On sawing a loaf: living simply and skilfully in hut and bothy

Introduction – on sawing a loaf

In a sparsely furnished room, a man saws a loaf of bread (Figure 1). Around him certain objects signify a rustic setting: plain walls, a candlestick-holder fashioned from a glass bottle, a plastic water canteen, and a tin of baked beans. The saw is the vital feature of the pictured scene, animating its surroundings.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Man sawing a loaf. MBA archive. A.K. Bell Library Perth. Permission given.

The man’s eye follows the line of the blade, slicing a mark on and then tearing through the crust. His left hand holds the loaf firmly in place, his thumb guiding the blade. His right hand grasps the saw, providing the force and movement that enables it to cut a clean slice.

Its slightly unconventional use aside, nothing about the saw itself might strike the viewer as terribly unusual. Yet, as Ingold has noted,

no object considered purely in and for itself, in terms of its intrinsic attributes alone, can be a tool. To describe a thing as a tool is to place it in relation to other things within a field of activity in which it can exert a certain effect. ¹

This opening vignette is designed not only to set up the ‘low-fi’ aspects of the particular culture to which this article pertains, but also to ask the reader, from the outset, to consider the importance of place – of setting, context, immediate environment – in the enacting of skill. The relational process of skilful tool-use – to adopt Ingold’s phraseology – operates within an ‘out-dwelling’, a noun I use to describe Scottish huts and bothies, a setting where life is lived a little differently, a little more simply and, if the photograph can tell us anything, perhaps a little more inventively than is the social ‘norm’. The photograph thus offers a first view on the sort of skilled practice that is invited by, and produced in the social space of an ‘out-dwelling’, a building to date unconsidered in the growing body of work which follows from Jacobs’ study of ‘big things’, work attending to architectural structure, social order and situated practice. ² This article seeks to fill this void in offering a geography of small things, but equally attending to architectural structure, social order and situated practice, told through a series of small buildings – huts and bothies (a basic dwelling available free of charge, for leisure use in rural Scotland). The existence of these buildings is predicated upon skill as a form of expertise for living based on the rhythm and structure of a different everyday life. These are skills which differ from, yet are temporarily valued for, their difference from those of the everyday.

It is, therefore, through the ‘out-dwelling’ that the following discussion will offer some reflections on the skill of living simply. In doing so, the article will briefly chart some of the relevant literature, before adding to this by making four comments on skill. First, ‘the lure of out-dwelling’ offers comment on how the speed of modern life portends a return to skill, a commonly voiced need for users of hut and bothy. Second, it is argued that there is a craft to hutting or bothying ‘well’ and attention is paid to the valuing (or judgement) of skill. Third, in emphasising the imagined idea of a ‘right’ user, time is given to examine skill as a cognitive phenomenon and to question the assumption that the attainment of skill is a predetermined product of practice. Finally, ‘skill in place’ introduces the important idea of the ‘skillscape’, of buildings inducing certain capacities for skill. As such, this article views hut and bothy as a proving ground for skill, and in doing so questions both the place of skill in the 21st century and where skill is located, physically, morally and imaginatively. These comments cumulatively highlight that skill is resident, not just in the ‘folk skills’ of ‘out-dwelling’ life, which make these places, but also in the places which can themselves, in turn, offer certain affordances to encourage skill. Moreover, skill is argued to be innate as well as embodied, something which is tacit, less-than-easily worded, but not necessarily pre-cognitive.

Thinking on skill

As an academic concern, skill has grown considerably in profile in the past few years. While the concept of de-skilling was tackled as early as 1985 by researchers Penn and Scattergood, ³ it is the devaluation of craft in Western society which is more recently examined by Sennett, explored through the cultural figure of the craftsman. ⁴ Sennett laments the social separation of head and hand, at least in terms of value. The material consequences of this rupture, he observes, are an increased indifference to the final product, underscored by a slow decline in the craftsperson’s aspiration for quality. These Sennetian ideas, combining the cultural and the corporal, are echoed in more recent geographical studies of practice. Turning from de-skilling to skilling, Lea has recently turned her attention to the cultural and corporeal geographies of becoming a Thai Yoga masseuse. Contrasting the conceptual ideas of Dreyfus and Deleuze, Lea concludes that the process of becoming skilled is not static, not straightforward and, importantly, ‘not assured’. ⁵ This processual quality of skill-production is also to the fore in Lorimer’s account of an ornithological research survey, where the search for an endangered bird species is routed through the affectual body. His account of the fieldwork-enabling census survey highlights the situated nature of skill, dependent on an ability to ‘tune-in’. ⁶ The embodiment of skill is also reflected in work by Eden and Bear on recreational anglers, and their well-developed abilities to ‘read a river’. Such skills are ‘developed ecologically, in the context of their bodily activity and their environmental relations’ ⁷ and as such they cannot be easily expressed in words, but rather are rhythmic, kinetic, existing as a practice ‘that can only be properly felt’. ⁸

