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The Scotland Outdoors podcast from BBC Radio Scotland.

Hello and thanks very much for downloading this podcast.

I'm Mark Stephen.

In this edition, I'm going to share a discussion with you I had with a writer and broadcaster Leslie Riddick. Leslie's recently published a book called Huts, A Place Beyond, which looks at hutting culture in Norway. Now, it's common over there for families to have a hutter as well as their own home, and it's a place can go at weekends or on holidays it's often in the forest and it's a simpler life it's a chance to escape from the rat race the rest of the time Leslie believes that if we here in Scotland had more of a culture of hutting our lives would be transformed in so many ways I met up with her in our home in Fife and asked her.

Why is it that huts didn't take off here?

Huts didn't fail to start in Scotland.

They failed to survive.

And that's what took me 10 years of research and a PhD to discover,

because I kind of assumed that because of the problems we have

with land ownership, we probably just never got going.

And you wouldn't have blamed anybody actually because the difficulties are just massive

difficulties compared to all the Nordic countries, to America, to Canada, to Russia,

to most of the Baltic countries, to New Zealand in a

southern hemisphere with its batches. When you find a wooded latitude, which Scotland definitely

inhabits, you find huts and cabins, it's not like there was a big convention way back in the

1800s, it's just what people do when there's wood about and when there's forest cover.

So is that the problem?

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