Amara Osei arrived in Dundee at the start of last year's autumn semester with two suitcases and no clear sense of where the city ended and the countryside began. She had grown up in Accra and then in London, and the idea of walking into Scottish hills for pleasure struck her, she admits freely now, as something that belonged to a different kind of person. "I thought you needed special skills, expensive gear, a whole group of friends who already did it," she says. "I thought it simply wasn't for me."
She found out about Cairnvost Howe through a noticeboard in the Students' Union at Dundee University — a small poster advertising a Saturday walk in Glen Prosen with transport included and kit available to borrow. The subsidised student rate meant the cost was less than a cinema ticket. She sent a booking email half-expecting to feel out of place and spent most of the week before the walk quietly convincing herself to cancel.
She didn't cancel. The minibus left the city centre on a grey October morning with nine walkers aboard — students, a retired couple from Lochee, a father and his teenage son who had walked with the group several times before and knew the route well. Nobody asked Amara about her experience level or what gear she owned. The walk leader, Fiona, handed her a borrowed waterproof jacket and a pair of poles at the car park and described the route in terms that made it feel genuinely manageable: five miles, a steady climb to a viewpoint above the glen, lunch on a flat rock, then back down by a different path through the birch woodland.
"The viewpoint was the moment I understood," Amara says. "You could see all the way back towards Dundee — you could actually see where I lived. The city looked so small and so far away, and I'd got there entirely on my own feet. I didn't know that was something I could do." She took a photograph and sent it to her mother in London. Her mother asked where it was. Amara realised she had no good answer — only a rough direction and a name on a map she had barely looked at on the way up.
She came back the following month for a walk in the Sidlaws, then again in January on a crisp clear morning when the low winter light turned the Tay estuary silver. She has since completed eight walks with Cairnvost Howe and is halfway through the skills programme, having attended the navigation session and the remote first aid day. She is considering whether to pursue her Mountain Leader training in the next two years — something that would have seemed entirely implausible to the version of herself reading that noticeboard poster fourteen months ago.
"It's become the thing I look forward to most each month," she says. "I tell everyone on my course about it. Some of them have started coming along, which makes the minibus feel like part of the walk now — you're already out before you've even left the city."
Amara's story is not unusual among the people who walk with us. The participants who come back most reliably are often the ones who assumed, before their first booking, that the outdoors was not meant for them: people new to Scotland, people without cars, people who grew up somewhere without hills, people whose families never walked for pleasure. What Cairnvost Howe offers is not complicated — a bus, a guide, borrowed kit, and a clear path through country that is genuinely spectacular. But removing those four barriers turns out to matter enormously. The Angus Glens and the Sidlaws and the Lomond Hills have always been there, waiting. Getting Dundonians to them is the work.