"A bothy is a basic shelter, usually left unlocked and available for anyone to use free of charge."

"It was also a term for basic accommodation, usually for gardeners or other workers on an estate. Bothies are found in remote mountainous areas of Scotland, Northern England, Ulster and Wales. They are particularly common in the Scottish Highlands, but related buildings can be found around the world...."

I'm reading the Wikipedia article "Bothy," after encountering this word, which I don't remember ever seeing before, in the London Times article "Have William and Kate fallen for ‘west coast bothy frenzy’?It’s never been more fashionable to hole up in the Scottish isles like the Waleses, says Victoria Brzezinski."

Ben Pentreath, head of the architectural and interior design studio of the same name, is widely reported to have assisted the Prince and Princess of Wales... has had a connection with the Scottish west coast since he was a teen.... In 2018 Pentreath and his gardener husband, Charlie McCormick, bought a teeny pair of buildings (a Victorian two-roomed cottage and a much earlier stone bothy) on a sea pink-covered estuary in the far west coast of Scotland. “It really does feel a long way away,” Pentreath says. “Bothies really can’t be more than one or two rooms. And I think we all find romance in living in small places — for a while!” And while their bothy is sans plumbing — water is drawn from an old spring and there’s a composting toilet — here they are not entirely off-grid, with electricity, heating and hot water, and have suitably chic interiors kitted out with a tin bathtub, chintzy fabrics and a rush chair from the Orkney Islands.... Financial pressures (and a thirst for digital detoxing) have helped the resurgence of the unpretentious bothy and shepherd’s hut, with Scotland in particular high in the travel psyche. The remote getaway specialist Canopy & Stars (which has hosted Romeo Beckham) reports that spending on bothy breaks grew by a quarter in 2024....

[T]he Swedish-French interior designer Patricia Rodi [says]... “Bothies have been preserved and used for centuries. Tied to crofting or estate work, they were temporary homes for the people who were working as shepherds or labourers. I also think that they symbolise something more than just a space; they’re associated with adventure and simplicity, the connection to nature and romantic escapism....”

ADDED: These bothies reminded me of some of the tiny houses described in Jack Kerouac's "Dharma Bums," which I listened to recently, especially this description of huts lived in by the Allen Ginsberg character ("Alvah Goldbook") and the Gary Snyder character ("Japhy"):

In Berkeley I was living with Alvah Goldbook in his little rose-covered cottage in the backyard of a bigger house on Milvia Street. The old rotten porch slanted forward to the ground, among vines, with a nice old rocking chair that I sat in every morning to read my Diamond Sutra. The yard was full of tomato plants about to ripen, and mint, mint, everything smelling of mint, and one fine old tree that I loved to sit under and meditate on those cool perfect starry California October nights unmatched anywhere in the world. We had a perfect little kitchen with a gas stove, but no icebox, but no matter. We also had a perfect little bathroom with a tub and hot water, and one main room, covered with pillows and floor mats of straw and mattresses to sleep on, and books, books, hundreds of books everything from Catullus to Pound to Blyth to albums of Bach and Beethoven (and even one swinging Ella Fitzgerald album with Clark Terry very interesting on trumpet) and a good three-speed Webcor phonograph that played loud enough to blast the roof off: and the roof nothing but plywood, the walls too, through which one night in one of our Zen Lunatic drunks I put my fist in glee and Coughlin saw me and put his head through about three inches. About a mil from there, way down Milvia and then upslope toward the campus of the University of California, behind another big old house on a quiet street (Hillegass), Japhy lived in his own shack which was infinitely smaller than ours, about twelve by twelve, with nothing in it but typical Japhy appurtenances that showed his belief in the simple monastic life—no chairs at all, not even one sentimental rocking chair, but just straw mats. In the corner was his famous rucksack with cleaned-up pots and pans all fitting into one another in a compact unit and all tied and put away inside a knotted-up blue bandana. Then his Japanese wooden pata shoes, which he never used, and a pair of black inside-pata socks to pad around softly in over his pretty straw mats, just room for your four toes on one side and your big toe on the other. He had a slew of orange crates all filled with beautiful scholarly books, some of them in Oriental languages, all the great sutras, comments on sutras, the complete works of D. T. Suzuki and a fine quadruple-volume edition of Japanese haikus. He also had an immense collection of valuable general poetry. In fact if a thief should have broken in there the only things of real value were the books. Japhy's clothes were all old hand-me-downs bought secondhand with a bemused and happy expression in Goodwill and Salvation Army stores: wool socks darned, colored undershirts, jeans, workshirts, moccasin shoes, and a few turtleneck sweaters that he wore one on top the other in the cold mountain nights of the High Sierras in California and the High Cascades of Washington and Oregon on the long incredible jaunts that sometimes lasted weeks and weeks with just a few pounds of dried food in his pack. A few orange crates made his table, on which, one late sunny afternoon as I arrived, was steaming a peaceful cup of tea at his side as he bent his serious head to the Chinese signs of the poet Han Shan. Coughlin had given me the address and I came there, seeing first Japhy's bicycle on the lawn in front of the big house out front (where his landlady lived) then the few odd boulders and rocks and funny little trees he'd brought back from mountain jaunts to set out in his own "Japanese tea garden" or "tea-house garden," as there was a convenient pine tree soughing over his little domicile.