“Historical Camping” In The Cairngorms

August 17th, 2025.

Reviving Highland Traditions

I met Max at the bus stop at Cairngorm Mountain.

He was heading into town, wrapped in a great sweep of wool, buckskin at his legs, leather brogans on his feet. The kind of outfit that makes you pause before you even think to ask why.

He’d just come from an ancestral skills workshop with Peter Ananin of Woodland Tannery – part of The Shieling Collective – learning how to tan leather the old way, with animal brains and tree bark, the sort of work that once shaped whole communities before it was pushed aside by the machinery of war. That part of his trip was over. Now he was up here for something different.

Max calls it “historical camping.” It’s not nostalgia exactly, more like a small act of time travel. Out in the hills with the midges, sleeping on bark-tanned sheepskins, the smell of wool and heather. No modern tent, no ultralight sleeping mat , just the kind of kit a Highland cattle drover might have carried three centuries ago. He wanted to see what that felt like. Turns out, you can sleep through a night of rain and wake dry if you’ve got enough wool and a decent breeze in the morning.

“I’m in a 100% wool great kilt, wearing handmade leather brogans and buckskin leg coverings, a red deer buckskin sporran patterned after a Jacobite sporran from Culloden, a leather flask made by Hamish Lamley of Pictavia Leather (who also adapted the sporran pattern), and carrying my roycroft style packframe. And so, I slept on my bark tanned sheepskins out in the open air atop some heather using 2 great kilts and a wool blanket for cover; and even though it rained that night, I didn’t get wet under all the wool and was dried by the early morning breeze and sunshine.”

The Cairngorms were the obvious choice for him, beautiful, accessible, but still wild enough to make the modern world feel far away.

“Growing up watching American cowboy movies and having some Scottish ancestry, I’ve always had an interest in the highland cattle drovers – the original cowboys”

The mountains mean different things to different people. To some, they’re a safe adventure before an egg mayo sandwich in the café. To others, they’re a testing ground, or a place to imagine what came before. They change, and they stay the same. They keep their shape in the mind.

If you come here, you might find your own version…

Learn about Pictavia Leather and the work of Hamish Lamley here: www.pictavialeather.co.uk

You can find out about the work of Peter Ananin from Woodland Tannery, and the team reviving Highland traditions at the Shelling Collective here: www.theshielingcollective.com