The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Young bothy lads had it tough
Angus resident Barbara Kennedy has enjoyed seeing Craigie’s recent coverage of bothy traditions of days gone by and today provides a few fascinating insights into the once common way of life.
Barbara, from Forfar, writes: “Most of my life has been spent living in the countryside. All around us were farms, and most of them had a farm bothy where single, young lads, who were employed on these farms, lived.
“The accommodation was very basic, but the few bothy lads whom we knew were very nice, hard-working and polite. This was going back to the 1940s.
“I did some research recently on the bothy system going back to the 1800s, and mostly in Aberdeenshire. One man I came upon wrote his story to The Press and Journal in the early years of the 1900s.
“His name was James Allan, and he started working and living in bothies in 1862. He wrote, ‘My first bothie was a hut resembling a pighouse, the floor was below ground level, and as a result, when it rained water came in under the door and ran out under the wall at the other end of the hovel. I had planks to walk on to get to bed with dry feet – and I was a boy of 11, alone.’
“To us today this is shocking, but it was normal back then and right up to the early 1900s, on old photos of the ‘bothie lads’ there is always a young boy, who was known as the ‘orra loon’. He would have done light jobs around the farm.
“James Allan stayed six months at this farm, called Tullos. He then went on to another farm near Monymusk, where he had the company of another fee-ed lad a fair
bit older than himself, and this ‘bothie’ was a loft above the stable, where he said, ‘The horses had first breathed the air.’
“The roof above this bothie was of a type of thatch made of divots and broom, in which the stable rats burrowed regularly in this roof.
“He goes on to say, ‘We had to acquire the habit in the morning of refraining from opening our eyes until we first shook our heads downwards over the bedside to clear
the dust which fell overnight from the rats upon our eyelids!’
“He went on to say at the time that bothies should be made illegal, and he did not like them.”
She concludes: “Driving around the countryside today, many farms still have a building that had been the bothy, that housed the single agricultural workers of the time. There has to be ex-bothy lads around still today who knew the bothies, and no doubt their memories of a time now gone would be well worth the telling.”