User client
Bothy Project
Land owner / crofter and host
Isle of Eigg Community Trust / Lucy Conway & Eddie Scott
Architect
Iain MacLeod
Concept Artist
Alec Finlay
Technical design/Project Management
Bobby Niven
Sweeney's Bothy
Year
2013
Location
Isle of Eigg
Year
2013
Location
Isle of Eigg
Recognition
Creative Scotland’s Year of Natural Scotland 2013
Artist's residency space on the Isle of Eigg, designed in collaboration with artist Alec Finlay.
Sweeney's Bothy was developed in collaboration with artist Alec Finlay as part of Creative Scotland’s Year of Natural Scotland in 2013. This dedicated off-grid residency space is purpose-built to offer artists, writers, musicians and the wider public direct creative engagement with the Scottish wilderness.
The bothy's design concept is inspired by the 7th century Gaelic king Sweeney (Shuibhne). Cursed, Sweeney fled into the wilderness, surviving for a decade among the trees and birds, living on sorrel, berries, sloes and acorns, and enduring ‘the pain of his bed there on the top of a tall ivy-grown hawthorn in the glen, every twist that he would turn sending showers of hawy thorns into his flesh’ (Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds).
Poetry and accounts of the legend of Sweeney inform the building’s layout. At the centre of the bothy, a thorn-shaped support props the bed above, echoing the trees Sweeney slept in and protecting a soft interior containing a desk, wood-burning stove and a bunk for two. The bothy belongs within a new contemporary movement – identified by Finlay as ‘hutopian’ – in which artists create huts and viewing platforms in the Scottish wilderness, proposing them as ecological, technological, architectural, and social models.
Sweeney’s Bothy is situated on croft land, where its elevated position in Cleadale, close to Eigg’s northern tip, influenced a design that incorporates a large window taking in the view towards the Isle of Rum.
"Here, on the sunset-side, Suibhne eyed the azimuth of the western massif Sgùrr nan Gillean’s keel, spear-pointed Askival, & hole-riddled Trollabhal. Since my life forked at Magh Rath I am despised Suibhne! The corbie's crony! I claw the edge of the curtain cliffs that lock and let the light in. I bare my arse to winds that whisk off the waves and whirl the ramparts. I prowl the scrubby crag of Yellow Mountain. I shape the stone that shifts on your skyline."
Alec Finlay
The building form is separated into two distinct elements - one being the main space which follows the topography of the landscape with a single pitch rising to accommodate the bed level and the other being the green rooved 'live' space, housing the kitchen, entrance and outdoor shower.
Pig Rock Bothy
