Cairnvost Howe - Indigo is a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation based in Dundee. We exist to make the hills, glens and moorlands of Angus and Fife genuinely accessible to the people of Dundee — not as a distant aspiration, but as a regular, ordinary, affordable part of city life. We run a year-round programme of led group walks, half-day skills sessions and occasional multi-day introductory expeditions, all organised so that the practical barriers of cost, transport and kit are handled by us rather than left to the individual.
Our name comes from two pieces of Scots landscape vocabulary. A cairn — the stone marker you build on a summit — stands for arrival, achievement, and the tradition of finding your way by landmarks that others have left before you. A howe is a sheltered hollow in the hills, a place of gathering and protection from the weather. Together they describe something of what we try to be: a place that helps people reach summits while also offering shelter and community along the way. Indigo is the programme name we use for our core public walking offer — the regular, affordable, open-to-all sessions that make up the heart of our work.
We are proud to work closely with Dundee's student community, with families in the city's north and west neighbourhoods, and with community groups who want to build outdoor confidence in the people they support. Our volunteer walk leaders are trained to Hill and Moorland Leader standard, and our skills tutors bring backgrounds in mountain rescue, ecology and outdoor education. We are a small organisation that punches above our weight by keeping overheads low and working in genuine partnership with the communities we serve.
Cairnvost Howe - Indigo grew out of a simple, repeated observation: that the people most likely to benefit from time in the Angus Glens were also the people least likely to get there. A loose group of Dundee-based outdoor educators and community workers had been running informal walks for friends and neighbours for several years, noticing each time how quickly the hills changed people's mood and outlook, and noticing equally how many of their neighbours never came because the bus didn't go, the kit cost too much, or nobody had ever taken them before. In 2019 the group formalised as a SCIO, raised a small amount of seed funding from Dundee City Council's community grants programme, and ran their first official season of six walks into Glen Clova and across the Sidlaw ridge.
The early years taught us a great deal. We learned that the five-pound contribution model — asking participants for what they can afford up to a maximum of five pounds — removed the financial anxiety from the decision to join without eliminating the sense of investment that makes people actually show up. We learned that lending kit at the minibus rather than asking people to arrange it beforehand was the difference between a full bus and an empty one. And we learned that our most loyal returning walkers were often students and young parents who had simply never had an adult in their lives who took them to the hills. Those lessons are baked into everything we do now.
Cairnvost Howe - Indigo exists to ensure that every Dundonian who wants to experience the hills, glens and moorlands of Angus and Fife has a practical, affordable and welcoming route to do so. We believe that access to wild and semi-wild landscapes is not a luxury for the well-equipped few but a right for every city resident, and that the barriers of cost, transport and confidence are organisational problems to be solved rather than personal failings to be overcome. We fulfil this mission by running a regular programme of led group walks and practical skills sessions, by maintaining a free-to-borrow kit pool, by organising our own transport from central Dundee, and by building the kind of warm, unhurried walking community in which nobody — regardless of background, fitness level or prior outdoor experience — ever feels out of place.
Cairnvost Howe - Indigo is governed by a board of trustees who bring together expertise in outdoor education, community development, charity finance and Dundee's voluntary sector. All three trustees walk regularly with the organisation and remain closely connected to the practical work on the ground. Day-to-day operations are led by a small staff team supported by a core of trained volunteer walk leaders, all of whom hold Hill and Moorland Leader qualification or are working towards it under our in-house mentorship scheme.
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