Arguably, what remains implicit in this body of work is a consideration of the simplicity, or indeed the complexity, of skilled practice, with existing studies tending to focus upon specialist groups (sometimes expert or elite in composition) and so reinforcing a professionalised understanding of skill as ‘trained practice’. ⁹ The conception of skill considered in this article differs to some degree. It is indebted to work by anthropologist Tim Ingold. In ‘Walking the plank: mediations on the process of skill’, readers find him grappling with an everyday task resonant with my opening vignette: sawing a plank of wood. In the midst of an account of this activity, he reflects that ‘[t]he skilled practitioner is like an accomplished storyteller whose tales are told in the practice of his [sic] craft rather than in words’. ¹⁰ Such ‘tactics for telling’, so crucial for geography’s ‘telling turn’, heavily influence this article’s conceptions of skill, and in turn, its delivery of these ideals.

Skill is considered at greater length in Ingold’s book Perception of the Environment, where he attempts to ‘rethink the technical’, contending that the machine has degraded skill, equalling not ‘complexification but . . . externalisation’. ¹¹ He offers several points on what skill might mean, importantly noting that skill is not merely an ‘application of mechanical force’, but rather something requiring ‘care, judgement, and dexterity’. ¹² Skills, he argues, are not so much learned as passed on and thus are inherently social. Likewise, in addition to its social status, ‘skill is not an attribute of the individual body in isolation but of the whole system, constituted in the presence of the artisan in his or her environment’. ¹³ His attention to the emplacement of skill in an ecological field of relations is crucial, and captured in the concept of ‘taskscape’. An instantiation of the ‘dwelling perspective’, Ingold’s notion of the taskscape is intended to explain how the world is ‘populated with beings who are themselves agents, and who reciprocally “act back” in the process of their own dwelling. In other words, the taskscape exists not just as activity but as interactivity’. ¹⁴ Landscape is not a visual depiction, he contends, but a version of the world that changes depending on an agent’s point of view – their interaction with that world. This redistributive way of understanding the world – as a synergy of person, place and time – invites a habit of thought where skill is not treated as the practical achievement of a ‘skilled agent in the environment’, ¹⁵ but rather a phenomenon generated by the entire environmental ‘ensemble’ of which the agent is a part.

Taking Ingold’s lead, what I examine here is not simply the simplicity of skill but the skill of living simply. Recent work by Vannini and Taggart argues that, ‘on grid’ lifestyles, in everyday homes are actually ‘easy’, a deliberate reductionist stance used to highlight that away from electricity, running water and touch button heat, ‘off-gridders’ lifestyles (as with ‘out-dwellers’) ‘puts them back in touch with complexity, and in the everyday practice of complexity they uncover that it is actually quite normal, undaunting, indeed even expecting of a living being to put up with it and thus “simple”’. ¹⁶ Therefore, the difference, between the simplicity of skill and the skill of living simply is, as we will see, crucial and more than semantic. It will be argued that skill is not just enacted in the actions of practitioners (of ‘out-dwelling’ life), but also in their envisioning of skill and how specific skills become inscribed into the interior design and domesticated arrangements of the buildings where they dwell.

This article is therefore offering something other than a discussion of skill as occupation or identity ¹⁷ or as technique. Rather, as a geographer, I seek to explore the means by which particular locations become proving grounds for skill. As such, cross-cutting the four sections that follow are a set of broader themes which will gradually materialise. These propose that thinking on skill requires thinking through a ‘skillscape’, developing Ingold’s idea of ‘taskscape’ to speak to skill specifically, and addressing how research on skill should aim to become more attuned to the intricacies of placing skill. Place here does not merely denote a classic geographical sense of region or locality – although there is an element of this in what follows, given my Scottish focus – but rather it speaks to micro-spaces, the ‘small things’, and a loosely Deleauzian take on the ever-changing spacings between things that are integrally, processually, implicated in the making of a skillscape. This is effectively a gathering of place and person, knowledge and practice, object and activity which is contextual, immediate and neatly illustrated in that intimate skillscape composed between ‘humanity, load and saw’ related in the opening vignette.

Setting the scene for ‘out-dwellings’

Scottish rural huts, one of the two built forms addressed in this article are, by outward appearance, fairly basic though attractive dwelling places, commonly nestled into small communities in a rural setting (see Figure 2). ¹⁸ In Scotland, hutting as a leisure practice can be traced to the aftermath of two World Wars when small plots of land were made available by the state to returning servicemen. ¹⁹ Modest, timber-frame dwellings were erected here, the term ‘hut’ being used to define these seemingly makeshift structures. Surviving sites contain a number of dwellings within a specific area of land. Properties are rented annually, generally not used as permanent residences but rather designed for temporary leisure use (weekends and holidays ordinarily). What I describe here in ‘hutting’, is both a practice and a way of life, a form of leisure, which also represents a culture, of inhabiting the rural and the outdoors.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Interviewee’s hut in Carbeth (author’s own).

