In 1965, Bernard Heath pushed open the rattly door of a former shepherd’s cottage deep in the Galloway Hills in southern Scotland, and thumbed open the visitor book. He was attracted to an entry expressing dismay at the abandonment and likely ruination of many worthy buildings in remote countryside and the hope that an organisation could take this sad state of affairs in hand.

Bernard took this to heart and was determined to act. He was familiar with staying in bothies not least because so-called mobile camping was a cumbersome and heavyweight affair. Small buildings constructed from combinations of stone, wood, metal sheeting – whatever was locally available – they housed shepherds, gamekeepers, miners and the like whose work took them far from towns and villages.

With imagination, determination and energy – which would become his familiar modus operandi – in the summer of that year he organised a team to restore the ruin of Tunskeen in Galloway. From this emerged the Mountain Bothies Association and, for years, Bernard, who has died aged 93, was the driving force behind it.

As the organisation grew, now with about 4,000 members, it became familiar with the very tricky building challenges set by isolation, foot-slogging by broken tracks, and the often inclement British weather; but Bernard was able to conjure up a positive attitude that defied the apparently impossible. Right from the beginning he asserted that no problem was insurmountable, even if it might require some creative thinking.

And so, as he described work at Tunskeen, with his team member Brian Bunyan: “We stuffed some concrete into that wall and lots of old fence irons, wire and old bed frames. Higher up we found our home-made Heath-Bunyan scaffolding was a bit stretched so we built one bed frame into the gable end to stand on and reached with ease the apex at what seemed a dizzy height at the time.”

Bernard was born in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, the younger son of Joseph Heath, an engineers’ tool inspector, and his wife, Jessie (nee Fuller), a tailor. Leaving school at 16, and following national service in the Royal Navy, he qualified as a chartered management accountant and taught accountancy at technical colleges first in Huddersfield and later in Thurso.

He had a love of cycling that lasted all his life. In helping to establish the Huddersfield Star Wheelers and then the Rough Stuff Fellowship, Bernard moved from being a member of a rather conventional cycling club to a pioneer of very adventurous off-road cycling in isolated wild country.

For 10 years his annual holiday was spent with a close friend, Frank Goodwin, exploring remote corners of upland Britain. No Scottish Highland glen seemed outside their ambition, pushing and carrying their bikes over high passes and fishing from mountain lochs to supplement their provisions. He took several trips abroad, most notably making the first cycle crossing of the interior of Iceland in 1958.

At the inaugural meeting of the association he met Betty Taylor, and they married in 1970. They were affectionately referred to as B&B, and were well matched for enthusiasm, hard work, modesty and openness.

Bernard worked easily by minimum impact principles in which he was again a pioneer. Only existing buildings – part of the human history of the landscape – were identified to become one of the mountain bothies, after which the landowner would be asked for permission for its use for an undefined period of time with property rights remaining unchanged. Bernard’s success in establishing good relationships reflects his positive view of human nature and his basic trust in people.

Anyone is free to use the unlocked buildings whether they are MBA members or not; and with the great expansion of outdoor recreation allied to an information revolution, it is to the credit of Bernard that he established a system that assumes the essential trustworthiness of bothiers and which enables the association to maintain some 105 unlocked buildings.

In the late 1970s Bernard gave up his teaching job so that he and Betty could start a metal recycling business and smallholding at their home in Thurso, which they ran successfully for 20 years. They still had energy to engage with local conservation issues and to plant a mixed woodland which was handed over to the Dunnet Forest Trust.

Success in attracting help, especially from volunteers with professional skills, meant they could pull back from direct involvement in work parties, but well into their 80s they both maintained an involvement with the MBA at many levels. In 1991, shortly after its 25th anniversary, Bernard and Betty received the unusual recognition of both being awarded the British Empire Medal.

Possessed of curiosity and imagination, they could never resist the pull to “see what’s up the glen and over the hill”, perhaps best illustrated in their exploration of small uninhabited islands. At the age of 74 Bernard fulfilled a long held ambition to cycle from Land’s End to John O’Groats, characteristically spinning out the route to over 1,500 miles along byways and off-road tracks. Two years later a stroke brought a gradual slowdown to his activities while still working on bothy projects into his 80s.

Likewise Betty continued to be very active into old age, and at the age of 86 was going backpacking on her own in the wilds near Cape Wrath. A friend remembers meeting them on their way to a bothy in about 2010, with Betty carrying a folding metal bed tied to her wooden pack-frame: “We stopped for a quick chat. “Isn’t that bed awfully heavy?” the friend asked. “Let’s just say the one I carried in yesterday was lighter,” she replied.

Betty died last year. Bernard is survived by two nephews, James and Anthony.

Bernard Joseph Heath, founder of the Mountain Bothies Association, born 22 September 1928; died 31 March 2022