Cairnvost Howe was established as a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation with a single, clear ambition: to break down the barriers that stop ordinary people from walking Scotland's hills safely. Those barriers are real and varied. They include the cost of equipment, the fear of getting lost, and the quiet but persistent sense that hillwalking is a pursuit for a certain kind of person — confident, experienced, already equipped. We have spent years dismantling each of those barriers, one walk at a time.
Our work rests on three pillars: practical skills training, a programme of guided community walks, and sustained outreach into neighbourhoods where outdoor access has historically been low. We train our walk leaders to Mountain Leader or equivalent standard, and every one of our programmes is co-designed with the communities we serve. We do not drop in, deliver, and leave. We build relationships, return repeatedly, and measure our impact over years rather than weeks.
We hold John Muir Award partnership status and work closely with Mountaineering Scotland, local authorities, NHS social prescribing networks, and a growing number of secondary schools and further education colleges. Our funding comes from a mix of grants, individual donations, and earned income from our training courses — a model that keeps us independent and rooted in the communities we serve.
Cairnvost Howe grew out of a conversation in a car park at the foot of a Stirlingshire hill in the autumn of 2013. A small group of experienced hillwalkers — friends who had been navigating Scotland's uplands for decades — had just returned from leading a taster day for a local community group, most of whose members had never walked beyond their nearest park. What struck them was not the effort involved, but how quickly people's confidence had grown over a single afternoon with a map and compass in their hands. By the time the group had climbed to the first col and back, something had shifted — from uncertainty to capability, from outsider to someone who belongs on the hill. That shift became the founding insight behind Cairnvost Howe.
The charity was formally constituted in 2015, taking its name from a sheltered natural hollow in the hills above Stirling where the founding group had spent many years exploring. In the first year, five volunteer walk leaders delivered forty-three walks to just over two hundred people. A decade on, our team of trained leaders and staff has grown, our community partnerships span central Scotland from Clackmannanshire to the Cairngorms, and we have helped more than two thousand four hundred people discover that Scotland's hills are theirs to explore.
Cairnvost Howe exists to make Scotland's hills genuinely accessible to everyone — not as an aspiration, but as a daily practice. We train people to navigate safely using map, compass, and sound judgement; we lead free and subsidised community walks throughout the year; and we bring our outreach directly to the neighbourhoods where the hills feel most out of reach. We believe that the skills and confidence to walk Scotland's uplands should not be determined by background, income, or prior exposure to the outdoors, and we work to close that gap wherever we find it. Our mission is not about numbers on a spreadsheet — it is about the person who, for the first time, reads a contour line correctly, finds a summit cairn in low cloud, and knows without any doubt that they can trust themselves on a hillside.
Cairnvost Howe is governed by a volunteer board of trustees who bring together expertise in outdoor education, community development, finance, and public health. They are supported by a small staff team and a dedicated pool of trained volunteer walk leaders who give their time throughout the year. Our trustees set the strategic direction of the charity and ensure that every pound we spend reaches the people who need it most.
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