Lesley Riddoch: Let's look to Scandinavia and bring back huts in Scotland

There’s a common theme. It’s almost all indoors.

Occasionally, the average Scot becomes a weekend tourist, planning and booking a few days in someone else’s property for a very expensive tiptoe around one of Europe’s most spectacular landscapes. The hardiest folk go camping. The wealthiest folk have second homes in remote, stone farmhouses that could be local first homes. The vast majority of us settle for short walks around the block.

Most of Northern Europe has a far better solution – family-owned, low-impact wooden huts that offer regular escape from the pressures of city life, without damaging rural communities … at next to no cost.

In the Nordic nations, each hytte, sommerhus, stuga and mökki is a priceless, family heirloom. But in Scotland such weekend huts are like hens’ teeth.

What are we missing?

Put simply, a deep connection with nature, our families and ourselves.

Look across the North Sea.

This weekend, Norwegians will be looking anxiously at the skies with just one question.

Is it going to snow?

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Because when it does, the headlong escape to family-owned, wee wooden weekend huts can begin again in earnest. Thanks to the family hytte, the Nordic winter isn’t just a story of darkness, inactivity and gloomy introspection. It’s a time of candlelit interiors, cosy wood-burning stoves and regular outdoor family forays on cross-country skis and snowmobiles. The weekly migration to huts – especially during the long, dark Arctic winter – is what helps keep our Nordic cousins sane.

Roughly one in 10 Norwegians owns a wee hytte (hut) – so there’s one in the family for almost every citizen, rich and poor. The majority of Norwegian huts are still fairly hard-core, with no access to roads, running water, flushing loos or indoor toilets.

And there are a lot of them – roughly half a million, tucked inside forests beside the fjord for summer swimming or up on the mountainous fjell for winter skiing. Some 80% of hytte owners also own the land – a natural development in a country where nobility was abolished in the 1800s and land (including forests) has long been owned by tens of thousands of ordinary locals. It makes hytte building and land purchase easy – far easier than asking feudal landowners or the Forestry Commission, as hutters have to do here.

All of which means Norwegians have the ultimate luxury – a wee but ’n’ ben for generations of escape from the stress and pressures of modern city life.

That should be the birthright of Scots too, because our grandparents and great grandparents fought for it.

Huts in Scotland didn’t fail to start – they failed to survive and thrive thanks to the sheer impossibility of ordinary Scots ever owning a wee bit of land to site an individual hut in the forests and woodlands of Scotland.

But the interwar generation of Scots certainly tried.

After the First World War, land values crashed. Soldiers returning from the trenches were determined to build better lives and socialist organisations mobilised to get working people out of TB-ridden cities and into the countryside. Meanwhile, the British Government raised taxes on land and imposed death duties of 40% on the largest “sporting” estates. As a result, one fifth of Scotland changed hands between 1918-21, and some was bought by farmers who were happy to diversify into huts – when asked.

Barry Downs – the hutting site near Carnoustie which was probably the inspiration for the Broons’ but ’n’ ben – was born in 1939, months after the Holidays With Pay Act, when Dundonian Andrew Jackson asked farmer Robert Sturrock to rent land for a hut. Seton Sands – Scotland’s largest hut site for many years –began in 1922 when some Boys’ Brigade members asked agricultural lecturer and farmer William Bruce for land to camp. Huts on rented plots soon followed.

During the interwar years, enterprising Scots managed to squeeze themselves into any available nook and cranny on marginal bits of land at Soonhope, Carlops, Lendalfoot, the Cloch, Rascarrel, Glen Devon, Eddleston, Dunbar … and, of course, Carbeth.

The man whose perseverance created Carbeth in 1922 would have remained a name on a page, had it not been for a stroke of luck. For years, I’d been following the trials of the Carbeth hutters and knew that a William Ferris had been largely responsible for getting hutting off the ground. But who was he? What motivated him? I could see he’d been in the Highland Cycling Battalion during the war, and later ran a clutch of Scottish and UK outdoor organisations. But calls and emails to them drew a blank. No-one had heard of him, which made me all the more curious.

