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A stirring, beautiful book for anyone who longs to run away to the woods sometimes.
You will find a bothy in the mountains or the wilderness, remote huts you can't reserve, usually without electricity or other mod-cons, running water or a marker on the map. In this beautiful journey, Kat Hill travels between fifteen bothies – across Scotland, England and Wales – revealing the beauty of these wild shelters, their history, the stories of the people who frequent them and the core of why we all crave escaping into the remote. Weaving in her own story of heartbreak and new purpose, her historian's perspective and brilliant, fresh consideration of the environment and what we owe to it, this is a glorious book of adventure and peace, wilderness and refuge.
Kat Hill is a Senior Lecturer in History at Birkbeck College, London. Her current research focuses on questions of landscape, people, and heritage in the bothies of the Scottish Highlands and non-conformist religious communities such as Mennonites in Europe, America and the Global South. She has a PhD from the University of Oxford (2011), where she was also later a British Academy Postdoctoral Award holder. She has been the recipient of numerous grants from major academic funders, but most notably a prestigious GBP1 million grant from the Leverhulme Trust for Research Leadership, and most recently an upcoming Environmental Humanities fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of the prize-winning book, Baptism, Brotherhood, and Belief: Anabaptism and Lutheranism, 1525-1585 (Oxford University Press, 2015). She is a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt and a European champion.
– Shortlisted for the James Cropper Wainwright Prize Longlist 2024 for UK Nature Writing
"The result is a thoughtful and thought-provoking, a beguiling combination of travel writing, nature writing, social history and personal reflection"
– Daily Mail
"Kat Hill thoughtfully couples history with memoir; these personal touches endear the reader to a life of bothy-dwelling. This is a warm, erudite work that neatly explores our relationship with wild landscapes and carefully considers our place within them"
– New Stateman
"An intelligent and thoughtful book that will have you reaching for your boots. Hill offers learned and considered reflections on the consolations of retreat, simple living, of finding even temporary shelter when all outside is tempest. It is also a meditation on change: climate change, emotional growth, and the unquenchable nostalgia for a past slipping ever further from view"
– Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment
"Marvellous [...] It would be difficult to think of a subtler or more careful exploration of the wrinkles of modern life and modern nature, with all its traps, delights, delusions and possibilities."
– Adam Nicolson, author of Life Between the Tides
"A questing, atmospheric collection of meditations of the essential nature of bothy life. A book steeped in dubbin, wood smoke, lanolin, and love of wild places, Kat Hill's hymn to the humble highland hut will delight and inform armchair travellers, weekend walkers, and veteran rough-stuffers alike"
– Dan Richards, co-author of Holloway
"You can't imagine just how much I loved the book. The honesty, the curiosity, the celebration and exploration all I wanted to do was to sneak under my covers and keep reading [...] the universality underneath the particularity is going to strike a chord with so many readers"
– Sophie Howarth, author of Looking at Trees and co-founder of The School of Life
