Huts E-Book

Lesley Riddoch

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 386

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Victorian visitors had shooting lodges – Scots had trips doon the watter. Norwegian citizens had hytte – Scots had Butlins. Why have the inhabitants of one of Europe's prime tourist destinations been elbowed off the land and exiled from nature for so long? Lesley Riddoch relives her own bothy experience, rediscovers lost hutting communities, travels through hytte-covered Norway and suggests that thousands of humble woodland huts would give Scots a vital post-covid connection with nature and affordable, low-impact holidays in their own beautiful land – at last.

Leseprobe

LESLEY RIDDOCH is an award-winning broadcaster, writer, journalist, independence campaigner and land reform activist. She writes weekly columns for The Scotsman and The National and is a contributor to The Guardian, BBC Question Time, Scotland Tonight and Any Questions. She is founder and Director of Nordic Horizons, a policy group that brings Nordic experts to the Scottish Parliament and produces a popular weekly podcast. Lesley has presented You and Yours on BBC Radio 4, The Midnight Hour on BBC2 and The People’s Parliament and Powerhouse on Channel 4. She founded the Scottish feminist magazine Harpies and Quines, won two Sony awards for her daily Radio Scotland show and edited The Scotswoman – a 1995 edition of The Scotsman written by its female staff. She was a trustee of the Isle of Eigg Trust that pioneered the successful community buyout in 1997. She has presented and co-produced films about the Faroes, Iceland and Norway and during lockdown, presented Declaration, a film celebrating the 700th anniversary of the Declaration of Arbroath. Lesley was awarded a PhD and the Fletcher of Saltoun Award for her contribution to Scotland’s civic life in 2020. She lives near the sea in north Fife.

To Riddoch, the humble hut is a birthright to which Scots have long since been denied. On the page and in person, Riddoch is persuasive.SUNDAY TIMES

A fascinating tale of why Scotland’s history of recreational hut culture is so far from the European norm. Lesley brings a blend of academic rigour, journalistic flair and entertaining story-telling to this neglected topic and makes a compelling case for a renaissance of the Scottish hut.ANDY WIGHTMAN

To Manhal Nassif, Morwenna Wood and Jacqui Calder whose surgical, medical, herbal and caring skills mean I’m happily trotting about today.

First published 2020

Reprinted with minor revisions 2020

ISBN: 978-1-910022-13-9

Typeset in 10.5 point Sabon

The author’s right to be identified as author of this work under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

© Lesley Riddoch, 2020

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

Preface

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE Arctic awakening

CHAPTER TWO In the land of the Hytte Queen

CHAPTER THREE Facts are chiels that winna ding

CHAPTER FOUR Oslo Fjord’s hytte heaven

CHAPTER FIVE Lindøya and the land-grabbers

CHAPTER SIX Landownership: Scotland’s burden

CHAPTER SEVEN The wonders of the Peasant Parliament

CHAPTER EIGHT Finding the Land of Beyond

CHAPTER NINE Carbeth and William Ferris: the rough diamonds

CHAPTER TEN What will working people use their free time for?

CHAPTER ELEVEN Plotlanders: the hutting anarchists

CHAPTER TWELVE Barry Downs, Seton Sands: evicted, gentrified and just hanging on

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Skaidi: where rivers and snowmobiles meet

CHAPTER FOURTEEN The Cloch

Postscript: Huts to relish

Appendixes

Endnotes

Timeline

List of Figures and Tables

Figure 1.1 Flying to Hammerfest.

Figure 1.2 Finnmark from the air.

Figure 1.3 Inger Lise Mathisen in Hammerfest.

Figure 1.4 Glenbuchat and the bothy, 1990s.

Figure 1.5 Drumnagarrow and the bothy, 2018.

Figure 1.6 Mirror.

Figure 1.7 Bothy looking south over Glenbuchat to Ben Newe.

Figure 1.8 Bothy, 2020.

Figure 2.1 Sami gamme above Hammerfest.

Figure 2.2 Bjørg Larsen.

Figure 2.3 Ola Larsen.

Figure 2.4 Ola’s new hytte on Sørøya.

Figure 2.5 Grave of Mariann’s dog at her hytte.

Table 3.1 Scotland and Norway – second home types.

Table 3.2 Population and second homes in Nordic countries.

Table 3.3 Forestry owners in Scotland and Europe.

Figure 3.1 Edinburgh’s Warriston allotments, 1933.

Figure 3.2 Caravans in the snow near Alta, Norway.

Figure 4.1 Lindøya in winter.

Figure 4.2 Map of Lindøya East roder (neighbourhoods).

Figure 4.3 Ferry queue for the hytte islands in Oslo.

Figure 4.4 Tutta and Ola Normann in their Lindøya hytte.

Figure 4.5 Hilmar and Maria Kristiansen.

Figure 4.6 Boats at Akerselva.

Figure 4.7 Tutta and Ola Normann outside their hytte.

Figure 5.1 Piers on Lindøya with Oslo in the background.

Figure 5.2 Sjursøya – pre-demolition, 1924.

Figure 5.3 Sjursøya – post-demolition, 1933.

Figure 5.4 Summer life on Lindøya by J Boes, 1920

Figure 5.5 ‘Contemporary face of the future’, Oslo Port Plan.

Figure 5.6 Map of Oslo fjord islands.

