Morag MacPherson is fifty-eight years old and lives in a small village outside Beauly, about twelve miles from Inverness. She walked the hills around her home for most of her adult life — it was simply what you did, she says, the way you moved through a week. But after her husband died three winters ago, and a difficult period that followed, the idea of walking alone felt different. The hills were the same. She was different.
"I'd go to the end of the road and come back," she tells me, sitting in the community hall in Beauly where we are hosting one of our pre-walk briefings. "I told myself the ground was wet, or my knee was bad. There was always a reason."
Her GP referred her to a social prescriber at the primary care team in Beauly, and the prescriber mentioned Cairnvost Howe. Morag looked at our website, decided the walks looked too ambitious for where she was at the time, closed the tab, and thought no more about it. Three weeks later the prescriber mentioned it again. "She was quite persistent," Morag says, and she is smiling when she says it.
The first outing she joined was a lower-level walk along the southern shore of Loch Ness — about seven miles, mostly on good paths, no significant ascent. The walk leader, a retired forester from Drumnadrochit, noticed her hesitance in the car park and made a point of walking alongside her for the first hour. He did not draw attention to it. He talked about the loch, about the birds, about a pair of ospreys he had watched fishing near the narrows the previous week. Another woman in her late fifties had come by herself too, and the three of them fell into conversation without it being arranged.
"He didn't make a fuss of me," Morag says. "That mattered. I didn't want to be somebody's project."
She came back the following month. Then the month after. By last April she was with us on a clear winter morning when the group crossed the ridge above Loch Ness with snow still lying on the high ground to the north and the whole length of the loch visible far below in a hard grey-blue. Someone in the group took photographs. In the one Morag sends us when she wants to explain to people what she has found again, she is in the centre of the frame, caught mid-laugh by whoever held the camera. The sky behind the far hills is pale gold.
"I'm not back to where I was," she says, in a tone that suggests this is not a problem she is losing sleep over. "But I'm back outside. I'm back moving. That's the thing."
Cairnvost Howe coordinates pickup points in Beauly, Drumnadrochit, and several smaller communities along the Great Glen corridor for participants who cannot easily reach Inverness for the start of a walk. If you have been referred by a social prescriber, or if you would like to refer someone you work with, please get in touch through our website. No prior walking experience is required, and no one is expected to go further than they are comfortable going on the day. Morag is planning to join our Glen Affric autumn walk in October. She has not been to Glen Affric since her twenties. "That will be something," she says.