Space-saving hammock plan for remote Scottish ski hut

Wanted: caretaker for remote mountain hut. Must have experience of shovelling snow | Wally Skalij/Getty Images

What’s not to love about a plan to build a ski hut high on a Scottish mountainside, manned by a live-in caretaker during the winter months and well-stocked with supplies? In addition to a few double bedrooms for couples, hammocks would be slung from the rafters in the main living area in order to accommodate larger parties. Skiers looking to visit multiple times in a season would have the option of renting lockers where they could store bulkier items, and they would be free to supplement the food available on site with whatever they are able to carry in.

The price of an overnight stay in this idyllic-sounding super-bothy? For those visiting during the week the rates would be very reasonable, ranging from one shilling and sixpence to two shillings, depending on the kind of accommodation required. However, this would rise to between three shillings and sixpence and five shillings for those hoping to stay at weekends.

The above plan was first outlined in the Scottish Ski Club Magazine in 1909, in an article titled “The Club Hut Scheme”. It was written by JH Wigner, the club’s “weather reporter”, and given that the SSC did indeed go on build several ski huts, notably at Coire Odhar beneath Beinn Ghlas in Highland Perthshire, as well as at ski resorts including Cairngorm and Glencoe, it’s fair to say that Mr Wigner was very much onto something.

For more than 100 years, on and off, the Scottish Ski Club Magazine, latterly known as the Scottish Ski Club Journal, has charted the evolution of skiing in Scotland, but early editions are hard to come by. Now, however, every edition has been digitised and is available to read online via the SSC website, and for anyone with even a passing interest in the history of Scottish skiing, it’s an absolute gold mine.

This isn’t a new initiative – the digitised editions of the magazine were made available for the first time last year, thanks to the work of SSC members Alan Forbes and Colin McFarlane. However, it’s only been a few weeks since I was alerted to this development by another SSC member, Alan Robertson, who now edits the magazine, and since then I’ve been making up for lost time.

As you might expect, the First and Second World Wars caused major disruption to the magazine’s annual production schedule, not to mention the SSC itself, as many of its younger members were called up to fight. The first, pre-First World War group of magazines, then, runs from 1909 until 1915 – the latter edition including death notices for four club members including one killed “near Ypres”.

In the years immediately after the Armistice, the SSC struggled for numbers, but good snow conditions in the late 1920s saw it come roaring back, and the magazine – now relaunched as The Scottish Ski Club Journal – came out every year from 1930 to 1938.

An ill-advised advert in the 1938 edition from the Glasgow-based travel agent Dean & Dawson, offering trips to the Alps under the headline “Ski Heil!” hinted at the conflagration to come, and following the outbreak of the Second World War, the journal didn’t return again until 1947.

In the decade or so after that, there was an explosion in the popularity of skiing in Scotland. The editorial of the 1949 edition of the SSC Journal described the crowds at the club’s Easter Meet at Beinn Ghlas (“more than in any previous season”) and suggested that the occasion had “some of the carefree spirit of pre-war days”. By this stage, as reported in the 1948 edition of the Journal, skiing was becoming such a mainstream pastime that The Scotsman had started carrying snow reports.

Retired war machinery was to play a significant role in Scottish skiing during this period, too, and in the 1950 edition of the journal there’s a detailed report of trials of the SSC’s newly acquired Weasel – a tracked army vehicle designed to assist with amphibious landings. According to the writer of the report, LRS Mackenzie, when the Weasel was tested on the slopes of Beinn Ghlas it struggled in soft snow on one particularly steep slope (“the tracks were grinding round and the Weasel floundering ineffectually in the drift”) but that was the only time it became stuck and failed to reach its objective. In an era before ski lifts, a ride up a mountain in the SSC’s “little tank” must have seemed like next-level luxury.

As the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, the Journal began to loosen up: the traditional-looking cover with its lion rampant logo was replaced first by drawings and then photography, and cartoons began to proliferate. By 1968, the Journal was starting to feel positively futuristic, with an advert for the Aviemore’s new high-rise hotel, the Strathspey, on page six and an article by Stuart H Anderson titled “A Cairngorms Monorail For the Future” with illustrations straight out of Thunderbirds. The most remarkable thing about the archive, though, is how little has changed in a century. In an article titled “Some Jumping Notes” in the magazine’s 1909 edition, proto-park rat EC Richardson gives some excellent advice on how to construct a backcountry kicker.

To access the digital archive of the Scottish Ski Club Journal, visit www.scottishskiclub.org.uk/journals