Figure 5.7 Teltodden (tent valley) with a mix of tents and huts.

Figure 5.8 Dunderdalen, 1921.

Figure 5.9 Nakholmen.

Figure 5.10 Lindøya hytte.

Figure 8.1 Newspaper ad for tents with wooden floors at Seton Sands.

Figure 9.1 William Ferris

Figure 9.2 Cartoon captioned ‘The Optimist’.

Figure 9.3 Layout of Carbeth with huts and Fellowship Camp.

Figure 9.4 Rules and Conditions at Carbeth Hill Camp.

Figure 9.5 Carbeth Swimming Pool, 1930s.

Figure 9.6 Early hut, Carbeth.

Figure 9.7 William Ferris by Carbeth Swimming Pool.

Figure 9.8 Medals after Carbeth swimming gala.

Figure 9.9 Carbeth hut, 2010.

Figure 9.10 Relaxing at Carbeth after the buyout.

Figure 9.11 Another hut at Carbeth.

Figure 10.1 Socialist Sunday School song book.

Figure 10.2 Women’s Van built by Glasgow Clarions.

Figure 10.3 The Govan Clarion Cycling Club, c. 1910.

Figure 10.4 Cartoon from Clarion Cyclist, 1930.

Figure 10.5 Banner demanding eight hours, work, sleep and leisure.

Figure 10.6 Newspaper ad for Martin Tranmæl meeting.

Figure 10.7 Utøya Labour Youth holiday camp, 1938.

Figure 11.1 The Oggs’s Lodge on Canvey Island.

Figure 12.1 James Rowling at Barry Downs huts.

Figure 12.2 Smashed hut at Barry Downs.

Figure 12.3 Panorama of Barry Downs huts – all vandalised.

Figure 12.4 ‘Not abandoned’ sign on Barry Downs hut.

Figure 12.5 Huts at Seton Sands, 1930s.

Figure 12.6 Ideal campsite advert, Seton Sands.

Figure 12.7 Huts at Seton Sands, 1950s.

Figure 12.8 Caravans replace huts at Seton Sands in the 1960s.

Figure 12.9 Hopeman West and East beaches, 1980

Figure 12.10 Lendalfoot.

Figure 13.1 Skaidi, Finnmark, 2010.

Figure 13.2 Pre- and post-WW2 versions of Myggheim hytte.

Figure 13.3 A traditional Sami-style gamme.

Figure 13.4 Wooden barracks in Hammerfest, 1945.

Figure 13.5 Inger Lise Mathisen and myself go visiting.

Figure 13.6 Ken, Marianne and Sophie Andre Olsen’s hytte.

Figure 13.7 Hot chocolate at the Naess hytte, Skaidi.

Figure 13.8 Ove Høddo’s old hytte.

Figure 13.9 One man, his hytte and his dog.

Figure 13.10 Ove Høddo’s new hytte being built.

Figure 13.11 Mariann and Aurora (Inger Lise’s daughter) at Skaidi.

Figure 14.1 Cloch huts.

Scotland, Norway and our North Sea, Arctic and Baltic neighbours.

In this book the Norwegian word hytte, is used to mean hut, cabin or cottage. Observing Norwegian grammatical rules would lead to many variations. So, the singular form will be used throughout (ie hytte as opposed to hytter, en hytte, hyttene). Norwegian words (except proper names) will be shown in italics with their English meaning afterwards in brackets.

Preface

THIS STORY STARTS in the 1960s, with annual pilgrimages to my parents’ family homes in Wick and Banffshire each summer holiday. Other folk round us in Belfast headed for the coast or destinations in the sun. But my dad drove our family (Mum, wee brother and myself) first to the Larne–Stranraer ferry and then overland on an epic annual car journey to some of the remotest parts of Scotland. Thus began my fascination with The North. That physical connection ended when my grandparents died and their council-owned homes passed on to new tenants. But the emotional link and the echo of their northern lives travelled with us. Everywhere. My dad recited the Doric poems of the North East every night into a reel-to-reel Grundig tape recorder – much to the mock annoyance of his truly fascinated offspring. Decades later, his regular use of the Doric ‘quine’ made Harpies and Quines an obvious title for a scurrilous feminist magazine I co-founded in the early ’90s. My Caithness mother’s quiet sense of outrage about land clearances and her fascination for almost all things Norwegian was infectious – even though she was never that keen on the Great Outdoors. I only ever coaxed her uphill to the bothy I rented for seven eventful and eccentric years on one solitary but memorable occasion.

So finally, in 2010, I put all these parts of my life together and embarked on a PhD comparing the hut and cabin traditions of Scotland and Norway. Ten long years, some great friends in Hammerfest and Lindøya and a basic proficiency in Norwegian later, this book is the result.