Scotland has notable hutting sites at Carbeth, Eddleston and Soonhope, representing a minor vernacular built tradition of the contemporary rural landscape. ²⁰ A Scottish Executive report notes nine local authorities having one or two sites in their areas, and this totals to an estimated 630 huts nationwide. ²¹ As a consequence of the ‘Thousand Huts’ campaign (a social movement dedicated to ‘celebrating, protecting, expanding and enjoying the world of hutting in Scotland’ ²² ), combined with recent changes in planning law, it is reasonable to speculate that the overall number has increased in the 15 years since this government survey was undertaken.

Bothies, the second built form to be considered, are generally better known, at least among the outdoor cognoscenti. In origin, the word ‘bothy’ appears to originate from the Gaelic word bothan, meaning a hut. Historically, ‘bothy’ was the term used to describe basic accommodation billeted to unmarried male farm-workers or the shelters provided to shepherds working in remote settings. With changes in rural land use and advances in transportation, and depopulation (a result of the Highland Clearances), during the last century, these relic buildings were opened for public use, generally accessible for overnight accommodation during recreational walking, skiing, cycling or other expeditionary trips in the more remote and mountainous regions of Scotland.

This tradition of recreation-oriented, shared accommodation began informally, usually when isolated buildings were no longer required for agricultural use. Resourceful outdoor enthusiasts moved in, inhabiting for recreation what another sector of the rural economy had left behind. Sometimes, this shift in use was quiet and secretive, other times with the knowledge and consent of the landowner. Consequently, ‘bothying’ became the term for a modern leisure tradition now associated with these historic buildings. While there remain a number of privately owned bothies, my article focuses attention on those maintained by the Mountain Bothies Association (MBA), a charitable organisation which currently acts as steward to around 100 such shelters in Scotland. ²³ While a membership fee is optional, access to bothies is free at-the-point-of-use, reflecting the MBA’s overarching aim, ‘to maintain simple shelters in remote country for the use and benefit of all who love wild and lonely places’. ²⁴

To unite the differing rural histories and geographies of hutting and bothying, and to indicate the common sense of skilled practices that they generate, in this article I use the collective term ‘out-dwelling’. As a phrase, it is intended to represent the two built forms, encompassing a broader spectrum of interests in Scotland’s outdoor scene, and a range of situated, skilled interactions produced between people and the particulars of place (in and immediately around the structures in question). Although not the current focus of this article, it is worth acknowledging that the politics and power of land ownership and use in Scotland is a crucial debate for the Scottish outdoors. The ‘out-dwelling’ is thus implicated in discussions about the redistribution of power over land, and consequently within a political debate more radically inflected than the idyllic notion of a rural hut might initially imply.

Methods

This article’s findings draw on information gathered during 35 in-depth interviews, and through participant observation during 14 bothy visits and hutting events. These field experiences were spread across Scotland, allowing for ‘ethnographic exposures’ through nights spent in isolated bothies within the mountainous Cairngorm region (Figure 3) as well as visits to rural huts in both the Scottish Central Belt and Borders regions. This amounted to time spent witnessing, in accordance with Thrift’s flipping of ‘participant observation’ to ‘observant participation’, ²⁵ conducted while engaging in ‘out-dwelling’ practices, dwelling in huts and bothies as well as participating in committee meetings of the MBA or campaign events for Reforesting Scotland’s Thousand Huts campaign. I sought to observe myself, others, places and events to animate the lifeworlds embroiled in ‘out-dwelling’ practice and to explore the spacings of the emergent relationships between these many small things. Through engaging with how skill emerged from within these relationships, I have aimed to fashion the outlines for a geographical ethnography of skill. Throughout, my aim was to indeed be ‘infected’ by the practices, effort and investments of all parties in the creation of this world, and, as Dewsbury argues, I was ‘forced to think’ ²⁶ within the ecology of these material settings. The study also draws on archival sources, available through the MBA, and a unique collection of 72 bothy books (a form of visitor-book or logbook kept long-term in each bothy) currently retained by Scottish Natural Heritage. ²⁷

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Corrour bothy in the Cairngorm National Park (author’s own).

This eclectic mix of sources is ‘make-do’, ²⁸ such breadth being an asset so as to ensure that the critical consideration of ‘out-dwelling’ culture does not, in Ween and Abram’s words, ‘presume that there is a singular, passive, predetermined nature waiting to be analysed’. ²⁹ Rather, there are many narrative accounts and what follows is but one. As such, what is offered takes much from the ‘make do’ ethos of my participants, using what one has to craft what one needs, and in doing so accepting that the finished form will not be pre-thought or perfect, but a product of experience. In doing so, I draw upon previous works which acknowledge storytelling, utilising the likes of Lorimer and Parr, who pay heed to stories, fore-fronting their potential in arguing that geography’s ‘“telling turn” has come of age’. ³⁰ Methodology is thus combined with ontology, telling tales through stories reaped from practice.

