Gillian Craig: Paths for All's Community Path Volunteer of the Year

In this episode of Voices of the Walk, Paths for All’s Technical Officer Graeme Anderson talks with our Community Path Volunteer of the Year Gillian Craig. 

Gillian joined Ayrshire Coastal Path three years ago to carry out maintenance work on the 100-mile walking route from Glenapp to Skelmorlie. Since then Gillian has gone on to recruit new volunteers, increase awareness of the path through social media and leading organised walks and has become a member of the group’s management team. 

Alongside her volunteering with Ayrshire Coastal Path, Gillian also documents and shares her walks through her website gillianswalks.com and encourages people to litter pick through ‘plogging’. 

Graeme spent some time with Gillian in her Dad’s shed in Kilmarnock to find out more about what drives her passion for walking, the outdoors and the Ayrshire coast.

Transcript

Graeme:   0:00
Welcome to Voices of the Walk, Paths for All's everyday walking podcast. Our mission is to get Scotland walking, everyone, everywhere and everyday. In this podcast series, we'll be hearing from a variety of Scotland's walking champions who are helping make our vision a reality.

Graeme:   0:17
Well, here we are. It's turning out to be quite a nice, sunny day. We're sitting in this wonderful man cave of your father's, which is great. We're here to talk to Gillian Craig and Gillian is here to be interviewed because you recently were awarded the Community Path Volunteer of the Year by Paths for All and we saw you at the Scottish Parliament, which was wonderful. I hope you enjoyed the night, we certainly enjoyed seeing you there. We thought we find out more about you so we've got a number of questions so just to start that can you just explain a little bit more about your life.

Gillian:   0:53
So I live in Kilmarnock. I am married with two little boys. Nathan, who's eight and Thomas who's six. I work for Sustrans part time, three days a week at the Active Travel Hub in Kilmarnock which is a partnership between East Ayrshire Council and Sustrans and funded by Paths for All. When I'm not working, I have a few voluntary rules, one of which is the Ayrshire Coastal Paths who actually norminated me for the award that you mentioned, and I take a lot to do with local walking festivals, whether it's leading walks, or helping to organise them.  The biggest part of my time is taken up with my website, which is Gillian's Walks which we'll talk about a bit later.

Graeme:   1:38
Yes, well, I thought, actually a good opportunity just to go over a little bit about that nomination because it was wonderful and you stood out. It really was. People think very highly of you. So if you don't mind, I was going to read the first sentence, I think to explain to everyone listening to this just how impressive you actually are and the huge amount of work that you do. So Gillian Craig is an impressive, energetic, enthusiastic, committed individual who has worked tirelessly and unselflessly to further interest in walking throughout Ayrshire and beyond. What more can you say? Is there any point saying any more, it covers everything.  I was wondering if you tell us how you became interested in path development and promotion.

Gillian:   2:16
So I suppose I could take it right back to when I was a little girl. My parents used to take me and my sister hill walking a lot, so that's where my love of the outdoors stemmed from. I knew of a lot of different programmes happening on the hills, conserving footpaths and that kind of thing. That's something that had always wanted to do. But life took me away from that until the last few years. But I had always kind of assumed that you had to go north to do something like that. I kept looking and looked at a lot of  intensive courses you could go on, some were voluntary and some you got paid to go and do but that would be time away from my family.  I hadn't thought that there was anything in Ayrshire. It's kinda part of the Ayrshire Coastal Paths story but after having walked the coastal path, I came to realise that it was volunteers who maintained it, and that set off a lightbulb in my head that maybe I didn't have to go all the way up north to do any of this kind of path work. So I asked if they would mind very much if I came along and learned from them because I didn't particularly have skills in that area. But I was keen to learn and being a local long distance path made it even more interesting for me to be involved in maintaining it. So they accepted me and I joined the team.

Graeme:   3:43
Fantastic. So expand a little bit because it was the Ayrshire Coastal Path and the work that you do there that  nominated you for the award that you received, so expand a little bit more about the coastal path -  where does it start? where does it end, how many people are involved in, what sort of activities do you directly get involved in?

