Cairnvost Howe – North Star is a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation serving Inverness and the wide, rural hinterland of the Highland capital. The terrain we work in — the Great Glen corridor, the vast ancient pinewoods of Glen Affric, the Munros and corbetts rising above Loch Ness, the open moorland east toward Strathdearn — is among the most rewarding walking landscape in Europe. It is also, for a significant number of people who live alongside it, genuinely hard to access without organised support. We exist to bridge that gap: to connect people to landscape they can see from their kitchen window but have never set foot on, and to communities of walkers they would never otherwise have met.
We operate through a volunteer walk-leader network trained to national standards, a quarterly programme of safety-skills training days, and a dedicated outreach service that travels to communities too scattered or too remote to sustain their own walking group. Every walk in our programme is graded — from gentle riverside paths on the flat Great Glen Way sections near Inverness to demanding full-Munro days requiring real navigational competence — so that participants of every fitness level and experience can find appropriate outings and progress as their confidence grows. We do not treat the hills as the preserve of the experienced or the well-equipped. We treat them as a health, social and wellbeing resource that belongs to everyone who lives within sight of them.
Partnership is central to how we work. We have long-standing relationships with community councils across the Highland capital area, with NHS Highland and its active travel and social prescribing teams, and with rural primary schools that bring young people onto the hill under our leaders for the first time. We are grateful to Transport Scotland, Highland Council, the National Lottery Community Fund and a number of private trusts whose support has funded kit, transport and training over the years. Everything we do rests on the commitment of our volunteer leaders and trustees, who give their time because they believe — as we do — that access to wild land makes people measurably and lastingly better.
Cairnvost Howe – North Star began in the spring of 2017, around a kitchen table in Dores on the east shore of Loch Ness, where a retired NHS physiotherapist and a qualified mountain guide compared notes on a frustration they had both been carrying for years. Walking groups in Inverness were thriving — but the same familiar faces cycled through every rota, and everyone who lived beyond the A82 corridor, in the glens and straths where the roads dwindled and the bus service stopped, either made the journey under their own means or, far more often, simply did not come. They put out a call to friends and neighbours, sketched out a programme of led walks that would actively travel to outlying villages rather than waiting for people to reach them, and registered as a SCIO the following year. The name — Cairnvost Howe, a modest ridge and grassy hollow on the eastern flank of Loch Ness, well known to locals but rarely marked on tourist maps — was chosen deliberately: a landmark that belongs to the people who live here, not to anyone passing through.
In the years since, what started as six walk leaders and a borrowed people-carrier has grown into a charity with a qualified volunteer team, a minibus of its own, and a programme that spans the length of the Great Glen and reaches into glens — Affric, Moriston, Strathfarrar — that few organised walking groups ever visit. The founding physiotherapist still leads the Tuesday easy-grade outing from Drumnadrochit. The route varies by season. The principle — that the hills are a health resource, not a privilege — has never changed.
Cairnvost Howe – North Star exists to make the hills, glens and long-distance routes of the Highland capital genuinely and practically accessible to every person who wants to walk them — regardless of experience, physical confidence, transport options or how far they live from the nearest walking group. We believe that the landscape around Inverness, the Great Glen Way, the ancient pinewoods of Glen Affric and the Munros above Loch Ness, is a shared resource for health, wellbeing and community belonging: not a destination reserved for those who already know how to navigate, already own the right kit, or already have a companion willing to walk with them. We fulfil that belief through a structured programme of graded volunteer-led walks, hands-on mountain safety training, and an outreach service that travels to scattered rural communities across the Highland capital area — so that proximity to some of Scotland's finest walking country is a gift that every resident can actually use.
Cairnvost Howe – North Star is governed by a volunteer board of trustees drawn from the communities the charity serves. Between them they bring professional experience in health and social care, upland land management, outdoor education and charity finance — and all of them walk regularly on the routes the charity covers. Day-to-day delivery rests with a part-time coordinator and a walk-leader network of more than twenty trained volunteers, but strategic direction and stewardship of the charity's resources sit with the trustees, who meet quarterly and maintain close relationships with funders, community partners and the walkers who come out on our programme.
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