Bothy culture is a set of unwritten rules that mostly work

This is written to be used rather than admired. Each section below is a decision about bothy conventions, and each one has a default.

Who owns and maintains them

Bothies are typically estate buildings maintained by a volunteer association under agreement with the landowner. The association funds repairs through membership and donations and carries out work parties. The landowner can withdraw the agreement, which is what makes the conventions load-bearing rather than decorative.

Repairs are funded from membership and donations and carried in on people's backs, by quad or by boat, so a new roof on a remote building represents a working weekend, a fundraising appeal and a landowner willing to permit all of it.

Nobody can book

A bothy is open to whoever arrives, and space is shared by consolidating as more people come. A group that spreads out and does not move up when others arrive is the classic source of friction. Carrying a tent as backup on a busy weekend is the sensible precaution.

Locally, which building you pick matters more than which weekend, because a bothy an hour from a road is a different place on a Saturday from one four hours in, and large groups are asked to avoid the accessible ones for exactly that reason.

Fuel and fire

Where a stove exists, the convention is to leave at least as much dry fuel as you burned. Burning bothy furniture, fittings or fence posts is the behaviour most likely to close a building permanently. In treeless areas fuel must be carried in, which is why many bothies have unlit stoves and full buckets.

Where wood can be gathered, taking it from the ground and from well beyond the immediate area matters, because standing deadwood is habitat and the ring of stripped ground around a well-used bothy is visible from a long way off.

Waste and sanitation

Everything carried in comes out, including food waste and packaging, and ideally anything found. Toilet arrangements vary from a spade to a basic facility, and the convention is to go well away from the building and any water.

A bothy that becomes unpleasant stops being used and then stops being maintained. The particular accumulation is well-meant: half-used gas canisters, damp food, candle stubs and tins left for the next person, almost none of which anybody ever uses and all of which somebody eventually carries out on their back.

The social part

Bothies are shared spaces where strangers spend an evening together, which is much of the appeal. Arriving late and quietly, and not monopolising the fire or the sleeping platform, is the whole etiquette. Joining the maintaining association costs little and is the reason the next one is still standing.

Worth knowing before you go — arriving late in the dark is normal and is the moment the conventions get tested, so a torch on its lowest setting, gear kept in one bag rather than spread over the floor, and a quiet word rather than a full conversation is what the room is expecting of you.

How much of that applies depends on the terrain you are actually in.

Not every shelter is on a list, and that is deliberate

Associations publish most of the buildings they look after, but some are kept off the list at the landowner's request and others were removed after fires, damage or sustained overuse. Posting the location of an unlisted shelter, or a photograph with the grid reference legible in it, is the reliable way to lose it for everybody, and it has happened more than once. A publicised bothy within an easy walk of a road attracts a different kind of use altogether — parties arriving with crates and fuel by car — which is much of why the buildings deep in the hills stay in better condition than the ones near tarmac.

Over a season, if a shelter has plainly been damaged or abandoned, the association wants to hear about it, because work parties are scheduled from reports rather than from any programme of inspection.

The takeaway

Leave fuel, take everything out, and behave as though the landowner will read about tonight.

Go slowly enough to notice, and most of this stops being advice and starts being obvious.