I’d like to thank Professor Donna Heddle, whose UHI Northern Studies course first prompted me to consider academic research and whose comments as an external examiner helped fine tune the PhD. Thanks also for the inspiration provided by Professor John Bryden, whose determination to connect Scotland to the wider Nordic region is nothing short of heroic. I’m grateful to my supervisors Profs Allan McInnes and Richard Finlay from Strathclyde University and Jon Vidar Sigurdsson from Oslo University for their belief and encouragement and to Dr Fiona Watson who spent her own valuable time helping me restructure the PhD when I was on the verge of quitting. Dr Ali Cathcart helped me shape mountains of material into coherent form with humour, genuine interest and gently applied academic rigour and Strathclyde University granted several extensions to the PhD submission because of my involvement in two referendums, four elections, three books and some serious health issues. Thanks to Caitlin DeSilvey and Janice Marshall for letting me read and quote from their own research ‘When Plotters Meet’: Edinburgh’s Allotment Movement 1921–2001 and Holidays in East Lothian with focus on Seton Sands, respectively. Scott McGregor let me use Dundee University library to write up my PhD and Murray Ferris, the son of Carbeth pioneer William Ferris shared his personal archive of letters, newspaper cuttings and photographs. Chris Ballance, Gerry Loose and other Carbeth hutters gave access to their historical material and members of the Thousand Huts campaign including Karen Grant, Ninian Stuart and Donald McPhillimy diligently reminded me that the story of hutting and the determination of our thrawn forebears really does matter.

The generosity of Norwegians has also been amazing. I’d like to thank the Norwegian Consul in Scotland Mona Røhne and Honorary Consul David Windmill for arranging the study visit that brought me to Hammerfest. Thanks also to the Yggdrasil Mobility Programme funded by the Research Council of Norway for financing a three month stay at Oslo University in 2011. Dr Ellen Rees, Knut Kjeldstadli and Oivind Bratberg offered reassuring encouragement as I embarked on research in a new country and a faltering new language. Ingun Grimstad Klepp and Inger Johanne Lyngø gave access to their fascinating anthropological paper on the hytte islands (which then became case studies for my PhD) and answered innumerable questions ten long years after publication. Thanks also to Finn Arne Jørgensen and Dieter Müller from Umeå University who directed me towards relevant Nordic literature at the outset; Knut Are Tvedt, author of the comprehensive Oslo Byleksikon who helped me understand the wider context of Oslo life in the 1920s and my stalwart Scottish, Oslo-based friend Sarah Prosser and fellow Norwegian language learner, Professor of Outdoor Education and patriotic Kiwi, Pip Lynch for their constant humour and optimism. Tutta and Ola Normann and their friends on Lindøya managed endless queries and regular visits with ready smiles and strong coffee. Oddmund Østebø took time off work to explain the expansion of huts on neighbouring Nakholmen. My friend Inger Lise Svendsen took me round her extended family and the Arctic hutting community of Skaidi on her snowmobile, helping me piece together the story of its origins in glamorous style. I’m also hugely grateful to Creative Scotland for a small grant which let me take two months away from weekly newspaper column-writing to turn the completed PhD into this rather different fusion of story-telling and research.

Thanks finally to all my friends and particularly Chris Smith who rarely enjoyed a holiday for the best part of a decade without finding himself in the middle of yet another undiscovered hutting community.

Introduction

HUTS.

Wee wooden huts. Not sheds at the bottom of the garden, not yurts, pods or cabins hired by the week, not upmarket self-catering accommodation nor family houses in remote areas used as second homes.

I’m talking about modest, self-built, low-impact wooden huts – located in woodland, generally without electricity and in constant use every weekend and all summer long. Huts, like the Broons’ mythical yet fondly remembered but ‘n’ ben.

Wee makeshift places, owned by individual families and handed down to each new generation as the ultimate family heirloom.

Huts – situated in the country but most dearly loved by folk who live in city flats without gardens or access to nature.

Wee, wooden huts.

Could half a million of them sprinkled throughout the woodlands of Scotland transform our health, happiness and democracy?

Well, apart from the amount of sheer uncomplicated fun such low-impact weekend retreats would bring to our (mostly) cooped up, indoor and urbanised leisure lives, Scotland would finally be a place where enjoying the countryside isn’t the sole preserve of the very wealthy or the very hardy.

If every family could own a hut, many of Scotland’s ‘stuck’ problems would be solved. Our bizarrely unequal system of land and forest ownership would be a distant memory; small plots would be available and affordable; forests would be filled with huts, not just timber operations; forest owners would be local communities, not just wealthy folk chasing tax breaks and large companies; planners would change rules to approve makeshift modest weekend homes and Scots would get out of cities to relax, not out of their heids.

Stuga, mokki, sommerhus, bach, cabaña, dacha, gite, hytte and cabins – modest weekend, wooden huts are common every-where at wooded latitudes from Canada through the northern states of America and the Nordic/Baltic states to Russia.

Everywhere that is, except Scotland.

In Norway there are almost 500,000 wooden huts – one per ten Norwegians.

In Scotland there are fewer than 600 wooden huts – one per 8,035 Scots.

Does that matter? I think it does.

The average Scot finds it hard to physically escape the pressures of daily life – perhaps it’s no coincidence we over-indulge in liquid and chemical escapes. What we need is to spend meaningful time in the restorative company of nature instead.

Research shows that time in nature produces measurable reductions in anxiety, blood pressure and stress whilst boosting feelings of self-esteem and wellbeing. Japanese doctors prescribe ‘forest bathing’ (shinrin–yoku) to strengthen the immune system, Scandinavian parents choose outdoor over indoor kindergarten, and for Richard Louv, who coined the phrase ‘Nature Deficit Disorder’ in Last Child in the Woods, academic studies are finally proving what he intuitively understood: ‘Nature is not only nice to have, but it’s a have-to-have for physical health and cognitive functioning.’1

And that means more than just looking from a car window. It means immersion.