Setting the scene for skill

Early research forays into this world highlighted how hutting is figured, to some considerable degree, as a reaction to what are regarded as the excesses of the modern world: capitalist accumulation, over-regulated lives and the distancing of humankind from nature. In the face of modern living, these buildings provide a place for ‘getting away from a sort of inward looking cycle of daily life in whatever daily life is’, ³¹ ‘because life can be fairly hectic’. ³² As such, ‘out-dwellings’ are for many a ‘place to retreat from the craziness of life’ ³³ and ‘a place to breathe’. ³⁴ They can therefore be somewhere that ‘keeps my feet on the ground’, ³⁵ where ‘I can be away from everything’. ³⁶ It is this aspect of ‘out-dwelling’ that, one interviewee observed, ‘keeps me sane’. ³⁷

In this vein, hutting becomes tied to work which pays attention to time. Thrift’s concern with ‘the temporal’ is one aspect of modern societies where ‘fast subjects’ feel compelled to operate in a state of ‘permanent emergency’. ³⁸ Observing that the fast can also be ‘fragile’, Thrift questions an overriding logic of managemental governmentality to ask, ‘How thin can I spread myself before I am no longer there?’. ³⁹ A time-centred critique of contemporary lifestyles is manifest in the ‘slow culture’ movements, seeking to recalibrate food production and consumption, and more ambitiously, the temporality of neighbourhood or city living. Pink documents the Cittàslow movement, embracing and celebrating a slower life where

suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long lasting enjoyment [may] preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency. ⁴⁰

It is to this ethos that the comments above attest. By these terms of description, hutting can be firmly positioned within the spatial ordering of the rural idyll. As Woods’ explains, ‘the countryside has become a refuge from modernity’. ⁴¹ Bolstering the already powerful idea of the idyll is a yearning to connect with nature, to the land, and to human communities who still base their livelihoods upon it. The sense of losing this experience (or an association with it) can create feelings of nostalgia, ones which some argue literally mean the sense of loss of home. In this thinking, humankind, as with some animals, has become distanced from its imagined home in the rural idyll, and thus has a deep-seated and profound urge to move back to the land, or to go home. The imaginary geographies inherent to this spatial ordering are readily apparent. However, as Cloke notes, ‘while it is all too easy to satirise and parody these aspects of the so-called idyll, it is very much more difficult to reject them altogether’. ⁴²

These ideas have been extended in research dealing with hutting in Norway, culturally different, yet also a complementary community of practice. ⁴³ In Norwegian hutting, the proximity of modernity is wholly relevant. The hut is placed within ‘a new kind of emotional space, an experimental zone where norms, habits, and routines of bourgeoisie city life could be stretched a bit, transgressed, and even questioned’. ⁴⁴ In this manner, the hut can be seen as complementary to modernity, existing not so much alien to, and rather in symbiotic relationship with, contemporary life. The ‘out-dwelling’ here becomes a pocket of pre-modern experiences within a modern world, a sojourn to a supposedly more rewarding, and seemingly simple place.

Whatever the theoretical underpinning of this perceived need, the notion of an escape from the contemporary world, to a so-called ‘hutopia’, a supposed simple life, underpins the ideals of my respondents, at least as they have presented them to me. As one user notes, ‘there was in me something of that real desire for simplicity’. ⁴⁵ Such ideals are also representative of the broader cultural trend in popularising tiny houses, cabins, and other small builds. ⁴⁶ Yet it appears that living simply, arguably in any of these contexts, is in fact really quite a complex business. Certain ‘families’ of assumptions associated with these activities (which may appear coherent on the outside) actually conceal all manner of tensions. Likewise, while a skilled individual may make something look simple, in practice it is likely an articulation of complex learned and embodied actions. Consequently, living simply is a matter not of retreating from skill, but rather of ‘skilling up’. Therefore, what this article offers are reflections on the skill of living simply.

The lure of ‘out-dwelling’

For many of the users who contributed thoughts to this project, it appears through the language used, as well as their actions, that there is a lure in ‘out-dwelling’ life based, in part, around the most simple of tasks. What some would view as mundane or menial in other settings become enriching experiences in the hut space. These ‘practices of place’ ⁴⁷ engender or are skills: it is the ability to light a fire, to chop wood, to cook without a stove, or craft tin foil into a reflector to get the most light from a single candle (Figure 4).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

A tin foil reflector fashioned by users (author’s own).

In hutting communities, it is the skill to mend, to re-use and to build which are most commonly discussed. The following interview extract derives from one user of the Eddleston collection of huts, which lies 18 miles south of Edinburgh. Talking of his experiences since purchasing his hut, he notes,

While other works talk of skill as mastery, ⁴⁹ here skill is seemingly appreciated for the attempt, the process and the ‘make do’. As with the ‘make do’ of my own methodology, the skills here aim to work with what you have. Here, though, these skills are stitched upon the ‘make do and mend’ philosophy, and as such are couched in a resource-saving, economically sensible and (largely) environmentally conscious awareness.

