When we applied to Bothy Project we intended to spend our week focused on two main things; to experiment more with how we make maps and to see what happens when you spend a prolonged period of time in one place.  Our usual method of map-making involves a lot of research and planning and sees us visiting a predetermined place once or twice.  We naively imagined that spending a whole week in the Cairngorms would result in some more profound knowledge of the area.  We also imagined returning home with a handful of maps all drastically different to anything we'd ever created before.  If we had set out to achieve just these two things, then we may have left feeling like our experiment had failed.  Yet what we left with - the other random lessons we learnt along the way and the unpredicted maps we decide to make - out-weighed the vague ideas we had set out to achieve.

I’m five months pregnant. / I’m sitting in my car in a layby on the A9. / There’s steam coming from the engine. / It's raining. / Every time another vehicle drives past my car shakes. / I'm waiting for the AA. / This is not how I imagined my week in the wilderness beginning.

The proposal for this RSA residency at Bothy Project was to begin developing ideas for a personal body of work relating to Nan Shepherd's book ‘The Living Mountain’.  The location of the bothy in the Cairngorms with its sense of isolation within the landscape gave a unique sense of place ‘genius loci’ that I felt would be vital for capturing the essential nature of both the meditation of the book and surrounding landscape it takes us into.

Lucy Wayman was selected for the Bothy Project x TOAST Residency in spring 2019.  You can see selected photos and a short diary of her week in Inshriach Bothy on TOAST's website: Diary from a Scottish Bothy.

Day 1 - 19th January 2019

Poetry in The Bothy