Lorraine Menzies spent twenty-two years working twelve-hour shifts at a Glasgow hospital. Her days off came in unpredictable clusters — sometimes mid-week, sometimes a rare back-to-back weekend, sometimes a single Friday that felt over before it started. She had never walked a hill in her life. The Campsie Fells were the thing she looked at from the A803 on the way home from night shifts, usually at six in the morning, usually exhausted, usually thinking: one day.
She heard about Cairnvost Howe from a colleague who had seen a flyer at Milngavie train station. The phrase that stayed with her was not the usual beginners welcome, which she had encountered on other things and found did not mean what it seemed to say, but the specific acknowledgement that the walks were designed around rota life and shift patterns. She sent an email on a Tuesday night and was on a walk three days later.
She had expected something like a fitness class, the kind of environment where you feel assessed for pace or capability. It was nothing like that. The walk leader spent the first twenty minutes of the ascent above Lennoxtown talking about the landscape itself — what the hills were called, how the Campsies had been shaped by volcanic activity, why the bog cotton grew where it did and not elsewhere. Lorraine forgot to feel self-conscious. By the time she noticed she was breathing hard, she was already on the open plateau looking north towards the Fintry Hills, and the view was so unexpected in scale that she stopped walking for a moment just to take it in.
That was fourteen months ago. She has been coming back most weekends since. She knows the difference between the Lennox Hills and the Fintry Hills. She can read a basic OS map, which she describes as still slightly magical — the idea that you can know what a hill looks like before you can see it. She has completed three of the Cairnvost Howe navigation coaching days and last autumn walked the opening section of the West Highland Way from Milngavie to Drymen on her own, something she would have described as impossible two years earlier.
What has changed is not only fitness or confidence on rough ground, though both have changed considerably. It is something harder to name precisely. Shift work in a hospital can reduce the world to a very small set of corridors, wards, and the drive home. The hills are a specific and reliable antidote to that smallness. When I am up there, she says, I can see for about forty miles in any direction. That does something to your head. You go back to work and the problems there look like the size they actually are.
She does not think of the Campsies as something to look at anymore. They are somewhere she goes. She knows which seat on the top deck of the bus from Queen Street gives you the best view of the hills appearing above the fields north of Kirkintilloch on the approach to Lennoxtown. She watches for them now the way you might look for a familiar landmark on a route you know well — with recognition, and something close to the comfort of returning to somewhere that does not change much and does not ask anything of you except that you show up.