Wild Hut 16

Location:
Pacific Quay, Glasgow

I noticed blue lights flashing and through the rain I could see an ambulance parked awkwardly in the road and a man being held by the throat against the building opposite. A typical Saturday evening in Glasgow I thought! The rain was fairly heavy and had been pouring all day. I decided this was a perfect night for a wild hut adventure.

I had noticed that building work had begun on my favourite little plot of land on the Clyde-side. 25 years of woods and wildlife had been scraped clean in less than a day, revealing old cobbled roads and retaining walls. The new Masterplan for this area includes strategic routes, hotels and office buildings (View part of the design). The thing that struck me was the maturity of the trees that were being cleared. For an inner-city site it looked like commercial forestry at work, with trailers full of heavy timber ready for the sawmill.



I followed a familiar little trail through the undergrowth until I arrived at the edge of the destruction. I remember following a little fox along this wooded trail with the surrounding branches full of screeching Magpies and Wood Pigeons. The Grey Herons who once stood like concrete statues in the tall reeds will never return. It looked like a tsunami aftermath – just thick mud and a tangle of broken trees.

I don’t like to get sentimental over one patch of scrub-land but I think urban density needs to be tempered with negative space - areas for wild resurgence. On the plus side, there was enough chopped materials here for all 100 huts so I wasn’t complaining for long.

The Build:
I decided to build quite an elegant triangular form. It consisted of two simple A-frame structures, which supported a triangular sleeping platform with roof above. Both the sleeping platform and roof tapered back to a single point. This reduced the material requirement and made it quite a quick and efficient build.

I constructed two free standing A-frames and strung the bed and roof structure together in super-quick time. I was slowed down considerably though as groups of screaming youths passed on the road above every few minutes. I felt really exposed with the lack of ground cover and crouched down behind stacks of timber like an animal shunning human contact.

The rain hadn’t stopped all night and it would be safe to say I was pretty wet. I was knee deep in mud through much of the foraging and could feel my face was caked in it too. It felt a bit like commando camouflage but I knew I would feel stupid walking home. I had the look of someone who had attempted to drink a puddle.

I laddered the roof with straight lengths of wood, using gravity to hold them in place. I then used upturned moss and turf to form a skin over the roof timbers and hold them in place. This ‘wattle and dob’ style roofing was quick and extremely effective. I built a short windbreak with some broken evergreen branches and the full hut was complete in only 3.5 hours.

Roughing it:
The rain hadn’t stopped all night and I pulled off my squelching wellies and wriggled onto the sleeping platform. It was a good test for this little hut as I’m sure even my tent would have packed in during such a heavy and constant downpour.

I put on a hat and snuggled down into the sleeping bag feeling the odd drip find its way through the layers of debris. The wind seemed to change direction from west to north-west, but the windbreak was well positioned around my head. I wondered how I would fall asleep – I was wide awake and there is a row of glowing flats on the road above. Taxi’s sped past every few minutes and people laughed in the rain on their drunken walk home from town.

Before long I was fast asleep and only woke to the sounds of birds chirping the following morning. I opened my eyes to see a black shape darting around the mud below the hut. It was still dark and I was sure it was a rat. It moved again and to my relief it was a blackbird searching for the early worm. It was odd to see bird-life in the darkness. It was almost 7am and the sun had not yet risen.

I watched the blackbird dart around the ground instinctively and wondered if it was following the same route it had done for years through the old forest? I wondered if by studying the bird’s movements you could build up a picture of how the forest was arranged before it was destroyed a few days earlier. I wondered if the residual mental maps of these birds could reveal the historic forest landscape through their confused movements, like a ghost or x-ray. Animals are highly adaptable I thought. Which is lucky as their eviction notice came in the form of a chainsaw.

It was soon light and as I walked home I felt like a travelling mud-wrestler. I passed about 10 people who looked at me with some concern. I checked my reflection in a car window and realised that my head looked like a chocolate truffle with bed-hair. I cleaned my wellies in a puddle and felt a lot better.

