Craig came back from his third offshore rotation of the year in early September and did what he usually did: drove home from Aberdeen, unpacked, slept for eleven hours, and then found himself at loose ends with a fortnight and nowhere particular to be. He had been working two weeks on and two weeks off for six years by then, long enough to know that the first few days of shore leave felt like pressure releasing from a valve, and long enough to know that by day five the lack of structure started to work on him in ways that were hard to explain to people with conventional working weeks.
He had walked in the hills as a younger man — day trips into the Cairngorms with a school group in his teens, a few weekends in his twenties before the shift pattern took hold — but a combination of irregular scheduling and gradually accumulating unfamiliarity had pushed it well to the back. He was not unfit, but he was uncertain. The hills felt like something that had moved on without him, a world with its own knowledge and equipment and confidence that he no longer had access to.
A colleague mentioned Cairnvost Howe after seeing one of our leaflets in a community centre in Inverurie. Craig looked at the website, saw that we ran genuinely graded outings — not just easy, medium, hard with no explanation of what those words mean — and sent an email asking whether someone who had not been on high ground for nearly a decade would be welcome on a moderate-grade half-day. We told him yes, obviously, and that the only things he needed to bring were waterproofs and some food.
His first outing was a circuit on the lower slopes of Morven, one of our gentler introductions to the area south of the main Cairngorms massif. The group was eight people, the leader was a hill walker who has been covering this ground for thirty years, and the pace was genuinely unhurried. Craig says what he remembers most clearly is looking out across Deeside in the early afternoon and realising he had spent six hours not thinking about anything except where to put his feet and what the cloud was doing. For someone whose working life is loud and concentrated and shift-structured, that quality of attention felt like something he had not had access to for a long time.
He came back the following week for a longer outing onto the plateau above Loch Muick. By his second rotation home he had attended two hill-skills evenings in Ballater and was navigating short sections of route himself with a map and compass. By his fourth rotation he was helping newer members of the group read the ground on descent. He is not, he is clear, a converted obsessive. He does not spend his offshore weeks researching gear or planning ambitious routes in his bunk. But the outings give his shore leave a shape the free time previously lacked, and they give him something specific and uncomplicated to look forward to during the last few difficult days of the working fortnight.
We share Craig's story not because it is unusual but because it is representative of something we see regularly among the offshore workers, shift medics, and other rotating-schedule professionals who come through Cairnvost Howe. The combination of irregular hours, concentrated working periods, and long stretches at home without obvious structure is common across north-east Scotland, and it creates a particular kind of need: not for a demanding new hobby or a rigorous fitness regime, but for an activity with enough structure to give the days a shape and enough physical engagement to genuinely occupy the mind. Graded outings, with a known start time and a known level of challenge and a group of people to walk alongside, serve that need directly and reliably.
Craig's next rotation home falls in late June. He has already put his name down for a half-day on the Fungle Road and an evening navigation session in Ballater. He says he will probably attempt a full-day route if the weather is reasonable. He does not call himself a hill walker yet. But he is starting to sound very much like one.