The Howff Project

The Howff Project is an exploration of artist Tim Knowles’s network of hidden, site-specific shelters across the Scottish landscape. The book also features an essay on shelter by anthropologist Tim Ingold, a survey of existing alternative, hidden or secret shelters and a text by Claudia Zieske examining issues around land use, ownership and access.

The Howff Project is an exploration of artist Tim Knowles’s landscape project by the same name. For more than two years, Knowles built a network of hidden, site-specific shelters across the Scottish landscape. Inspired by the Scottish word ‘howff’, which describes an abode, tavern, familiar haunt or shelter, Knowles utilized existing structures and features in the landscape and then adapted, modified, and reconfigured their characteristics to create a series of unique hidden shelters, providing refuge in remote areas.  The Howff Project takes readers behind the scenes of the making of each structure, from conception to finished product. Visually rich, the book captures the landscape through more than one hundred stunning photographs and drawings, while personal anecdotes detail Knowles’s experience traveling through the Scottish Lowlands and the mountains of Aberdeenshire and the Cairngorms.