Wild Hut 11

Location :

Old Partick Central Station, Glasgow

I had the good fortune to meet up with a chap Toby Clark from the John Muir Trust Awards who was interested in the wild huts concept and was keen to give it a try. The accessibility of the project initially grabbed his attention and how people could engage with wild spaces in urban areas as well as rural. We agreed to build a '2 person shelter' one month prior but had failed to anticipate the onslaught of freezing weather conditions. It felt like madness but we gave it a bash.

It was on a dark cold winter’s evening after work when we met in a west-end bar to discuss our build and where we might go. The ruined remains of Partick Central Station are sited just behind the bar and this seemed as good a place as any! Toby heartily agreed but suggested that after experiencing the freezing temperatures that day he was ‘anticipating’ the experience rather than looking forward to it.

The station was built in the 1890s by the Lanarkshire and Dunbartonshire Railway Company, it sat on a line that ran along the north bank of the River Clyde from Stobcross to Dumbarton. The station was renamed Kelvin Hall in 1959.

Passenger and goods services to the station ceased in 1964 when it closed as part of the Beeching cuts to rail services across the UK. The station building was later used as a workshop and an auction house before lying empty for a number of years. The remains of the platforms and track-bed, which were underneath the station building, have been removed but the railway's route is fairly discernible. The station's goods yard served as a site for travelling people and as a scrap merchants.

The site had been empty and awaiting redevelopment when in 2004 it emerged that the supermarket chain Tesco wished to develop a 24-hour operation there, in the face of local opposition STOP. Tesco had the station building demolished on 28 January 2007, before planning permission had been given for the development from Glasgow City Council.

We ventured out into the frozen air and passed through an open gap in the fence which led along the old railway tracks. We spend a short while exploring this forgotten landscape and regaining our bearings. It was like an island: marooned on 4 sides by high walls, roads, bridges and the River Kelvin. It was strange to find such a pocket of overgrown wildness so close to the busy west end and Glasgow’s bustling Byres Road.

The Build:
The hut concept was two free-standing mono-pitched structures which were mirrored and could be bound together for increased rigidity if needed. As the freezing rain steadily fell we gathered the fallen branches which lay strewn throughout the dense thickets. Due to limited tools - Toby accumulated the better structural timbers as I wrestled with bundles of tangled branches. We stacked our materials under the sheltering road bridge and assembled a series of A-frames which we used as the primary structural components.
This was a fairly time consuming process but we had the basic structures complete and in place by around 11pm. After the rain had passed, the stars and moon burst through the shifting clouds and the temperature began to plummet much like our energy levels.

We decided to take a break and stop for a well earned beer. To my infinite joy I had somehow managed to burst open a can in my rucksack which drenched all my spare clothes with freezing cold Stella Artois. It was probably a better smell than mud and sweat, but would increase the chance of hypothermia if worn! I offered some soggy spare socks to Toby but he gracefully declined in favour of his life.

The hardest part of the build was yet to come as this involved gathering bails of cut material to use as roofing tiles. I knew from experience that this would be time consuming and Toby wasn’t entirely looking forward to the process. It was around 2 hours later where he confessed that bailing wasn’t for him. Gathering grass for hours on end on a freezing cold winter’s night is numbingly monotonous and requires a steely mindset.

I hadn’t seen Toby in a while and decided to take that opportunity to stretch my legs and see how he was doing. Through the mist I noticed Toby had a new friend in the form of an inquisitive fox! It seemed to take an interest in what we were doing and was happy to come close in search for scraps. It darted around playfully and watched our progress for the next hour.

A cormorant flew overhead, heading upstream. It occurred to me that these spaces have a role in providing sanctuary for life of all kinds. It would be good to recognise the importance of these informal spaces: they seem to have a more exceptional capacity to harbour wildlife than our manicured parks.

Roughing it:

Around 3am we were ready to try out the structures and unfurled our sleeping bags over the frosty branches. Passers-by glanced down from the adjacent bridge on occasion but we remained undisturbed. Toby noticed that the frozen forest glistened like the stars and it was difficult to differentiate between them. We slept until around 7:30am where we both woke with cold feet. I looked down to see my sleeping bag had a glaze of frost which covered my projecting feet.

