The Loch Chiarain bothy stands on the east shore of its loch at the western edge of Rannoch Moor in the central Scottish Highlands, three miles by faint path from the West Highland Way and roughly nowhere else from anywhere. It is a single-room stone building with a slate roof, two sleeping platforms, a fireplace at the gable end, and a small wooden table that someone has carved their initials into in 1987.
The Mountain Bothies Association maintains it on the agreement of the Corrour Estate. The association has done this since 1965. The arrangement involves no payment of any kind, by anyone, in either direction.
Astrid Pereira walked to Loch Chiarain on the afternoon of May 28, 2026, from the Kingshouse Hotel on the A82, by way of a path that is marked on the Ordnance Survey 1:50,000 sheet 41 as a thin dashed line and that is, in places, no path at all.
She carried a sleeping bag, a foam mat, a small pot, a hexamine stove, three days of food, a wool jumper, a waterproof shell, a paper map, a compass, and a single box of safety matches.
The walk took her four hours. The first two were on the moor proper, which at the end of May was wet to the boot top in places and dry in others, and which contains exactly one navigational feature of consequence, a small lochan called Lochan Coire na Saille, which she used as a handrail to the south.
The last two hours were a descent into the loch's catchment, on a path that became more visible as it dropped, until at the last quarter-mile it was a clear shepherd's track running along the burn to the bothy door.
The door was unlocked. The door is always unlocked.
Inside, the bothy was empty. There was kindling in a galvanized bucket by the fireplace, four candle stubs on the mantel, a stack of dry peat in the woodbox, a visitors' book on the table, and a small handwritten sign that read: Please carry out what you carry in. Leave the bothy as you would wish to find it. Leave any spare fuel for the next walker.
She lit the fire at 6:30 p.m. with two of her matches. She ate a meal of couscous with a tin of mackerel mixed in. She read the visitors' book by candlelight.
The visitors' book at Loch Chiarain begins in October 2023, when the previous book was full and was taken away by a bothy maintenance organizer to be archived. The current book has entries from approximately one hundred and forty parties since.
The entries are short. Most are simply a name, a date, a weather note, and a destination. Some are longer. A party from Glasgow on January 1, 2024, recorded that they had walked in from Corrour station in a horizontal blizzard and that the bothy roof had not leaked. A solo German walker in March 2025 had written, in careful English, that he had been alone for three days and was sorry to be leaving.
A party of two from Inverness on April 12, 2026, six weeks before Astrid's visit, had written: roe deer at the burn at dusk, single hind, watched her for twenty minutes from the door.
Astrid added her entry. She wrote the date, her name, the route in from Kingshouse, the weather (overcast, wind from the southwest at perhaps fifteen knots, no rain), and the time of arrival. She added, after a pause: fire takes well, peat dry, kindling adequate. carrying out my own rubbish and one wrapper found by the door.
She slept on the upper platform. The fire died at about 1 a.m. The temperature inside the bothy at first light, by her watch, was 4 degrees Celsius. The temperature outside was 1 degree. The wind had risen and there was a fine cold rain blowing in horizontally from the west.
She stayed in her sleeping bag for an hour and then got up and lit the fire again.
She spent the second day walking the head of the glen to Loch Eilde Mòr, about three miles round trip on a path that grew faint and then disappeared in a peat hag. She saw two red deer hinds at three hundred metres and a meadow pipit at considerably closer range, and she did not see another human being.
She returned to the bothy at 4 p.m. and read until dark. She had brought a small paperback of Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain and she read it slowly, perhaps twenty pages, and stopped at the end of a chapter.
The second night was warmer. The wind dropped. The rain stopped. She slept with the door propped slightly open and was woken at some indeterminate hour by a sound she eventually identified as the scrape of a stag's antler against the stone wall outside.
She did not get up to look. She thought about it for some minutes and decided not to disturb the stag, who had a better claim to the place than she did.
She walked out on the third morning, May 30, leaving two of her own matches and a small bundle of birch kindling she had collected near the bothy, in a dry corner of the woodbox. She closed the door. The door does not lock. The next walker, whenever they arrived, would find what she had left for them.
She walked back across the moor in clear weather and reached Kingshouse by 1 p.m. She drove south the same afternoon. The bothy, she wrote that evening from her flat in Cardiff, is one of the small accomplishments of a culture that has otherwise mostly given up on this kind of generosity.
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