Think about the last time you went for a spring walk in some natural woodland. Your absorption in small things quickly becomes vast – you try to identify trees by their leaves, or even their bark, notice that wild garlic and bluebells grow under some species not others, wonder why ash trees flower so late, or whether young nettles really do make delicious soup. Of course, the minute you get home (or even back in the car or on the bike), the immediacy of that natural environment fades to be replaced with the sights, smells, sounds and thus the stressful imperatives of everyday life. It’s inevitable.

The good news is that the calming reverie returns as soon as immersion in nature resumes. The bad news is that such regular contact with the great outdoors is on the wane, especially amongst children. Ask the lexicographers. There was an outcry in 2015 when The Oxford Junior Dictionary was found to have removed the following redundant words: acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, paster and willow.

How scary. How depressing. When we now know that time spent rebalancing lives in nature does so much for the spirit. It reminds us that the world of work is not the only important dimension in our lives and the assigned role that comes with employment or unemployment, not our only identity. As the explorer and humanitarian Fridjhof Nansen put it his inaugural address as Rector of the University of St Andrews: ‘We all have a Land of Beyond to seek in our life… Our part is to find the trail that leads to it.’2

But how do we do that? Without time spent in nature and regular access to that green gateway, how easy is it for the urban majority to spend unconstrained hours, pressure-free days, undemanding weeks even, immersed in nature?

The answer for Norwegians and just about every other nationality at our wooded latitude is simple – in huts.

The mystery of Scotland’s missing huts has always bothered me – not least because I rented a stone-built bothy for seven glorious years after a series of professional accidents brought me to the lovely, forgotten slopes of Glen Buchat, 45 minutes’ drive from Aberdeen. My ‘hut’ was actually a shepherd’s house, abandoned in the 1960s. It had a great roof, two bedrooms and an amazing view thanks to its elevated location – 1,200 feet above fields of tatties, neeps and banks of heather. There was no electricity, road access or running water and over the empty decades, the hut had become the domain of animals. It took years of weekend and summer stays to fix things up and learn to calm down about sharing that space. A herd of elephants dancing in clogs at night signalled only the return of field-mice to the attic. A wedged-shut door didn’t warn of a secret invader – just heavy rain the night before. Cows wandered outside – part of their water trough served as my floating, makeshift fridge.

I loved the freedom and the small, unpredictable adventures that bubbled up during every stay. Yet I knew only a handful of people who felt the same. When I was sufficiently persuaded of the merits of country life, I let go of the bothy and moved to a small house in rural Perthshire – filled immediately with my responsible, serious self and worldly possessions. That Norwegian balance of tame urban weeks and carefree country weekends and summers was over. I had become a normal Scot again with one fixed abode. But the experience never left me. Or the question that then arose.

Why do Scots have the smallest number of huts, cabins, boltholes and mountain retreats of any country in the world at a wooded latitude? After a decade of research, one thing’s for sure. Today’s sad reality is not the result of apathy or inaction by our grandparents’ generation. During the 1920s and ’30s, working people across Europe escaped the pressure, disease and squalor of TB-ridden cities by building weekend huts round big cities and Scots were just as active as Norwegians, Germans, Portuguese and Danes. Carbeth, Seton Sands, Barry Downs – all these large hutting communities began life during the interwar years. But elsewhere after World War Two, hutting developed. Cars were de-rationed, incomes rose, guaranteed leisure time increased and hutters (especially in Norway) went in search of individual hytte locations that were less coveted by land-hungry city councils and more adventurous than the old, densely packed and tightly regulated communal sites. Since land in Norway is owned by tens of thousands of citizens, that was fairly easy to do. So ‘ordinary’ Norwegians bought individual hut sites at low prices in the most stunning fjord-side locations, and the 1960s saw a huge expansion in hytte numbers.

In Scotland though, hutting was about to grind to a halt. The original wartime sites – with huts crammed in cheek by jowl – were still popular, but needed renewal. They didn’t get it. Instead, from the 1970s onwards, hutters faced eviction and most hut sites were gentrified out of existence by councils and planners with a fierce dislike for the non-symmetrical, unplanned, makeshift and self-built. New individual plots couldn’t be found in Scotland thanks to high land prices, closed forests, and distant, unapproachable landowners. So, a Norwegian-style ‘cabin’ culture failed to take root in Scotland, mostly because it wasn’t possible to get a foot on the land and partly because long centuries of feudalism have left Scotland with an aesthetic of emptiness, which lies embedded and unquestioned at the heart of our planning system today.

Some folk speculate that Scots perhaps lack a real appetite for rural life after being urbanised and industrialised earlier than every other European nation. That would make sense – but it just isn’t true.

The evidence shows that Scots shared the common desire of all Nordic and North European people for a permanent and modest wee retreat amongst the spectacular forests, lochs and mountains of their own country. But beyond setting up a few celebrated, communal sites, one enduring aspect of Scottish life made the realisation of that dream impossible – Scots, alone in Europe, could never, ever, ever own a piece of land to call their own.