By 8am the blue morning light had saturated the sky as the city streets sprung to life once again. We passed through the fence and looked down at the hut from the adjacent road bridge. It stood like the mystical jungle shelter from a lost tribe. After mild reflection we soon saw sense and headed straight to the nearest café for a fried Scottish breakfast.



Wild Hut 9

Location:
Pacific Quay, Govan, Glasgow



M-frame Hut

I always thought ripping a toe nail off would be a fairly negative experience and indeed it was. I was heartily pulling on my woolly socks in a rather brisk manner when I felt the toenail catch on the inside and felt subsequent blood. I had previously bruised this toe nail during a long distance hike through the Highlands but hadn’t expected to part company with it so soon. It detached from one side and was swinging rather freely. I tried to pull it off but it was still organically deep-rooted on one side. I managed to stop the bleeding, Sellotaped the nail down onto the nail-bed and popped on my wellies. I wasn’t going to let this minor inconvenience disrupt my enjoyment of the icy-cold rain and wind waiting for me outside!

I walked through the downpour to the Media District on Glasgow’s River Clyde where there is a large expanse of overgrown wasteland yet to be developed on its south bank. After passing a stream of office workers who were leaving for the night I made my way over to the darkest corner of the quay. The only good thing about torrential rain I discovered is that it makes for fewer awkward conversations as I’m usually the only person mindless enough to be wondering around in it. As darkness fell I noticed a huge pile of pruned branches which had been discarded over the fence from the neighbouring residential development. I decided to make the hut entirely out of this rotting pile of brown leaves, twigs and cut branches.

The Build:

As I was frequenting the newly branded “Media” District (home to BBC Scotland HQ, STV, rats and seagulls amongst others) I decided to build an “M” shape hut structure. I arranged some branches on the ground in two triangular forms and bound them tightly together. Within each triangle I placed further bracing which formed the “M” shape. It also gives the sleeping platform some mid-way support which is ideal as I usually fall right through the bed each time like a comedy sketch show.



I stripped the twigs from various branches to form cross bracing members which allowed the structure to be free-standing. I then lashed some further branches along the length of the roof like a large ladder-frame. All the discarded brown leaves and twigs were then used to tile to roof (much like a traditional debris shelter).

This was a particularly quick process and the roof was water-tight in around half an hour. One thing that wasn’t water tight was my wellies! The continual rain had streamed down my trousers creating vast cold reservoirs in each foot. I took them off and poured out the contents. It was a delicate business putting them back on though as the sticky-tape had become wobbly...much like my toe nail.

I just had the bed platform to create and set about finding springy bedding material. As I pulled hard on a branch I felt something sharp cut deep into the top of my index finger. The blood quickly mixed with the rain and ran down my hand for the next hour. The bleeding wouldn’t stop as the rain continually diluted the open wound. I started to wonder if I should start another project called “100 different ways to hurt yourself in the dark”. It might also be an slightly easier project! The hut was complete in around 3.5 hours, my quickest hut yet.

Roughing it:

I pulled my sleeping bag out and rolled it across the bed platform. It was obvious that winter would soon be on us and the summer had passed as quickly as it had arrived. It felt fairly cold although reasonable, the weather forecast suggested there would be lows of 8 degrees. I put my full weight on the sleeping platform and for the first time ever – no cracking, nothing breaking...all quiet below! The structure seemed to tighten under the weight and remained firm. I squirmed into my sleeping bag and looked out across the water as the bright lights on the BBC HQ performed a colour-changing sequence.

The hut’s roof material was also a minor success as the rain seemed unable to penetrate the dense canopy of dead leaf-litter. The rain stopped in the night and the temperature dropped. I watched people passing close by, and ambulances screeching past a lot more than usual. I thought it must be an strategic “arterial route” they use to-and-from the Southern General Hospital. Luckily that was my last boring thought for the evening and I fell asleep fairly quickly. I set my work alarm for half 7 and awoke to a still-calm morning. I gathered my things and made my way back through some deep puddles along the quay wall. Back home I used some “second-skin” liquid bandage for my cut finger which stung much like the original accident itself! Every time I return from a night of building huts my brain always feels refreshed, as if washed clean by the cool rain.