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Hutchison Memorial Hut in the Cairngorms is popular with climbers

For its members, getting into these wild spaces was more than just a hobby, it was what they needed to enable them to survive working in industrialised urban environments for the remaining five (or more) days each week. Putting on shared buses or, more often, hitchhiking, once they got where they needed to go, short on money, they would sleep wherever they could – in barns, under rocky overhangs (known as howffs), in caves and in these abandoned bothies, and they taught themselves to live off the land, so that they could be close to the crags the next day.

This spawned some of the most famous climbers of the 20th century – from Jimmy Bell (who put up a host of new routes on Ben Nevis and edited the Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal for an impressive 24 years) to WH Murray, author of Mountaineering in Scotland (first penned on toilet paper when Murray was a prisoner of war during the Second World War, it was destroyed by his captors, to which he retaliated by writing it again and finally – triumphantly – getting it published in 1947), and Don Whillans (working-class hero, incredible climber, gear inventor and renowned deliverer of the one-liner). For men such as these, bothies were key to enabling them to get into the countryside and stay on the doorstep of the peaks.