So hut numbers soared in Norway after WW2, but halved here. At the same time, the number of detached family houses used as holiday homes more than doubled, helping create the impression (unique to Britain) that second homes are inherently elitist. This book aims to challenge that perception. Of course, second homes are currently the preserve of a privileged few. Of course, it’s unhelpful to have precious first homes taken from the rural housing stock to sit half-empty and under-occupied. But designating family homes as ‘first homes’ in perpetuity – as they do in Norway – could help stop that practice. In Norway boplikt (the duty of place) has been in operation for 70 years, placing burdens in title deeds that mean first homes can only be sold to other permanent residents and second homes must be bought by other second homers. This has effectively created two separate housing markets and stopped locals from being trumped by wealthier incoming holiday homers.

So, hutting has generally thrived in Norway alongside, not instead of, vibrant rural communities. Scotland could do the same thing – but that would mean action in the sacred market place and intervention on land reform. And for what – so that folk can sit in auld wooden sheds?

This perhaps is the nub of the problem.

The pitifully low value we have learned to place on our own leisure lives and our relationships with nature. Most urban Scots aspire to lead modern, busy, cosmopolitan lives a world distant from the grinding poverty experienced by their parents. It’s not a bad aspiration, but it’s turned us away from their makeshift world – away from self-built, low-key and small, regular adventures towards large, expensive, commercial and organised ‘fun’. So wooden huts, that are regarded as priceless family heirlooms in Norway, just look like shabby, slightly embarrassing shanties here – especially to decision-makers. That’s the legacy of feudalism and whilst it’s not the fault of Scotland’s professionals, taking steps to end this long exile from nature certainly is their call.

Currently, Scots live to work, because no other place calls us away. Norwegians by contrast, work to live, because the hytte is always beckoning. It’s not too late to change that situation around. If Scotland’s second homes were less like someone else’s first home and more like the modest, purpose-built wooden huts that fill forests across the world at our northern latitude, their reputation might improve and so might our leisure lives. It just needs people to rediscover their appetite for low-impact weekends on the land – and politicians to act.

Displacing locals is not what hutting does.

It’s what the growth of upmarket holiday homes in the absence of hutting has done.

So, why shouldn’t the ordinary Scots family have their ain wee but ‘n’ ben? One fifth of Scotland’s landmass is currently a giant, empty, barren grouse moor, beyond local use, taxation or criticism. I’m not suggesting it all gets divvied up, planted out with trees, with clumps of huts in between. But in areas nearest to towns and cities – why not? Is the biggest threat facing rural Scotland really the near universal desire to have a wee holiday home – if that could be satisfied by modest wooden huts – or the pervasive, unacknowledged and chronic land scarcity we seem unable to name let alone tackle?

Let’s rethink.

The process of removing Scots from our own countryside (except as grateful, obedient day trippers) is almost complete. Foreign visitors with stronger currencies outplan and outbid locals for scarce and increasingly expensive self-catering cottages, Bed and Breakfasts and even campsite pitches, while long-term lets for local workers have long since become Airbnbs. Caravans are a good alternative for many, but it’s almost impossible to get planning permission for a lone, picturesquely sited van and organised sites simply replicate the conditions of city life, without any of the usual security against sudden rule changes and evictions.

Everywhere else, the citizens of a country are taken out of the cut-throat commercial holiday market and insulated from competition with wealthier foreign tourists by having their own humble huts. So why not here too?

Are Scots content, or just resigned to exclusion from one of the world’s most sought-after natural habitats? Have we become such delicate, risk-averse, indoor wee flooers that spending summers and weekends in wooden huts just seems unhygienic and scary? Have we lost the belief we can build them? Does the prospect of unpackaged leisure time fill us with dread?

My bet is that most folk would be out there in a flash – learning to use native trees, build wooden huts and undo centuries of damaging distance from nature – given half the chance. The chance their families were never given.

So, here’s the thing. In some respects, Scotland and Norway are very alike. But nothing sets the two northern neighbours further apart than the way they use leisure time.

Every weekend most Norwegians go to their hut or cabin. Every weekend most Scots do not. This book tries to describe what Scots are missing.

CHAPTER ONE

Arctic awakening

IT’S 6AM ON 14 MARCH 2009.

A tiny single-engine plane sits on the runway at Tromsø airport like a giant frozen insect half-heartedly rousing itself for flight. The carriage shudders as the propeller gathers speed. But after a few minutes of noise and vibration the blades slow again to a disappointing standstill. Moments later the same build-up sets the seat belt buckles rattling and the little Cessna almost lurches forward. Once again, the engine whine peaks and fades and the blades falter to a full stop.

Inside, I find myself thinking of balsa wood, sweet-smelling, near-drinkable white glue and model aircraft.

What has this got to do with hutting in Scotland?

Bear with me.

I’m on a week’s trip round Norway arranged by the ever-helpful Norwegian Consul in Scotland, Mona Røhne. It’s meant to end in the ‘Arctic Capital’ Tromsø, but the relative proximity of the world’s northernmost town is hard to resist. Especially since plucky, utterly remote Hammerfest has strong connections with my mum’s home town of Wick. Both like-sized small towns sit in the north of their respective countries. Both were once major fishing ports. But Arctic Hammerfest is now a thriving hub of world-beating, renewable technology that may yet extract energy from Scotland’s fastest-flowing waters, 15 miles from struggling Wick. In 2009, Hammerfest Strøm announced plans to build turbines ultimately destined for the Pentland Firth. Hammerfest’s population then was just 9,000 – slightly larger than Wick. And while the impact of ice ages means settlement in Caithness clearly preceded Hammerfest, it’s pretty clear which North Sea sibling is the Big Sister now.