After sessions in the Mitchell, Glasgow and Strathclyde University libraries and an online surf of the National Co-operative Archive in Manchester, I was starting to despair. There was nothing. Or at least nothing I could find.

So, I went back to basics and started flicking through the Glasgow phone book. If William Ferris had children, if they stayed in the Glasgow area and if they weren’t ex-directory, it would just be a matter of time before I found them. How hard could this be? The answer was fairly hard, given the involvement of another Ferris in the longest and most expensive trial in Scottish legal history (which I hasten to add, ended in his acquittal on all charges). After three bruising phone encounters, I reconsidered my strategy. Ferris had a stamp shop in West Nile Street between the wars. He helped set up the Ramblers’ Federation and the Citizens Theatre and persuaded a reluctant landowner to embrace hutting. Where would the children of such a man live? I took a punt on Glasgow’s West End. So, I scanned the directory for a Ferris with a 339 prefix, found one, called the number and found myself speaking to Murray Ferris, William’s son, busy preparing to move house and leave Scotland.

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Archive searches be damned. I’d found my man just in time and headed south a few days later to record a two-hour conversation. Happily, Murray had a mini-archive of newspaper cuttings about his dad and was able to bring the paperwork alive with his own vivid memories.

William Ferris was born in Govan in 1894 – one of 11 child-ren, only two of whom survived past the age of five. That tells its own story. He also seems to have been involved in two of the great socialist movements that swept the west – the Socialist Sunday Schools and the Clarion Cyclists. Both are as unknown today as William Ferris himself.

Murray recalls that his father was a keen cyclist, who found a firm in Glasgow able to make bicycles with gears that could cope with the Scottish hills and paniers long enough to take tents by Black’s of Greenock, which were light enough for weekend jaunts. Murray recalls going to David Rattray’s workshop and showroom off Parliamentary Road in Glasgow as a boy to buy his own first grown-up bike. “They couldn’t do enough for us and I found out later that dad had lent the family a tent and equipment at a time when such things were like hens’ teeth.”

The war brought the days of relatively carefree cycling to a temporary end for Ferris Senior. In 1914, he signed up to the Highland Cyclist Battalion (HCB) which provided mobile infantry, signals and scouting. By 1918 he was a sergeant, stationed at Ballinrobe in Ireland, and it was here that William Ferris drafted the letters that kick-started hutting at Carbeth for hundreds of working-class families. But in December of that year, just weeks after the Armistice, his letters had a different aim – to get a hut at Carbeth for himself and his closest colleagues. A modest enough reward, you’d think, for surviving a hideous war.

Realising that rank and social class mattered when addressing a Scottish landowner, Ferris asked an officer in the HCB – a Mr Hotchkiss – to write to

Allan Barns-Graham, the owner of Carbeth, on behalf of Corporal Fraser, Sergeant McCallum, two other colleagues and himself. Ferris explained that

Craigallian near Carbeth had been a favourite camping site before the war and the idea of having a little “club house” there for weekend trips afterwards had kept them going. Plus, the men had saved £30 in War Savings Certificates to finance their modest dream.

Astonishingly, given the moral power of their case to modern eyes and the modest nature of their request, Barns-Graham turned them down, offering the chance to camp instead. Nothing daunted, Ferris wrote again, this time directly to Barns-Graham in July 1919 after being demobbed. Again, he was refused.

Ferris’s next letter tackled the likely source of Barns-Graham’s anxiety – the state of revolutionary fervour in Scotland, months after the first ever General Strike and just two years after the Bolshevik Revolution. It wasn’t the easiest time for a socialist stamp-seller to be asking for access to the land. But Ferris persevered, suggesting that the anonymous neighbour who apparently objected to their presence should know more about “Bolshies” before passing judgement: “Fraser joined when the Post Office allowed him (1915) and managed to have a few years’ ‘holiday’ in France where he collected a few wounded stripes until demobbed a few months ago. Smith visited Gallipoli, Egypt and France perhaps on ‘Bolshie’ propaganda, but his three gold bars indicate he did not have it all his own way.”

