Irvine Butterfield

Irvine Butterfield (1936–2009) was an environmentalist, hillwalker and author of several books about mountains and the outdoor environment who took a significant role in the running of organisations with such interests in Scotland. He was a good organiser and volunteered large amounts of his time to causes he believed in.

Personal life

Butterfield was born in Farnhill, North Yorkshire on 8 August 1936 and from his youth he was a keen walker. He worked at the local gasworks and then in the Post Office. In 1957 he moved to London to start his lifetime career with HM Customs and Excise, in 1960 transferring to its whisky departments in Perth, Dundee and then Inverness. It was here that he developed his love for the Scottish hills.

Butterfield was a burly man, not built with the physique for climbing, who never claimed to be more than a hillwalker. He admitted that to climb the Inaccessible Pinnacle "a climbing friend from Manchester hauled me up it".

Scottish hillwalking books and environmentalism

When in Perth he started climbing the Scottish mountains and became particularly attracted to Schiehallion. An interest in improving bothies, remote highland shelters, led to him becoming secretary of the Mountain Bothies Association from 1969 to 1972. In 1972 he published a book about a project for repairing Dibidil bothy on the island of Rùm, and in 1979 he produced a detailed report A Survey of Shelters in Remote Mountain areas of the Scottish Highlands (1979).

In 1970 Butterfield co-founded the Mountaineering Council of Scotland where he was willing to spend time stuffing magazines into envelopes to post to members and working as a volunteer in the office generally. He gave fund-raising talks and wrote, without payment, articles illustrated with his own photographs to be included in the club magazine. He was in favour of a specifically Scottish organisation, one intended to help individual hill-walkers and not just the established mountaineering clubs.

Butterfield was never a single-minded "Munro bagger" but nevertheless by 1971 he had climbed all the Munros and eventually in 1986 he published The High Mountains of Britain and Ireland describing all the hills over in both countries, described by Mountaineering Scotland as "the bible for hill goers for Munro style hills" and which sold over 50,000 copies. A substantial book of over 300 pages, this was an early example of the genre of magnificently illustrated hillwalking books with maps and details of routes, transport and accommodation. For many readers it proved to be an encouragement to explore remote areas of Britain, particularly Scotland. He became a director of the John Muir Trust and was the fourth person to be given its Lifetime Achievement Award, after Tom Weir, Adam Watson and Doug Scott.

Publications