So this small Arctic hop is irresistible.

But the plane still isn’t moving.

Scanning my three sleeping fellow passengers, I peer from the window to see if the scheduled flight to Hammerfest looks entirely normal. A quick scan establishes the plane looks real enough, though the door isn’t completely closed.

Outside only the lights of the tiny airport building are lit. It is 6.15am. We have no competition for our slot on the single runway, set within the deep snow like a dark exclamation mark. So why aren’t we moving?

The cockpit door slides back and the pilot extracts himself with difficulty, opens the side door, bending to avoid hitting his head and steps carefully onto one of the wings. He bounces on the pliant fuselage a couple of times before swinging back through the door and into his faded blue leather seat. Smiling cheerfully at the stewardess he strains to read a thermometer gauge. A few more words are exchanged and the cycle of powering up and decelerating resumes. I look round. Everyone else is still asleep.

Suddenly, I realise the plane is de-icing. Snow on the wings is a small matter on the ground, but at 20,000 feet and temperatures of minus 30, light fluffy stuff becomes heavy and solid very fast. I smile at having unravelled this little mystery and feel somehow initiated.

Fully 15 minutes after the first engine surge, the plane finally taxies into position and without further fuss lifts cleanly into the clear March sky.

An Arctic Dawn.

I turn the words over slowly in my mind and conjure up images of high-flying sea eagles, low-flying Amelia Earharts and icebound Arctic explorers. All somehow at home in this epic, glowing terrain where jagged mountains turn into hard, squat lumps beneath us as the plane soars into the low, horizontal rays of the rising sun. I look down to see myth meet landscape. Here is the very route taken by the loving, resilient and faithful Gerda in the tale of the Snow Queen – travelling sometimes on the back of a reindeer, pounding hooves over narrow fringes of beaten, barren land; skating sometimes fast and light across thin ice, flying finally across the thick, slow, freezing, deadly Arctic. All to reach her brother and loosen winter’s grip on his heart. At each new lofty latitude, with each new loss of reassuring habitat and animal companion, she comes to know what all on Odin’s escalator understand, that the journey to the heart of another is endless. That the journey itself is all.

‘Coffee?’

The stewardess looks inquiringly at her moist eyed passenger.

‘Thanks – with milk,’ I glance back quickly to the end of Europe taking place below. Molten gold is being laid down in long, sun strips and it seems important to keep at least one watery eye on the whole process.

‘It’s an amazing sight,’ I venture, restraining the urge to share anything like my full emotional truth.

‘Yes, the morning flight is the best time to fly north. The view on the other side is also good. You can move if you like.’

I try to convey a smile of helpless gratitude to Gerda’s long-lost spiritual cousin and jump across a chasm of tectonic proportions to face East – towards Russia and the Urals, endless harsh terrain with meaningless borders, the remnants of salt mines and… it takes a few seconds to get a sense of proportion. We are nowhere near the Russian border.

I remember a conversation with some young Russian women from Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, who’d been given a year at Tromsø University as a reward for studying Norwegian language and culture. They found it hard to cope with the isolation of their new ‘western-style’ student accommodation. Living in single rooms and silent dormitories without the noise of mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and cousins, they felt lonely and disconnected. But this was the price of progress in the new Russia. The most talented had to venture far beyond the comforting apron strings of home. Still, Tromsø clearly hadn’t turned out to be the reward break they expected. I wondered where they would really like to go for a big event, like a special birthday. Three of the four were instantly agreed – St Petersburg. The fourth, after some encouragement to consider the whole of Europe, chose Rome, but after a few raised eyebrows and sideways looks from her colleagues added that her entire family would have to come too.

‘Might you not head to Oslo or Stockholm or Helsinki?’

Sensing my surprise at their lack of curiosity about Scandinavia, the would-be Italian traveller – the youngest of the student group – started positioning our coffee cups around the table to make her point.

‘Here we are in Arkhangelsk,’ delivering the city’s name in its full, scything Slavic splendour.

‘To get to Murmansk,’ her ‘r’ curled like a little chocolate shaving, ‘is almost two hours away by plane. And yet we are neighbours in Russia. This is our next city. To come here to Tromsø we must fly first two hours to Murmansk and then two hours more. We are not close to Norway. Nothing is close.’

I try to imagine this. Neighbours two hours distant by plane and 21 hours distant by road. Neighbours that defy every aspect of the word save the most basic. The next people. Another 13 hours’ drive to the next big clump of people in Tromsø – all partners in total isolation. Fellow travellers in a wilderness that should defy human existence as surely as the parched deserts of Nevada or the lion-infested plains of the Masai Mara.

They say Murmansk comes from the local Sami word murman, meaning ‘the edge of the earth.’

I gaze down again on the primeval landscape with a keener sense of proportion. Of course, these aren’t the Urals or any bit of Russia – that vast country lies in another cloudy time zone altogether. These ancient hills are more likely to be the interior of Norwegian Finnmark, the land of the nomadic reindeer Sami, whose every turf-built gamme (hut) was torched along with every permanent home as the Nazis retreated from Russia’s oldest border in 1944, leaving land bare and people cold and defenceless but ready to reclaim their land and their lives. And they survived – here at the top of the inhabited world where Europe becomes Asia in a clasp of peninsular arms, and the ever-widening Barents Sea keeps frozen motherlands apart.