Within this appreciation of the process of skill, there is also a tempo shift where ‘everything here is just a bit slower and a bit gentler, and takes longer’. ⁵⁰ In this slowness there a sense that things become more acute and users more attuned, ‘because the tempo is slower, and I appreciate time to think . . . gives me the energy to see the intrinsic value of the things I have to do’. ⁵¹ It therefore appears from the respondents that these simple skills make them more primal, more alert, allowing them to appreciate (perhaps more fully) the world around them. The same themes are espoused ‘in praise of slow’ ⁵² by Honoré and hinted at by Thrift in his scepticism that ‘fast subjects’ can ever ‘live lightly’ or be ‘sustainable’. ⁵³

Moreover, there is, as the following excerpt highlights, a prevailing sense that these are skills that society has lost:

it’s funny, I had this conversation with somebody a while ago and I was saying that one of the things I’m interested in about Carbeth is the idea of skills, developing skills and learning new skills. My dad left school at 14, his first job was in the mines and he did his national service and he did a variety of labouring jobs after that. But he could turn his hand to all sorts of plumbing and joinery, far more than I could and I’ve had the education that he never had and I could never do any of these things . . . So for me it’s about learning processes. ⁵⁴ (P)

This comment is from the child shown in Figure 5, all grown up now but pictured here with his father. His words highlight how hutting may be cast as a reconnection with an imagined breadth of skill base which, as a whole, society no longer holds. Just as Ingold concludes, evidence offered by users suggests that the frenetic pace of life and availability of new technologies has ‘not inevitably auger[ed] the end of skill’. ⁵⁵ In the case of the ‘out-dwelling’, it is exactly this speeding up which has ignited a return to skill.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 5.

Interviewee and his father. Taken from interviewee’s personal archive. Permission given.

The importance of skill is taken further by one representative of the Thousand Huts campaign, (mentioned above) who, when asked of the benefits of hutting, commented,

You need to be active and that’s a big benefit because everything else in society is encouraging you to be passive. I think that’s the strongly political aspect of hutting. It’s re-skilling people in being active in life, physically, mental and creatively active. ⁵⁶

Clearly, then, ‘re-skilling’ is central to the lure of ‘out-dwellings’ and their future in contemporary Scotland. While such activities may be tied to the imagined geography of a ‘going back’, it rather appears that this is a case of a more complex ‘skilling up’, a need created within modern society. As Thrift notes, ‘for there to be faster subjects, there have to be slower ones’. ⁵⁷

The craft of hutting well

Turning back to the users themselves, it appears that there is a craft to hutting well. While I have acknowledged that many of the skills which perpetuate this lifestyle can be seen as basic according to a certain hierarchy of tasks demanding more-or-less skilful intervention, there is nonetheless an acceptance by users both that it takes work to live simply and that some do this better than others. The placement of value in this way has led to a moralising narrative of skill within these ‘out-dwellings’ as this exchange portrays:

Specific skills here are deemed acceptable, even essential good hutting practice, as opposed to those things that remind the user of city life. Here the respondent critiques themselves – they do not regard themselves as a ‘good hutter’ as they see themselves as insufficiently skilled. The moral geographies apparent in the creation of this social coding are clear. Accepted are those who cherish the ‘simple life’, who are capable of going without a wash, a kitchen and, pertinent in today’s society, wifi. Less accepted are those who fall out with the tacit knowledge of this social code.

Central to this matter is not only practical skill, but also a perception of ‘closeness’ to nature. Littering in the ‘out-dwelling’ is lamented as not a lack of the skills to dispose of rubbish, but a byproduct of a ‘disconnection with the land’ ⁵⁹ and the loss of the broader skill of engaging with the environment ‘out there’. Such associations blend with the work of Matless on the British landscapes of leisure in the 1930s and 1940s. Here he notes that the countryside was deemed a crucial tool for generating citizenship, wherein the outdoors became ‘an instrument, the most important we possess, for the training of the citizen of the future in the art of living right’. ⁶⁰ Such grand national ideals still cling on within the culture of these ‘out-dwellings’, separating what is deemed acceptable from that which is not. Many users chastise those who are not the ‘right sort’, who, just as in the 1930s and 1940s, ‘make . . . a racket and leave . . . their empties’. ⁶¹ These anti-out-dwellers are held up in opposition to what the right user is thought to be. Coming back to ‘J’s comments above, it is not only active hedonism which falls within the discourse of the other, for being passive, and not honing suitable skills, is also seen to rub against the ‘out-dwelling’ grain.

