It's rucksacks at ten paces as a huge rift appears in the Mountain Bothies Association over the proposed creation of a new bothy in the Eastern Cairngorms. Dave Hewitt assesses round one of the fight.
It's not often that a long-ruined building up a remote glen suddenly becomes the focus of debate and dispute but this has recently happened to Slugain Lodge, deep in the eastern Cairngorms.
The lodge can be found on Landranger sheets 36 and 43, at grid ref 119952 - and from the maps it will be seen to be a considerable distance from the nearest road. It's just under 5km from Braemar as the raven flies but the heathery mass of Carn na Drochaide stands in the way. By far the most commonly used approach is from Invercauld Bridge to the south-east but that increases the distance to 8km, although three-quarters is on good-quality estate roads and tracks.
That Slugain is often visited - or at least walked past - is due not so much to its standing in a pleasant little gut of a glen but because it's on the way to the two massive Munros of Beinn a'Bhuird and Ben Avon. As with any hills, these Cairngorm giants have a variety of approaches but the Slugain route is the most natural for doing them as a pair, albeit a very long-day pair. Just above the ruined lodge, the glen gives out into rough moorland at a height of around 600m, a great place where big views of the complex of peaks suddenly opens out and where the long approach march abruptly turns into the start of the climb proper. There are few places in Scotland with quite such an advance-base feel as this, where you suddenly realise you're very much in among some high-quality hills.
Slugain Lodge itself is no real use for any kind of advance-base dossing, however. I walked to it again last Easter with my friend Ken Stewart, using it as an obvious first target on a Corbett bagging loop over Carn na Drochaide and back to the Dee. It was not a great weather day - squally overhead, slaistery underfoot - and we reached the lodge just as a fierce little blatter rattled through the glen, bringing sudden gusts and soaking sleet. Had the lodge provided any real shelter we would have used it but there was just a tumbledown gable-end, under which we huddled in an attempt to keep the worst of the squall at bay. My first visit to Slugain Lodge, almost two decades earlier, had been notable for an encounter with a potbellied stalker wearing a monocle - but that's another story.
So that's the background but it doesn't at all explain why Slugain Lodge has become the subject of a dispute. To understand that, it's necessary to refer back to an April 2000 meeting of the Eastern Highland section of the Mountain Bothies Association. This was held at Tannadice (no, not that one) and a proposal was heard that the lodge be "rebuilt" as a functioning bothy under the aegis of the MBA. This proposal was passed to the MBA's area committee and formally rejected at a meeting held on 6 October 2001. All bar one of the committee members voted against.
The arguments against development of Slugain as a bothy were various - that this was an inappropriate place for such an establishment, with the likely upsurge in visitors damaging both the atmosphere and the actual landscape of a relatively unspoilt glen and the high plateau beyond. That it would sit at odds with the policy of the neighbouring National Trust for Scotland owned Mar Estate where substantial efforts are being made to counteract erosion and intrusion (eg to discourage use of the "Slugain short-cut" path beside the Quoich Water). That the MBA traditionally has little involvement with Cairngorm bothies, the only official MBA building in the area being the Hutchison Memorial Hut in Coire Etchachan. That there is already a shelter in the Slugain glen - the fabled Secret Howff, slotted invisibly into crags. And that the local committee has a list of existing bothies prioritised for renovation, including Altanour at the head of Glen Ey, Callater Stables at Loch Callater and the legendary Tarf Hotel away in the interior between An Sgarsoch and the Tilt.
So, by rights - and by the constitution of the MBA as most people seem to understand it - that should have been that. It wasn't. Very quickly the area committee's decision on Slugain was overruled by the MBA's executive committee, headed by the chairman Colin Scales (ironically based down in the flatlands of Lincolnshire). Some kind of executive decision was taken over summer 2001 and while contact was undoubtedly made with Invercauld Estate, on whose land Slugain Lodge stands, there appears to have been no contact with Mar, despite any change of status for the lodge having a potentially substantial impact on their own land-management plans.
The MBA/Invercauld situation seems a tad chicken-and-egg-ish but it's now of little relevance whether the estate "offered" the ruined lodge to the MBA, or whether the MBA itself started the process by making discreet approaches to the estate. Either way, the proposal remains on the table despite hefty local dissent from north-eastern bothymongers.
I don't intend to delve too deeply into MBA internal politics here, having spoken to enough active MBA members over the past decade or more to know that it's an unusually factional and riven organisation, with enough splits and countersplits to keep the Free Kirk panting in its slipstream. Many of the problems arise from an increasingly expansionist and domineering central committee, along with an unusually large proportion of "sleeping" members - walkers and climbers, often based in the south, who pay their subscription out of a sense of duty at having occasionally used a bothy but who rarely, if ever, turn up for the work parties that actually keep the places standing. This, not surprisingly, tends to prompt a degree of resentment at times, with more than a hint of workers-versus-shirkers.
The bitterness is heightened by a long dispute over whether the MBA should publicise the location of its shelters. Years ago a ring-bound list of grid-referenced locations was made available to members but many hard-core bothyers felt that this increased the risk of vandalism while also undermining the essence of bothy culture itself - that people either chanced upon these rudimentary shelters or learned of them by word of mouth. Bothies were certainly not intended as target venues for rowdy Friday-night booze-ups, or for being taken over ("sorry, the bothy's full") by posh school parties who should be hiring outdoor centres or hostels.