‘Would you like more coffee?’

The reality is yes. The answer must be no, unless I want to hyperventilate all morning and feel vaguely anxious all day. I have no idea what Swedes, Finns and Norwegians do to coffee. But when they come to Britain, they must feel they’re drinking water.

‘Have you been to Hammerfest before?’

‘No. First time. It’s exciting.’

I’m talking nonsense now – subbing complex thoughts down to tourist-heavy cliché as the engine roar drowns all subtlety. But not all communication.

‘It’s my favourite trip too.’

We seem to exchange a conspiratorial smile. Why not. We are the only two people on this plane not sleeping or steering.

I point down theatrically. ‘It’s like I always imagined it.’

She smiles, collects my coffee cup and leaves me in a perfect and now perfectly validated state of wonderment.

This is North so far north it beggars belief. North so far north it relates only to the frozen Antarctic – its southern counterpoint, an entire planet away. And it’s a land of contradiction. Hard winter ice creates permafrost which becomes soft ground in summer where houses, roads and machinery just sink. No winter light becomes all summer light to create the world’s fastest breeding season for birds, insects, plants and primates. Liquid gas for heating is somehow extracted from frozen pockets beneath the Arctic seabed.

Hugh MacDiarmid would ‘aye be whaur extremes meet’ and settled in Shetland. Scotland’s contradiction-loving bard stopped travelling too soon. Here in the Far North there is time and space to indulge eccentricity. Here the sun can roam or sleep as the mood takes her, curling up inside caverns of mountain cloud or blazing in an endless day over sea haar and island-fringed fjord. It’s a land of light without heat, in more ways than one. Cold and bright or cold and dark, the Arctic world seems clear, clean and rational.

At 7am with Hammerfest in sight, at long last… I fall asleep.

Inger Lise Mathisen is waiting at the airport. With long, auburn hair and gentle colourings she looks every inch a Celt (though I discover she is all Norwegian and part Sami).

Clearly my desire to see round for a (short) March day has flummoxed everyone. Not least because it’s Saturday and Norwegians don’t do work on days off. Normally.

FIG 1.2 Finnmark from the air.

FIG 1.3 Inger Lise Mathisen in Hammerfest.

‘I can show you the board room of Hammerfest Strøm, and the old river turbine and a model of the Snovit gas production project or we can go to the place the tidal turbine normally sits – though it’s out of the water right now and pretty well invisible when it’s in…’

I feel like Wallander the Swedish detective unpacking a particularly complicated case. I’ve no idea what I want to know about the world’s northernmost town. I just want to be in it.

Hammerfest is studded with claims to fame. It installed the first street lighting in Northern Europe in 1897 – for decades they changed broken lightbulbs in winter by climbing from top windows across the banked-up snow, to reach lamp posts. The company progressed from river hydros to tidal turbines. Meanwhile Statoil built Snøvit, the world’s most northern liquefied petroleum gas plant by the harbour where the world’s largest fish have been caught for centuries.

Inger Lise mistakes my momentary silence for lack of interest.

‘We could always visit a friend downtown for coffee?’ She scans my face carefully for signs of enthusiasm. ‘Or we could take the snowmobiles and try to go up to our huts.’

I almost grab her.

‘You’ve got a hut? You’ve got snowmobiles?’

‘Well yes, who doesn’t?’

‘Try the whole of Scotland.’

‘Ah, but we have the same problem you have in Scotland. Not enough snow.’

This was a curious concept.

In the Arctic at a temperature of minus five there was no fresh snow. Or at least not enough to use the most exciting means of transport ever invented.

‘Yes, the snow cover has been really patchy this year. We were all watching the children in Britain play in the snow but it looks like we won’t be skiing at Easter. The thaw has already begun.’

Having stood on one frozen spot for ten minutes to take in the majestic vista surrounding Hammerfest from a viewpoint marked by a large plastic polar bear (not indigenous to Norway) I could testify everything was not thawing. There is no bad weather only bad clothing – how often had I bored everyone back home with that quintessentially Norwegian observation? Only to arrive in the world’s northernmost town wearing thin soled boots that radiated a damp chill up my legs.

‘So, we can’t walk up to your hytte?’

‘No, it would take hours and we would have to carry everything.’

‘Everything?’

‘Coffee, water for coffee, milk, food, matches…’

I hear Inger Lise but my mind is elsewhere.

It’s luscious country. Green and deep. It’s Friday at 8pm in August. Wee smirrs of heat-haze hover just above the road that heads north from Perth to Glenshee, Braemar, Balmoral and beyond. This fabulous walking country is empty, as it always is, because this is Scotland. The tourists have reached their self-catering cottages and hotels. The lairds and entourages are in their shooting lodges. Anywhere else, a road through such majestic mountain scenery, would still be full of life on a beautiful summer’s evening. Hutters would be heading north after a week’s work – most quitting an hour early to get up the road in good time. Anglers would be on the move, making for huts along the salmon-filled Don and Dee. But as usual I was almost alone on that four-hour drive from Glasgow to my own rented hut, tucked between two hillocks in an obscure Aberdeenshire glen. Luck helped me stumble across it. Luck – and curiosity.

