Bernard Heath
Accountant who in his spare time established a network of bothies for visitors to remote locations
BERNARD HEATH, who has died aged 93, founded the Mountain Bothy Association (MBA) in 1965 with the aim of saving deserted farm buildings from ruin “for the use and benefit of all who love wild and lonely places”.
The dictionary defines a bothy as “a one-roomed hut in which labourers are lodged”, often in mountains, though in practice bothies, generally former croft houses or estate cottages, vary in size from one-room boxes to two-storey cottages.
In 19th-century Britain there were many isolated stone bothies, often homes for shepherds or stalkers. From the early 1900s, and particularly after the First World War, social and economic changes meant these buildings were abandoned as estate workers became fewer, and those who stayed were less prepared to live miles from the nearest road in buildings with no electricity or running water.
But from the 1930s, with the rise in popularity of hillwalking, adventurous walkers would stay in them, not always with the landowners’ permission, beginning a fashion for “bothying”. The trend continued post-war, but by the 1960s many bothies were falling into disrepair.
In 1965, Heath, a keen cyclist from Yorkshire, spotted a remark in the visitors’ book at the Backhill of the Bush bothy in Galloway Forest Park, suggesting the setting-up of a club to save Britain’s bothies from ruin. Subsequently, with a group of friends, he organised the restoration of a ruined farmhouse at Tunskeen in southwest Scotland as an unlocked shelter, and on December 28 1965 called a meeting at Dalmellington, East Ayrshire, at which the MBA was formed.
Over the next four years Heath, despite having a full-time job, organised the renovation of 15 of the remotest bothies, from a gamekeeper’s cottage in the wild north-west Highlands to a mine cottage on the highest hill in the Pennines. By 1975, the MBA maintained 32 buildings and was registered as a charity. It now runs more than 100 bothies across the UK.
All the work was done by volunteers, financed by member subscriptions and donations. Heath developed a successful formula for getting agreement from the bothy owners, not asking for funding or ownership rights, but simply for permission to maintain a building “for the time being”.
The MBA website does not make enticing reading for those who like their creature comforts: “When going to a bothy, it is important to assume that there will be no facilities,” it warns. “No tap, no sink, no beds, no lights, and, even if there is a fireplace, perhaps nothing to burn. Bothies may have a simple sleeping platform, but if busy you might find that the only place to sleep is on a stone floor…
“There may not be a suitable supply [of water] near the bothy. If there is no fire then on a cold night you may have trouble staying warm… Few bothies have toilet facilities apart from a spade….”
Initially Heath saw the MBA as a secret club where the hardy few would be given a map with strategic dots to show where bothies were located. It was only in 2009 that the MBA revealed the location of the bothies to the public.
For more than 50 years Heath formed a close partnership in running the MBA with his wife Betty (née Taylor), whom he met at the inaugural MBA meeting and, in 1970, married. They were fondly known in the bothying world as “B&B”, and in 1991, shortly after the MBA’S 25th anniversary, their achievement was recognised in an unusual double award of British Empire Medals.
Bernard Joseph Heath was born on September 22 1928 in Huddersfield, the younger son of Joseph Heath, an engineers’ tool inspector, and his wife Jessie (née Fuller). Leaving school at 16, and after National Service in the Royal Navy, he qualified as a chartered accountant and taught accountancy at technical colleges in Huddersfield and later Thurso.
His main love was cycling, however, and he was involved in forming cycling clubs, first the Huddersfield Star Wheelers, and then in 1955 the Rough Stuff Fellowship.
For 10 years his annual holidays were spent with a friend cycle-camping in remote corners of the highlands of Britain. He also made a first cycle crossing of the interior of Iceland in 1958. It was on a New Year cycling expedition through Galloway that he chanced upon the comment in a bothy visitors’ book that inspired him to establish the MBA.
After their marriage, the Heaths moved to Thurso, and in the late 1970s Bernard gave up his teaching job so that he and Betty could start a metal recycling business and smallholding, a venture they ran for more than 20 years. In Thurso they became widely involved in local conservation efforts, planting a mixed woodland that they later handed over to the Dunnet Forest Trust.
At the age of 74 Bernard Heath fulfilled a long-held ambition to cycle from Land’s End to John O’groats, spinning out the route to more than 1,500 miles along byways and off-road tracks.
Two years later a stroke brought a gradual slowdown, though he continued working on bothy projects into his 80s.
Betty Heath died last year.