We are Graham and Amy and we’re delighted to introduce you to Arbor Bothy + Gallery. It’s been a wild ride to get here. We have been thinking of you staying in our bothy for a while now and are delighted to say it’s ready for you! Graham has built the bothy to a luxurious standard using beautiful local materials, with a little help from some friends. Along with an art gallery, jewellery studio, bike shed, garage, garden tool shed… yes, he’s been rather productive!
Graham is also an award winning photographer and you will find Niven Photography adorning the walls of the bothy, most notably a giant canvas of the Lairig Ghru in the bedroom. More of his work can be viewed in our on-site Arbor Gallery alongside handmade jewellery by Amy, designer and maker at The Third Aye. You can book into a private jewellery making workshop with Amy during your stay using your guest discount, including our Wedding Rings Retreat package.
Let us tell you a wee story.
Top: Graham and our son by local photographer Catriona Parmenter. Bottom: Amy’s dad and sister in 1977.
The Nethy dream… it’s generational.
We were like you, in love with Nethy Bridge and the surrounding landscape. We had visited since we were babies with our families and we kept coming back for more until we decided, we had to move here to raise our own young family.
There was just one prerequisite when we were looking for a house, it had to have enough space to build a bothy so we could share our love of the place with other adventurers. We wanted to be able to add to the community and bring our skills to locals and travellers alike. And so it began, we found this incredible property on Dell Road which had a wee bothy in the back of a huge garden. A lot of the gardens here have bothies as there was an old tradition of folk renting out their houses and staying in their bothies during the holiday seasons. The bothy was amazing and full of old artefacts, newspapers and even a note on the wall claiming it as the village cinema. With insulation made with moss and pine needles from the forest floor and timbers wearing away after years of service, it was time to take the old bothy back to the ground from which it had grown.
It started with a sketch.
Graham started a sketch book, scribbling and jotting down ideas for how the bothy might look. There’s an old saying about older generations, “The boys were built like men and the men were built like horses.” Well, Graham has been toiling like a workhorse to raise this bothy and he has done so with incredible attention to detail. What he has achieved is a retreat which is cosy and comfortable yet spacious and light, made to the highest modern standards and efficiency yet nods to the old bothy which stood before it in carefully selected materials and design.
Our focus now shifts from building the bothy to building relationships with you, our lovely visitors. We can’t wait to welcome you into our dream, to share with you all the things about this place which make us so happy to call it our home.