Even this heartfelt letter made no difference. So, Ferris started camping at Carbeth, along with many others. Eventually, by sheer force of personality, he charmed Barns-Graham and in 1922 the first huts were built. But there wasn’t one for William Ferris. The landowner made a condition of allowing huts that Ferris would do all the paperwork and the combination of this, political activities, representation on the boards of half a dozen outdoor organisations, keeping his own business afloat and helping to start the Citizens Theatre, meant Carbeth’s founding figure had no time for a hut himself. Instead he made it possible for hundreds of others by running the Hutters’ Association And Swimming Pool Club out of the stamp and book shop he owned at West Nile Street in Glasgow between 1920 and 1943.

Swimmers at the Carbeth pool

The hut sites marked out in 1922 were 60 feet square and the annual rent was £9, paid in two six-monthly blocks, plus occupiers’ rates. Hutters at Carbeth were governed by strict rules which listed activities that might prompt intervention by the local sanitary inspector. Harbouring secret overnight visitors, for example, could “endanger our scheme” and make tenants liable to prosecution for overcrowding under the Public Health and Housing Acts (Scotland) 1897–1937.

Hutters were warned that unsightly buildings and rubbish reduced the value of surrounding huts, so railway wagons, coaches, old tramcars and bus bodies were not allowed on the estate and applications to deploy them would be “a waste of time”. Barns-Graham was worried about pollution of water supplies and used the provision of hut sites to ban “insanitary camping”. Hutters were only allowed at weekends and owning dogs, playing football and climbing over walls were also all forbidden. Apparently, the landowner went around the site after the last bus each Sunday to check every chimney was cold and each hut empty. By all accounts, Barns-Graham behaved like “a benevolent dictator”.

But in 1930, unquestionably prompted by Ferris, the landowner financed and unveiled the first Right-of-Way Indication Boards in the West of Scotland, erected by the Federation of Ramblers, which William Ferris set up. Remarkably,

Ferris also established the first youth hostel in the whole of Britain at Kinlochard, as part of a group of Glaswegians called the Rucksack Club. This offshoot of the Glasgow Ramblers’ Association aimed to give open-air holidays to working folk at minimum cost. Headed by Ferris, 40 men each took a £1 share in the new company, bought a road-mender’s hut at Kinlochard and refurbished it to accommodate 12 people at a time. But without investors, the club hit financial trouble and the hostels were sold to the Scottish Youth Hostels Association in 1931. So, another Ferris-inspired organisation was born.

Meanwhile at Carbeth, the site continued to expand. In 1929, the Carbeth swimming pool or lido was opened, and in 1941, Clydebank Council asked permission to build 47 new huts for families made homeless in the Blitz, boosting numbers to 285 huts by the war’s end. Conditions were pretty basic for the decanted Clydebank families.

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A journalist reported that a family of six was living in a hut “like a kennel it was so small”, a revelation that prompted Barns-Graham to order the family off his estate, though apparently he later relented. Indeed, when he died in 1957, Allan Barns-Graham’s will revealed a total change of heart towards the hutters he once shunned, undoubtedly due to his long friendship with William

Ferris: “My estate of Carbeth shall not be feued or leased in such a manner as to interfere with the tenancies or rights of the original hutters” – and his heir was instructed to “look after the hutters without remuneration”.

But the spirit of the will, and the trust so carefully created between Ferris and Barns-Graham, didn’t last the year, never mind the century, as so often happens when friendship and paternalism form the basis of leisure arrangements. Without owning the land or having any legal rights as temporary tenants, the Carbeth hutters looked easy to remove. That they managed to survive rent hikes, vandalism, legal action, rejection by the new Scottish Parliament and a 10-year rent strike is testimony to the legacy of self-help, common cause and thrawn determination bequeathed by their remarkable founder.

Today, Carbeth is secure. But it cannot possibly house all the would-be hutters of Scotland. If our post-Covid world is to have a new leisure normal, we need a change of outlook, ownership and subsidies for forest owners and a renewed appetite for a place on the land by city-dwellers, who’ve been exiled from nature for far too long.