Back in the ’80s, working as a radio reporter at BBC Scotland in Glasgow, I was sent to work in Aberdeen for three months. I opted not to stay in Granite City (no offence) in the hope I could sample some craic in its rural hinterland instead. The only rentable house between Aberdeen and Inverness with an all-important landline in those pre-mobile days was Coldstriffen, located in Glen Buchat, 45 minutes west of Aberdeen. The owners of the nearby Kildrummy Castle Hotel had renovated the house, lived there for a while, but apparently got snowed in one bad winter and concluded that living six miles from their business wasn’t wise. So, it was available to rent. The house itself was fine, the drive into Aberdeen scenic but Glen Buchat was the real discovery. Unusually fertile, with lime deposits supporting fields up to 1,200 feet, the glen once supported dozens of farms and hundreds of people, till decline and depopulation kicked in.

The eastern entry to the glen is still a single-track road, passing just above Glenbuchat Castle, built in 1590 for a member of the Gordon clan to mark his wedding, but now a ruin. I generally approached from neighbouring Strathdon to the south, branching off the main road at the intriguingly named Castle of Newe (given that extra ‘e’ by its owner Sir Charles Forbes in the 1820s to stop post going to Newcastle-upon-Tyne). Another single-track road twisted up through dense, dark forests stashed with deer, owls, a wildcat (okay, a large, powerful-looking tabby, miles from a house), brambles and mushrooms in the autumn and a permanent air of mystery.

FIG 1.4 Glenbuchat and the bothy, 1990s.

Emerging from the forest, the road continued to climb past Eastertown. No houses marked this old ‘ferm toun’ when I first arrived, just a few collapsed ruins, corners of fields with clumps of rhubarb and other poignant markers of past use. After 16 years of summer picnics amidst the clearance ruins of Caithness, this landscape of eerie absence felt strangely familiar. The road led on through the pass known locally as the Deochry to the highest point of an elegant heathery shoulder, which stretched up to the graceful, conical dome of Ben Newe. Below, I could see the little church and graveyard of Glenbuchat, the cluster of houses tucked into the knobbly drumlin hills that partly block the glen and Coldstriffen itself, at the foot of the dark hill opposite.

This became my regular entrance to the Glen – a perverse 20-minute detour beyond the easier, castle-flanked route. And over three months, that oft repeated journey brought something else to my attention – sitting high above my temporary home, meeting my gaze at the same elevated height, a single, simple, two-windowed cottage without any visible track or signs of life.

Below, the Water of Buchat ran through the glen to meet the powerful, silent River Don, producing bright patches of yellow marsh flowers and verdant, sheltered nooks. Above, the sub-Munro foothills reached up into heather and moor land. But my mind was somewhere in between. Fascinated by this abandoned house.

After three months, I reluctantly returned to Glasgow. But that Hogmanay, I headed back with my obliging boyfriend, and hauled him up the hill to investigate. We set off from Coldstriffen in the snow to discover that the cottage is a lot easier to locate from the hill opposite than the road directly below. After 20 minutes’ erratic ascent, and stumbling in the falling darkness between clumps of woodland, we spotted it above the highest field of neeps.

The stone-built cottage sat sheltered between two low hills. It looked abandoned, but the slates on the roof were impressively intact. Perhaps that was what made me knock. To our astonishment, the old wooden door opened. Thinking fast – it was January 1st after all – I produced a half bottle, wished our mystery host a guid New Year and after some doorstep hilarity about the unlikely nature of this first-foot, we went inside and sat down. When my eyes adjusted to the darkened room, lit only by some candles and the open fire, Alan Campbell (a lecturer in Anthropology) explained the house was called Drumnagarrow – (arguably) in Gaelic ‘the little garden on the hill’ or the little ridge of the horses (Druim nan gearran). I remember the luxurious comfort of those ancient deep brown, leather armchairs. How relaxed the mood as we talked and drank whisky – yet also how daring. Here we, complete strangers, enjoying easy companionship atop a strange hill, in the pitch dark and freezing weather outside – talking earnestly about land reform, barbed-wire fences, hares and Scotland’s future. It shouldn’t have been happening. None of us should have been there.

But we were.

That was 1985.

A year later, I got a call from Alan. He’d just bought another cottage, 20 miles further east at Corgarff and the little bothy on the hill in Glenbuchat was empty. If I didn’t rent it, Drumnagarrow would fall to pieces. A mission, a reason and a prospect of wee adventures. As a young(ish) broadcaster, there was no option but to live in Glasgow. But that didn’t mean I had to stay there at weekends too. Maybe this would be the ideal compromise.

So, I headed north the next weekend to meet the owner Sandy McRobert, a tall, slightly stooping, flat-cap-wearing fairmer who spoke broad Doric and assessed me carefully.

‘Aye, mebbe we could dae wi your stock in the glen.’

Trying not to rise to the bait, I assured Sandy there was no way I’d be boosting the local population, but would appear at least once a month all-year-round. Clearly Sandy didn’t believe me, but wasn’t all that interested. Not while I was standing beside an unsouped-up, entirely normal Peugeot 205. Even though I couldn’t supply the desired details about horse power or towing capacity, Sandy thought the car was a stoater, eminently capable of scaling the hill and a good sign. He’d nearly bought a Peugeot himself once, was put off by the French sounding name and had regretted it ever since. Of such strange coincidences are possibilities born.