiversity in our landscapes and how we can best address that.

New technologies are always exciting but, to be honest, I think the main thing we need at the moment is publicity, publicity, publicity. Widespread knowledge and appreciation at all levels of how wonderful these little waterbodies are.

J: More than a particular technological solution, what we really need is funding for ‘National Pond Survey 2’, led from a conservation perspective and, as we’ve been doing for the last 30 years, generating and testing the ideas that Ponds, Pools and Puddles summarises. There’s so much to learn here: are ponds still declining in quality? What’s the effect of pond management? How do ponds, lakes, streams, wetlands and rivers interact? What about the microbiota which we know next to nothing about (that is something eDNA will help with)? How is climate change affecting ponds?

It was fascinating to learn that there is a much greater variety of species found in ponds in comparison to river communities. How important do you think ponds are in the recovery of nationally scarce or Red Data Book species?

J: The very wide variety of nationally scarce and Red Data Book species found in ponds means that ponds are absolutely vital for the recovery of these species. The special virtue of ponds is that, with their small catchment, we can still find large numbers of very high-quality ponds in the landscape, or create new, near pristine, clean water ponds in areas protected from pollution. This is all much more difficult for streams, rivers and many lakes with their much bigger catchments. There’s no doubt that creating and restoring networks of clean water ponds could put many of our Red Listed freshwater species on an upward trajectory. Indeed, this is one of the aims of Freshwater Habitats Trust’s vision to build the Freshwater Network: to reverse the decline in freshwater biodiversity. This will see us creating a network of wilder, wetter, cleaner, more connected freshwater habitats, and ponds play a big part in this concept.

To what extent do you expect climate change to affect the ecological formation and chemical makeup of natural ponds in the future?

P: The effects of climate change on ponds are undoubtedly going to be complex, varied, unexpected and unpredictable. For example, in the Water Friendly Farming project, where we’ve been monitoring the same ponds for over a decade, a clear (but not predicted) result is that shallow ponds are being rapidly encroached by marginal wetland vegetation in dry years, and this vegetation persists so that open water is being lost. However, the effect differs: where ponds are grazed this has been beneficial, sometimes enabling uncommon plants like Orange Foxtail (Alopecurus aequalis) to spread to lovely new poached drawdown zones. In other cases, it has been sad to see little ponds with water buttercups be replaced by just wetland grasses like Sweet-grasses (Glyceria spp) and Creeping Bent (Agrostis stolonifera).

J: Climate change is going to have a big impact, but the effects are going to very difficult to predict. Ponds are so varied, it’s inevitable that their responses will be too. It’s possible to make sweeping generalisations (pollution impacts get worse, many temporary ponds disappear) but there’s a good chance these will wrong. It’ll be crucial to have a good set of observations of what is actually happening to ponds. In the meantime, the priority should be to use ponds to put as much clean water as we can back into the landscape.

What is the most interesting finding that you have come across while researching ponds, pools and puddles?

P: For me it’s undoubtedly been the opportunity to riff on my geological background and delve into the ancient natural processes that shaped ponds in the past – and which still has so much to teach us about ponds (and other freshwaters) today. For example, I love the fact that almost all of today’s wetland plants evolved in landscapes that had already been shaped by grazing and poaching processes for over 200 million years – no wonder many wetland plants benefit from grazing and the presence of muddy ground! And, at a time when many people (including scientists and policymakers) still undervalue ponds as man-made artificial features, some of world’s best-preserved evidence of early life in terrestrial landscapes (the Devonian Rhynie cherts in Scotland which are c400 my) reveal an environment that is full of ponds with the fairy shrimps and tadpole shrimps swimming amongst stoneworts.

J: For me, it’s been the chance to bring together so much information that we simply haven’t had a chance to publish anywhere else. With the amount of time it takes to publish research, we are extremely selective about what we write up in papers. Only the most important results ever make it into print. It’s also allowed us to look at groups we don’t work on so much ourselves (such as the microalgae) and see how these reinforce many of the ideas about ponds from the more obvious bigger plants and animals. It’s also nice to get into the book the truth that many of our biggest and most famous wetlands, like the Coto Donana in Spain, are actually massive pond complexes comprised of over 3,000 temporary ponds!

Are either of you working on any other projects that we can hear about?

J: Freshwater Habitats Trust is really busy at the moment! Amongst other things we are:

– Launching the Freshwater Network: this is our plan to restore freshwater biodiversity taking account of freshwaters, including the critically important small (standing and flowing) that make up most of the water environment but have been largely overlooked for 100 years.

– Developing the network in key regions to protect and restore freshwater biodiversity in some of our most important freshwater landscapes like the New Forest, The Brecks, in the catchment of the R. Thames and in the Yorkshire Lowlands.

– Working with colleagues in Europe and South America looking at pond biodiversity, ecosystem services and climate change as part of the EU Horizon 2020 PONDERFUL project.

– Beginning research on the value of pond buffer zones in a project for Natural England and assessing the role that eDNA can play.

– Creating thousands of new ponds with Amphibian and Reptile Conservation as part of the Newt Conservation Partnership – created for Great Crested Newts but with much wider benefits for wildlife and, critically, monitoring the effects so we can tell whether it’s really making a difference.

– Continuing catchment research which looks at all of the water environment. Fortunately more and more people are realising that in every landscape, small waters are a lifeblood.

– and so many others….

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Ponds, Pools and Puddles is available to order from our online bookstore here.