Therefore, in addition to the moral geographies at play, there is also an argument to be made based upon Ingold’s taskscape. ⁶² Tasks in an Ingoldian vein clearly necessitate skills, but perhaps there is something here about honing skills, beyond what is required simply to complete the task. Here we begin to encounter the skillscape, made up of skills, gathered, practised and refined, which create not only a landscape made up of tasks but one in which skill is central to the experience, crucial to its success in delivering the aim of that particular ‘scape’. Many users talk of packing efficiently, so as to take only what one needs, as a skilful act. ⁶³ As one user who travels over 500 miles from London to the Cairngorms for a weekend in a bothy notes on the topic of skill,

social skills I suppose, and not everyone you meet has them, you know you’ve got to make the best of it, if you’re sharing with other people. What else, I suppose the little things like if I go on a trip and I go shopping then I straight away know what stuff to buy, but that’s stuff you pick up . . . It’s just remembering what you missed the last time. ⁶⁴ (D)

Thus, just as anglers learnt to ‘read the river’, so too do users of this recreational community learn the skills to undertake their chosen pastime. ⁶⁵ Learning the art of camp stove cooking, of weight minimisation and the balance between necessity and luxury they become able to ‘pack to perfection’. ⁶⁶ As with the anglers, this skill is developed ecologically, through bodily movements alongside environmental interactions. In addition, part of the skill of ‘out-dwelling’ is not only learning what to take, but also learning to repurpose (and also when not to). As one respondent recalls about reusing bottles,

just self sufficiency . . . not so much a skill, but taking away what you take in. You get folk that think that sticking a candle in it means that you’ve done something with it, but you just end up with loads of bottles sitting there with wax all over them. ⁶⁷ (F)

There is therefore skill in not doing, in absence just as much as in action. Such tasks may seem simple, yet it is often skill that makes them appear so. In practice, each of these examples highlights an articulation of complex learned and embodied actions, full of knowledge, even if tacit. These ‘out-dwellers’ are aware of this: they bemoan their own lack of skills acquisition, acknowledge the attendant possibility of failure, and critique those not yet up to the task. In this latter regard, there is certainly an exclusion of what is cast as unskilled, perhaps not physically, but certainly in discourses of acceptance that valorise the possession of the skills to hut well. ‘Out-dwellings’ may be predicated on simplicity, but successful ‘out-dwelling’ is pervasively dependent on skill.

‘Just get it’ . . . the imagined idea of the right user

Across the research conducted thus far, there is one key skill which is portrayed as imperative to ‘hut well’: the skill of being able to ‘just get it’. ⁶⁸ The term ‘get it’ has appeared frequently in interviews with both hut and bothy users without prompt or prior mention. While I, like Eden and Bear, appreciate that it is challenging to give words to practices that can only fully be felt, ⁶⁹ this phrase, a mere two words, nonetheless speaks volumes to the ideals of the imagined hut or bothy user.

When asked for explanation of this phrase, one interviewee explained,

I don’t know, not very articulate to say someone who just gets it, I think it’s about respecting that there’s a community and a tradition, . . . that you’ll watch out for your neighbour, and that you value the natural space and place, respect it, look after your hut, you’re not a nuisance, and that you don’t want the electricity and all that, you’re happy to walk away from all that. Because you know what’s magic is putting on a candle. ⁷⁰ (F)

While I fully accept that this notion of ‘just get it’ has exclusionary connotations, setting one group – who do ‘get it’ – over/above all others who do not, what I ask is whether skill requires a product or can it be a contextual, processual, learned accomplishment. Can there be skill in learning that, as Fiona states, what is magic is simply putting on a candle? Another interviewee continues this line of thought, noting,

What does hutting mean? . . . Disconnecting from things like the idea that you need to be on the national grid, you need to be on mains gas, you need to be paying extortionate amounts of money on domestic bills that you’ve no control over. And then reconnecting with being, just the remoteness of it and trying to figure out ways to make your life comfortable without having to be connected to all those previous things. ⁷¹

Is this process of disconnection and reconnection a skill in itself? The ability to step back, take a moment, be mobile? Anthropologist Grasseni has discussed this matter in her theory of ‘skilled visions’, ⁷² which are, she explains, ‘the diverse process of developing “an eye for” something . . . [the ability to] absorb certain capacities’. ⁷³ Describing her experiences while researching dairy farming, she voices her frustration at not being able to pick out individual cattle and call them by name. She was thus not ‘able to absorb certain capacities for looking that . . . [her] host’s grandchildren leisurely exercised’. ⁷⁴ If the visual here is changed for practice, or perhaps more specifically the appreciation of certain practices, then this notion is useful.

While anyone could go to a hut or a bothy, perhaps there is something in this notion of ‘just get it’ that denotes a skilled appreciation, a honed interest in living life a little differently, if just for a short time. As Lea highlights, there is no assurance that such skill can always be gained, which is an important point to underline. ⁷⁵ Repetitive action need not necessarily increase skill, just as repeated exposure may not make time spent within an ‘out-dwelling’ a skilful experience for certain users. If skill and practice are therefore recognised as not necessarily equitable then potential is made for skill to be innate, resident as a stance before the world and hence more than just a question of learning. Skill here can be appreciated as lodged in the mind as well as the body, twin parts of the human that, just as the theories behind dwelling suggest, cannot ever be separated.

