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Entry in Grwyne Fawr bothy book, by ’Hannah’, 2013

My face appeared orange in the light of the flame. The flickering glow of a dying candle fizzed and spat as I leafed through the pages of a bothy book – the visitors’ log that’s placed in each and every shelter from the far north of Scotland to the forested valley of mid-Wales which makes up the bothy network. I was, at the particular moment, not really aware of my surroundings. Wasn’t taking in the view of the creeping valley at my window as a thin sliver of a river hewed its way through the undergrowth and tipped into the dam below it. Didn’t register the shrill hoot of a brown owl on the hunt in the clear sky above my little slate roof. Instead I was lost among the pages of this tome, caught in a space between time by Hannah’s words, meeting new people in the ink within the lines of paper. This is the power of the bothy book, and of the bothy itself – this ability for visitors to simultaneously find and lose themselves, to meet and connect with other people in a way that they never could in an office or house surrounded by mod cons and mobile phone reception.