So with that as background and looked at coldly, the dispute over Slugain appears to come down to two issues. The area-versus-executive dispute within the MBA and the separate question of why Invercauld suddenly seemed amenable to the erection of a public-use building deep within its stalking heartland. This latter point needs to be dealt with first, as it has led to something of a conspiracy theory among the leave-Slugain-a-ruin camp - that the upgrading of the lodge would provide an ulterior motive for Invercauld to push a Land Rover track up the glen, handy for helping with the stalking and the grouse-shooting on which much of the estate's business depends.
That a track lurks behind the whole proposal (and therefore, by implication, that Invercauld surreptitiously wooed the MBA with an eye to short-circuiting planning procedures) has been mentioned in pretty much every phone call and email I've received on the subject over the past month or so - and there have been several, from various quarters. The respected writer and hill activist Irvine Butterfield expressed it succinctly in an email, "This could provide other estates with the excuse needed to push in tracks to remote glens once the precedent is set - ie bothy and track go hand in hand = OK; bothy/lodge on its own = OK; track on its own = refusal." Indeed, if a track was part of the equation, then the doubters and dissenters would be absolutely right to be worried.
No one seemed to have checked things at source, however, so I asked the Invercauld factor Simon Blackett for a quote. This is what he said, "I think it would be a big mistake to try and build a road up and past Slugain Lodge. It is technically quite difficult and in any event I think it would be the wrong thing to do for lots of reasons. This will not be used as an excuse to build a road." Which seems, to my eyes at least, pretty clear - even if Slugain was converted into a bothy, then the estate wouldn't use this as an excuse for putting bulldozers into the glen. Currently the track stops 2km short of the lodge - "it has been in existence since 1948 at least when the first Land Rover was brought to Invercauld," according to Blackett.
Blackett strikes me as a man who can be trusted - he did well (was one of the heroes in fact) during the absurd theatre of last year's foot and mouth closedown, keeping Invercauld open and thus dominoing Mar and Balmoral into line. He might well have done this as good PR for "his" estate and in a successful attempt to bring people (and money) to Braemar when everywhere else was being throttled by smallmindedness - but fair enough. He acted positively and proactively then and, as such, he deserves to be trusted by the hillgoing community now. I for one can find no reason to doubt his word in relation to the Slugain saga. Having swapped a couple of emails with him on the subject, he seems to be easy either way in terms of whether the ruin is renovated but would probably on balance prefer the glen to remain quiet and unfrequented.
So with that aspect of things out of the way, some of the smoke clears and the issue becomes dominated by MBA politics, by the local committee having been overruled by their overlords at head office. This is, of course, one of the time honoured plots in any form of politics (recent Labour Party history, anyone?), and it really needs a formal statement from Colin Scales or one of his colleagues to clarify the matter. This, as yet, has not been forthcoming, although this has appeared on the MBA website (to be found embedded within frames here), "Colin Scales confirmed that the MBA has already been actively seeking funding for the project. "Before it was destroyed, Slugain Lodge was regarded as a valuable access point for Ben Avon and Beinn a'Bhuird and was not considered obtrusive," he states. (...) "When renovated this building will form an important link in the area where, with the exception of a secret howff, there is no other shelter." Negotiations continue and work party dates are expected to be advertised in the March newsletter."
So we are left with confusion and suspicions of subterfuge. Conspiracy theorists (them again) could have fun trying to establish where the track rumour first came from. Those on either side of the MBA fence would have their reasons for introducing that particular red herring. The national committee could have seen some form of deal-striking with Invercauld as having made things easier for the bothy to be built, while the local committee could clearly gain a lot by alleging - or at least implying - a hidden agenda on the part of the estate.
Then there is the phraseology surrounding the ruinous lodge itself. The pro-Slugainites (ie those such as Scales who are keen on a bothy) seem to be using the word "renovated" in a way that implies the lodge has a previous history as a bothy and so merits being restored as such. This appears not to be born out by facts. The lodge is reckoned to have been reduced to a ruin in the 1940s after a local gang stole some plaids (those were racy times, those '40s) and stashed them in the building. This enraged the estate enough to take off the roof - although the requirement to pay roof tax might have had something to do with this as well.
Whatever the precise history, Slugain appears never to have been any kind of formal bothy - and anyway, if it had been, why would the secret howff have come to be constructed? That the prior status of Slugain is an important question here has been well expressed by the respected north-eastern MBA member David Gray, "Where we have bothies we'll do our best to make them work but where there aren't bothies we should leave the wilderness as it is."
That view appears to be at odds with the policy coming out of MBA high command and it will be interesting to see how this particular debate evolves over the coming weeks and months. Whether or not Slugain is left as a ruin or developed into a basic shelter, one thing seems certain - the MBA is in for yet another round of bloodletting - and that is sad.
Dave Hewitt
17/1/2002
You can contact Dave with your views at Dave.Hewitt@dial.pipex.com