Skill in place

Turning from the privately owned huts and publicly used bothies I now move to the work of The Bothy Project to make a case for skill in place through considering skill-inducing buildings. Established in 2011, this arts organisation initiated by artist Bobby Niven and architect Iain Macleod aims to create small-scale, off-grid residency spaces across rural Scotland. Their second bothy, shown in Figure 6, is Sweeny’s Bothy, a site that I encountered during construction. Both the builders and architects on this project espouse a connection between these simple dwellings and artistic skills. It is this understanding that leads the project to conceive a bothy as fostering a particularly sound platform from which artists can explore ‘the peculiarities of Scotland’s history, mythology, ecology, landscape and people?’, ⁷⁶ a place to foster, nurture and craft skills.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 6.

The building of Sweeny’s Bothy on the Isle of Eigg (author’s own).

I encountered this particular building in its infancy, not yet clad or fully glazed. Yet, researching amidst a building becoming, I was made conscious of the project’s claims concerning the placing of skill within particular buildings. My experiences here, however short, highlighted the importance of combining people, place and environment in the gathering of skill. Those helping with building during my visit were not professionals. In fact, they were, for the most part, amateur at most. Trusted and thanked by those running the project they were equipped with the tools for their task, depended upon to leave marks on this building. Yet marks were not only left materially. Each small inclusion, each voluntary moment spent within and around this place amounted to marks left on person, skills to be taken away. It was therefore here – in the moments spent, the lessons learnt in place, and during that time – that a skillscape was created at this site.

As I pushed pre-cut wads of engineered wool into a carefully prefabricated wall during one of these many moments of mark-making, I was struck by the way in which doing the everyday differently made space for thoughts. It became apparent that this building, though complex in design, was a platform for voluntary simplicity, ‘consciously chosen, liberating, self-empowering, creative, beautiful and functional’. ⁷⁷ Unburdened from everyday concerns, replaced by new necessities, space is made for new thoughts, in fresh place, a temporary form of the everyday. The consequence here is that skills are also resident, not just in people but also in places. In their abstemious interiors or rural locations, their societal exclusion and, notably in the case of Sweeny’s Bothy, the lack of phone signal, these places make space for skill, thereby becoming skillscapes. This place, therefore, is a proving ground for new skills (cladding, painting, insulating), as well as the honing of old skills (writings, sculpting, paintings) for which it was designed. It is also a place for the dawning of other sensibilities, ones more mindful if not overtly cognitive, perhaps the atonement towards that ‘just getting it’ as mentioned earlier.

Geographers have long acknowledged the ability of buildings to affect their users, yet many of these works ‘read’ architecture as a textual artefact offering up signs and symbols from which codes of use can be taken. ⁷⁸ As the Bothy Project’s work highlights, however, there is another way to interpret the potential of a building to influence its users. The skills highlighted here mark the way in which there is a co-production of people and place, and so this argument for ‘skillscapes’ owes much to the humanist geographical literatures, which view inhabitation as a coming together of the material and the body in the creation of place. In this vein, a building’s ‘biography’ exists, as Ingold writes, ‘in the unfolding relations with its human builders, as well as with other components of its environment, from the moment the first stone was laid’. ⁷⁹ Phenomenological works emphasise the impact of affect, the ‘sense of push in the world’, ⁸⁰ that an object, person or thing can exert. In the case of architecture, a building thus becomes ‘a collection of possible points upon which . . . bodily action may operate’. ⁸¹ These ‘out-dwellings’ themselves can thus be seen to afford a way of life in which skills can be developed, and skills can in turn be used to soften the edges of the ascetic dwellings in question.

Through this notion of a ‘skillscape’ these buildings are thus recognised as places of skill in their own right. As Kraftl and Adey note, ‘[t]he capacity of architecture to enable bodies to inhabit – or dwell in – spaces effectively has been an enduring feature of architectural thought and practice’, ⁸² but consideration of skill as a crucial ‘capacity’ is under-developed in human geography. Here the argument is again made for a placing of skill through which a specific building (as with other features) can be read as a place which not only exists as a collection of tasks (taskscape), but as one which produces certain skilled outcomes (skillscape).

