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4Bothies and an artist

Autumn issue of Outsider magazine

Right now, there are four particularly special bothies across Ireland. Though familiar to adventurers and hikers as basic shelters usually left unlocked and available for public use, these bothies are a little different. First of all, their locations are secret. Known as 4Bothies, you can only find them if you follow clues on the 4Bothies.com website. The project is the brainchild of Irish filmmaker Luke Franklin, who, alongside a team of other talented folks, built these distinctive bothies in the north, south, east and west of Ireland. Jane Lawrenson finds out more.

Despite the fact that the 4Bothies started as a final project for his master’s degree in art and science, Luke Franklin says it probably actually began when he asked for a drill one Christmas.

From there it grew. Taking the notion that art shouldn’t just be the preserve of the ‘soft hands’ contingent and that it should be taken out of the gallery, Franklin and his team set about building four bothies over a period of four months, with the final piece reaching completion in mid-spring.

Oh, and they’re hidden. People must visit the 4Bothies website (4bothies.com) and accept the challenge of solving a mystery and taking on an expedition to find them. They’ll have only a few images and some words to guide them to the secret locations of the bothies.

What’s unusual about these bothies is that each has its own unique identity: a library, a study, a studio and a gallery. From the pink metal styling’s of ‘The Study’ to the rustic charm of ‘The Library’; the angled lattices of ‘The Studio’; and the space within a derelict space of ‘The Gallery’, each bothy is different in size and appearance. Although the bothies are built for people to stay in them, visitors are advised to bring supplies and their own cooking gear if they intend on an overnight stopover. Some of the bothies are also quite small so if there are more than one or two visitors, it might be an idea to bring extra camping gear. They are unlocked and free for anyone to use, people are just asked to respect the bothies and those yet to visit.

“If you go to the website, you see the story of us building them,” says Franklin. “We go and have quite an arduous journey in the name of the initiative but we have done our bit, you as viewers must take on the next bit and go see it.”

But what really drove Franklin to embark on this project? He cites climbing greats George Mallory and Sir Edmund Hillary as some of the inspiration behind 4Bothies. Franklin states, “We may never know if George Mallory was the first man to climb Everest because he died on the way down. What we do know is when he was asked why he wanted to climb Everest he said, ‘Because it is there.’ Which is a really flippant response, but it’s kind of the right response. We don’t NEED to climb Everest but it’s part of the human condition; there is something in us; we have to explore.”

Franklin himself is no stranger to exploration either. As an avid climber, runner and paddler, it doesn’t take a genius to work out – superficially, at least – this project is an attempt to marry his two passions of creativity and adventure.

But Franklin claims the true meaning of 4Bothies is to scratch a little bit at the values we assign to various entities. “We understand why Mallory and Hillary did what they did. We understand that drive. We do the same with sport. We say that it’s perfectly fine to train a six-year-old girl, who shows some promise, seven days a week, so she can be an Olympic gymnast. But if you take those examples and map them on to art, and if you say I am going to go out into this freezing, cold place and risk my life climbing up mountains in the name of art or if I say I am going to commit my life and work my body to point of exhaustion in the name of art, people would find that strange. I find that strange because art adds just as much value to our lives as exploration does.”

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