Sweeney’s Bothy: Introduction

Sweeney’s Bothy mid-build, December 2013, photograph BN
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Welcome to Bothan Shuibhne (Sweeney’s Bothy). The project is a collaboration between The Bothy Project (Bobby Niven and Iain Macleod), and artist-poet Alec Finlay. We are also working closely with Alex Webb Allen and Luke Allan, as well as a host of contributors.
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Together we are going to design and construct a modest zero-carbon dwelling, a bothy, on the Isle of Eigg, off the West coast of Scotland. Once it is complete, towards the end of the summer, Bothan Shuibhne will host creative residencies, with a focus on wilderness ecology.
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Over the course of 2013 a host of collaborators will add to the project, and each of them will publish a post on this blog.
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Before we finalize the plans for the building – and before we start ordering materials and taking the handles of the wheelbarrow in our hands – we will share some reflections on what such a bothy might be, or become, drawing on hut traditions, the thoughts of fellow poets, artists, and architects, as well as the words and images of residents at the first bothy that Bobby and Iain completed, at Inshriach, in the Cairngorms.
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Simple dwellings enact a vision; they may, over time, gather a significance that extends beyond their walls. Bothan Shuibhne is one suggestion of what a hut-bothy-residency can be, in Scotland, today.
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The original sketch that I submitted to Creative Scotland, to encapsulate the proposal, is nothing more than a rubber stamp defining a walled form, with a suggestion of surrounding thorns. The bothy begins as a frame in and for the wilderness, as every hut is. The sketch catches the gist of Sweeney’s bed in the thorn trees.
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Over the past few months Iain and I have worked from that initial poetic image:

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The phrase distils the fragmentary narrative of Suibhne. I drew on Trevor Joyce’s adventurous, untethered versions of the poems, with reference also to Heaney’s and O’Brien’s.
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Glen Bolcain
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abode of saints; with many hazel groves
and nuts in cluster; quick icy brooks
that sprinkle down its walls: there are green cords
of ivy, a rich mast of acorns
and the apple-trees,
heavy with good fruit they arc
their boughs
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//– Trevor Joyce, Sweeny, Peregrine
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We have worked the image of thorn and shelter toward a constructive form, making sketches and sharing conversation, asking ourselves how the bothy might appear and, just as importantly, what it is for.
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Reading Suibhne, asking ourselves where the bothy may belong, we have learnt to look within earshot of ‘the hammer of the distant surf’, with the ‘shelter of a single tree’, within sight of ‘mountain blossom, mountain ash’ (Trevor Joyce, Sweeny, Peregrine). We have been glad that we are the lucky ones, with a roof and stove, fortunate to avoid ‘the pain of his bed there on the top of a tall ivy-grown hawthorn in the glen, every twist that he would turn sending showers of hawy thorns into his flesh‘ (Flann O’Brien, At Swim, Two Birds).
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Gradually the plans will project a suitable protection for this gentle interior: a welcome desk, fire, and bunks for two.
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Future posts will detail the bothy’s final location and the evolution of the architecture, as we attempt to remain true to Lu Chi’s motto:
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only when revisions are precise
may the bothy stand
square and plumb
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Other posts will consider this bothy within the wider context of a nascent contemporary movement – one I term ‘hutopian’ – in which artists and architects create huts and viewing platforms in the Scottish wilderness, proposing them as innovative ecological, technological, and social models.
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Outlandia, London Fieldworks and Malcolm Fraser architects, 2010
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Suibhne, the mad king, inflected our thinking, pointing us toward the mountain hut, which ‘finds its congruity on the frozen peak’, where the air is ‘thorned with frost’. Arne Naess’ hut on Tvergastein came to mind, and Wittgenstein’s hut at Skjolden.
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At other times we are told Suibhne hid away in the woods, where the aspen leaves ‘sing like a distant war’. This reminded me of the felt-roofed hut that belongs to my friends Gerry Loose and Morven Gregor, at Carbeth, where a deer path leads by their door and the yaffle’s laughter is straight out of Basho.
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And the echoes of war: would they be the huts and tree-top look-outs at Faslane and Coulport, nearby Scotland’s leading artist residency host, the pods and cubes of Cove Park?
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Sweeney can’t escape his memory of spears; remembrance sticks in his side each night, in his bed amid the blackthorn tines.
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Prunus spinosa
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the blackthorn drinks my blood again
my face bleeds on the sodden wood
thorns lace my sores
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//– Trevor Joyce, Sweeny, Peregrine
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These internalized memories of conflict became another problem to prompt our thinking while designing the hut; it could not simply be a ‘retreat’. Suibhne’s ‘ice and wood palisades’ are tinged with a survivor’s wariness. I invited the poet Susan Tichy to tackle the associations of the mountain huts with war veterans and the dark aspect of survivalism in her native Colorado, issues hutting in these islands prefers to avoid.
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Susan Tichy’s cabin
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Our shared aim is to make a small contribution, through Bothan Shuibhne, to the common task of bringing renewed awareness to the relation between human dwelling and wild nature. We have been thankful to have received a friendly response from the John Muir Trust, who weigh the issues of stewardship and human use of wilderness with care.

The work that myself and other collaborators will post here belongs alongside existing and unfulfilled projects by artists, architects, and progressive hutters – all those who have attempted to create ‘hutopian’ dwellings, viewing platforms and shelters.
Contributors to the project will include Kathleen Jamie, Gerry Loose, Morven Gregor, Ken Cockburn, Malcolm Fraser, Dee Heddon, Misha Myers, Susan Tichy, Trevor Joyce, Heather Yeung, Thomas A. Clark, Kevin Langan, and Hanna Tuulikki.
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These sketches are our first vision of what Bothan Shuibhne could be.
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(AF)

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Bobby’s vision
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Iain’s vision
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Alec’s vision
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I began from the blackthorn thicket that Sweeney locked himself away in, taking the form and projecting it into a formal pilotis style support, so that it could assume a useful function, while still representing the blackthorn’s sharp warning.
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Bothan Shuibhne | Sweeney’s Bothy
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Alec Finlay & The Bothy Project
commissioned as part of Creative Scotland’s ‘Year of Natural Scotland 2013’