The potential can therefore be seen for purpose-built artistic retreats to represent deliberately made ‘skillscapes’, but there appears no reason that such push symptoms cannot be experienced in self-built dwellings or those which have been re-appropriated. Inhabiting the other ‘out-dwellings’, teased out in interviews and archives, are an array of users proudly showing off their wares developed in such skill-permitting and skill-promoting places. In one family-used hut, a rag rug is produced, its methods detailed, and durability praised, a practical bench cover but also a mark of craft enjoyed and time taken. In another, the stove is indicated as pride and joy, created out of an old gas canister and now cast as the heart of this small space. In the bothies, such skilful creation is displayed in the bothy books, in the poetry, sketches and song silently scribed yet singing the praise of their authors nonetheless. Couched in the vernacular, in telling its tale through hut and bothy, this take on skill thus seeks to make space for the continuation of new geographies which appreciate the capacity for places which are ‘skill-filled’ skillscapes: buildings which create a space, a feeling, a sense of time, for simple skills to be developed.

Conclusion: the skill of living simply

Coming back to Ingold’s mediations on the process of skill, and following on from the man with the loaf: here a woman saws a log, her eyes, hands and feet working together to enable her body, the stone dyke and the saw cumulatively to perform the task of cutting the log (Figure 7). Skill here can be read, and written, very much in an Ingoldian vein, as a ‘coupling of perception and action’ ⁸³ and synergy of person, place and object.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 7.

User chopping wood for the fire (author’s own).

Yet, while a saw can be used as expected (to cut wood) in the ‘out-dwelling’ space, that is not to say it will be, and not to say that the means used to discuss skill in one location can be easily transposed to another. This article opened with an image of a man sawing a loaf, a rumination on skill out of place, of life lived differently. It is this different setting, the world of simple living, that the stories portrayed above have sought to unpack, narrating the argument that the skill of living simply is no simple matter. A number of conclusions can be drawn. First, that living simply conceals all manner of strains, contradictions and fractures. To be an ‘out-dweller’, in rustic surrounds, is not, and never has been, ‘simple’. Rather it is precisely a skilled accomplishment, appreciated for the potential for practical achievement and political activism (as an appropriation of land) if at a ‘gentler’ ⁸⁴ pace. Second, simplicity in itself is skilful – the ability to make something look simple, is in fact, where the true skill lies in this case, ensconced in an impressive relationship between ‘out-dweller’, thought, practice and environment. Third, while living simply is often cast with the trope of ‘return’ or ‘escape’ to a ‘simpler’ existence, to be successful in that endeavour requires a complex ‘skilling up’ – a process of learning, adaptation, creativity and flexibility which, arguably, is ‘akin’ to what is routinely expected in the modern world. There is no simple escape to pre-modern simplicity and it is foolish uncritically to valorise modernity over primitivism. These grand titles reflect relative conditions and therefore, as Latour notes, perhaps ‘we have never been modern’. ⁸⁵ Thus, if there is to be a ‘folk geography’ written of these practices, a celebration of what is commonly seen as anti-modern, the story, while of ‘simplicity’, is not of ‘simple folk’ (if it ever could have been).

This is, however, not the only tale this article has aimed to tell. These root problematic are accompanied by yet further comments on skill, born of ‘out-dwelling’ practice to highlight the placing of skill. The suggestion has been made that skills are resident, not just in the people but in the simplicity of these structures in that new ‘folk skills’ of ‘out-dwelling’ life may indeed make places, but places also have certain affordances which enable skills to develop and flourish. Moreover, analysing ‘out-dwellings’ has shown that these skills can be learned as well as embodied, knowledge-based as well as practical, even if tacit, less-than-easily worded. Often, it seems, it is the skill of ‘getting it’ which transcends practical accomplishment and lies at the heart of appreciation. With this comes all sorts of concerns about new kinds of exclusions, performed though a moral schema which accompanies the possession and execution of certain skill practices. Not all are equally valued in ‘out-dwelling’ circles.

It appears, just as Ingold notes, that ‘the functions of things are not attributes but narratives’. ⁸⁶ Thus, the skill of a place is not singular, not attributed to the user, but made through the narratives woven in that place. And so, just as an object needs to be thought of in place to justify its status as a tool, so too do certain skills, at least if we mean to explore the specific manifestations of skills in place or skills tied to specific activities. As such, perhaps the notion of ‘skillscape’ should be considered as a supplement to Ingold’s ‘taskscape’. While normally utilised with reference to outdoor landscapes, here his arguments can be taken inside and used to articulate the means by which living simply enfolds deeper meaning. As Ingold himself argues with reference to tasks, ‘no more than any feature of the landscape . . . [are skills] suspended in a vacuum’. ⁸⁷ A ‘skillscape’ might then be a way to clarify what ‘new folk geographies’ might need to address, not only with hut and bothy but also perhaps more broadly. Hence, the crux of the argument: a simple plea for skill to be seen as a process, as a product of place, and a more than physical practice. Having hopefully made the case for simplicity, let me finish on this poem, penned in a bothy book from the Scottish Highlands:

THE SIMPLE THINGS

Let the tourists gawp and point and huddle in their swarms

All I seek is a lonely peak and a run before the storm

To a bothy tucked into a glen and a kettle on the fire

To talk of hills with people whose ambitions are no higher.