From Issue Six of Hidden Scotland Magazine

Where the Muse takes you

Artists’ residencies and writing retreats in Scotland’s quiet places.

Words by Lucy Gillmore

Printed in Issue Six of Hidden Scotland Magazine, Spring and Summer 2023.

Throughout Scotland’s people-less places there are cradles of creativity. From artists’ residencies in hip Highland hideaways to writing retreats on remote islands, those drawn to the wilderness for silence, solitude and space to create can find sanctuary in bespoke bothies, off-grid cabins and cottages, and bohemian art-themed hotels.

Almost a century ago novelist Virginia Woolf asserted “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” in a lecture to the Arts Society at Newnham in 1928, later published as “A Room of One’s Own.” That is as true today, if not truer: artists, writers, makers and creators have always sought silence, solitude and space far from life’s distractions.

It was the ethos behind the foundation of the Bothy Project in 2011. Hiking, sketching and bedding down in basic shelters in the mountains gave artist Bobby Niven’s work a new energy. The light bulb moment, that the sense of freedom created by stripping away life’s clutter along with immersion in the natural environment is vital for the artistic process, led him to establish the Bothy Project with friend and architect Iain MacLeod.

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