A group from Caspin Travels, on a walk above Callander.
Being a guide
December 31, 2023
A networking group from Baillie Gifford
What’s it like to be a walking guide? Well, this year will be my 10th and final year as a walking guide, so I thought it was a good time to look back at my longer than expected second career.
I started my walking guide qualification journey once I left my job with Perth and Kinross Council. I already had lots of walking and climbing experience in both winter and summer conditions but little of leading other people on the hills. To gain this experience, I volunteered with a local Duke of Edinburgh group and had a few years of first helping with and then leading young people on expeditions for bronze and silver DofE awards.
Just over two years after leaving my first career I was a fully qualified summer mountain leader and two pioneers of walk guiding in Scotland, Dorothy Breckenridge and Margaret Porter, bravely took me on to lead walking holidays with C-n-Do. I enjoyed 4 years of guiding with C-n-Do and a few other companies before setting up Perthshire Treks with my husband, Richard Davison, in 2018. We both continued to work for C-n-Do but also began to offer day walks in the Highland Perthshire area.
Much of my early guiding was with either young people on DofE expeditions or French groups through C-n-Do where my ‘O’ level French seemed to get me through. I quickly discovered that guiding is very little about using the navigation skills you have practiced and practiced for your qualification (though you still need these), it is all about people.
You learn very quickly that you can only go at the pace of the slowest person in the group but sometimes the hard part is getting the rest of the group to accept that. All that happens if you go too fast is that you get cold waiting for the others to catch up! You quickly learn lots of tricks on how to try and slow down the faster walkers – not that it always works! Speeding the slower ones up is simply not an option – it just tires them out even more quickly.
A happy client - despite the weather - on Carn Liath.
I've had some great times guiding with lots of different people and you learn so much about other people and so much from them. I once had a lovely client on Skye who was a botanist, so we all increased our knowledge of plants on that holiday. As a guide you need to make everyone feel relaxed and try and ensure they enjoy their time with you. You need to work out how much information to tell people about the area and find out if their interest is access, history or natural history and tailor your walk accordingly. Quite often a group will book us as something different to do on their holiday when their real reason for a walk is just to have a chat and a catch up with each other.
We sometimes have single clients on our walks. One of the nicest compliments I had from a recent walk was that it was just like walking with a good friend, and was I available again the next day? The trick even on a short walk is to find the right connection with your clients and be yourself
Running repairs to a boot.....
Does anything ever go wrong? Not often is the answer in my case, but you need to be prepared if it does and you need to let your clients know where you are going, what you have with you for their safety and what dangers may be around, such as ticks for example. The main issue I have had to deal with over my guiding career so far is the soles of walkers’ boots becoming unstuck – the solution is to use duck tape around the sole and the toe area of the boot, and it will usually last until the end of the walk. So the lesson is to always carry some duck tape and a penknife on your walks!
Richard & Brenda on the summit of Tour de Moyen in Switzerland As we wind down Perthshire Treks over the coming winter, we have had time to look back over the last 6 years and all the lovely people we have walked with and the great adventures we have had. One of our very first adventures was for a lovely group of women from the Netherlands organised through Schottland op Maat . They came to Pitlochry on one of the wettest weekends of the year! Plans were quickly changed from the proposed walk up Schiehallion to a walk along the Rob Roy Way followed by a walk around Pitlochry the following day – and they were amazed at the waterfalls – they don’t have many in the Netherlands! The same year saw Richard do his fastest ascent ever of Ben Vrackie with a young Russian couple who were into marathon running and we also provided some self-guided walking for a corporate group from Baillie Gifford . This first year, as it turned out, was fairly typical with some clients booking directly with us and others via travel agents or travel curators.
If you're living or staying in Pitlochry or Aberfeldy, you can use a local bus to help you do a wonderful walk between the two towns. Find out more in our latest blog.
As I write this blog, a cold northerly wind has set in across the UK. A change in the wind direction so that it is coming from the Arctic is one of those weather patterns that is very noticeable for many reasons. Find out more in this blog post.
An overgrown path in Perthshire - just one of the obstacles on the TGO Challenge Life is a challenge but some people enjoy physical challenges in the outdoors. These challenges can be very rewarding and you can feel a great sense of achievement in their completion which can spur you on to do more and set yourself new targets. People are very different in what type of challenges they want to do and this can vary from just completing your first Munro (a mountain in Scotland over 3000 feet), walking the Skye ridge in 24 hours, doing a more organised challenge such as the TGO (The Great Outdoors challenge) or competing in an extreme triathlon. Much depends on whether you like to set your own individual goals or prefer the stimulus of a bigger group and whether you are competitive or not competitive.
Some winter walking in the North York Moors National Park, with some cold and snowy days and some warmer days!
A description of a walk on the moors above Bruar and Calvine, taking in a well-preserved stretch of a General Wade military road.
A visit to the Cairngorms in October 2021 allowed a close-up view of the "cap cloud" that can form in the Cairngorms - and the strong winds it generates!
A report on two wild camping trips near Glenshee and in the Letterewe wilderness in spring 2021.