Gillian:   4:00
So the Ayrshire Coastal Path is actually one of Scotland's great trails that runs 100 miles along the coast from Glenapp in the south to Scelmorlie in the north. It waas the kind of brain child in suppose of Doctor Jimmy Begg who is a member of the Rotary Club of Ayr and this was back I believe 2003 or thereabouts when it was coming up to the Centenary Year of the Rotary and they were looking for a project to celebrate that. The Ayrshire Coastal Path Projects kind of came to light. And so it was that time, just a small group of Rotarians who carried out all the research into where  the path could run, did all the surveys, spoke to all the landowners  and it came together over a period of a couple of years. They managed to get funding from various sources around £66,000. That's what it cost to put the path together and it took about a year and a half to do that. So it was a really small group of mostly retired men at that time and continued to be the case until a couple years ago.  Most of the Ayrshire Coastal Path, we kinda split it into north and south. The south is from Glenapp up to Ayr and a lot of that is, is on rugged beach terrain. Some field edge paths had to be created there and an old railway line, there was  a lot of cutting back required of vegetation, to create the path in the first place. From Ayr north, it's mainly joining up promenades and existing, there's a lot of the Sustrans cycle route is shared with the Ayrshire Coastal Path. So, although it's 100 miles in length, there's a lot smaller number of miles that require maintenance. But the point is that it's all volunteers who do it. Now, there are in the region of 50 volunteers. What started as probably four or five, quite a lot of women have got involved. I believe I was first. I think it's the only long distance trail in Scotland that is completely maintained by volunteers.

Graeme:   6:35
Part of the maintenance, in fact, all of the maintenance that you're talking about have been taken on by the path minders, so tell us a little bit more about the path minders.

Gillian:   6:42
So the path minders are people like me who give up their time to either use a strimmer and clear grass from paths,  brush cutters, hand tools, it could be litter picking, beach cleans all these kind of things. There's a mixture of men and women all ages and backgrounds, people who mainly have a background in that type of work or who have an interest in the future of the path, making it look attractive for people to come and visit. In addition to the Path Minders, some  are what we call path wardens as well. Path wardens have a section that they're responsible for, which could be anything from a few miles to 10. They would take care of checking signage, making sure it's as it should be against a list of inventory, gates and bridges and all the rest of their section and if there's anything that needs done. They would report that back. There's one of our volunteers who takes care of organising a weekly work party. So any work needing done feeds into him and he would then prioritise it and get a group of people together. We tend to go by the weather forecast, so next Tuesday looks quite good. Who is free and we'll come up with a plan, and it's quite a laid back set up.

Graeme:   6:58
Well it sounds pretty amazing and it lead to them winning Community Paths Group of the Year last year and that says a huge amount for the group and the work that goes on. So tell us about your specific role in Ayshire Coastal Path.

Gillian:   8:44
It's quite varied. I'm actually on the management team now as well. It started, if I could take you back to how it all formed. It started just with me actually walking the coastal path and that was work I was doing to raise money for charity. Being someone who has a website about walks, I came back and I wrote about the path and the management team at the time came across what I'd written and got in touch with me.  At the time when I walked the path, I didn't I wasn't aware that it was maintained by volunteers. And I think when you're walking a long distance trail, that's a recognised Scotland's great trail, certainly I was very critical of certain  things. So they were keen to help me understand why things maybe were the way they were. That was kind of the point where I then realised that I could potentially go and help physically. So that happened. I went out and joined as the first female and the youngest person to have ever got involved in maintenance, I learned a few skills. So I quickly learned to use a strimmer, a very new experience for me and they are much heavier than they look. I have been cutting back vegetation to clear the sides of a burn and that was just to make it look nicer. The burn was hidden from view, it had a little bridge over it but you couldn't actually see the burn for the vegetation. So we cleared that. Litter picking. So a lot of the work I do is around  organising litter picks as well. As a result, Ayr Rotary Club had asked me to go along and talk about about my website and how that came about.  That evening, they invited me to take on a section of my own as the path warden. So that turned out to be Irvine to Ardrossen which is actually about 20 miles. Most of that is promenades and beeches, and lots of things to check. That's quite easy walking so that seemed quite manageable at the time. I did that for about a year before I started working, so at this point, I wasn't working. So imagine now, I was working three days and trying to fit this in as well. We quickly realised that 20 miles was probably too much for one person, and I have now recruited extra volunteers to help me with my patch. So there's about volunteer management involved there as well. Training them on our system for inventory checks and reporting back. I later was invited to join the management team. I'm not sure. I mean, they obviously think highly of me. You read what they said?

Graeme:   11:51
Well, yes, only some of it of course. It goes on and on and on, they think incredibly highly of you.

Gillian:   11:57
I was honored to be asked to be on the team, not something that had ever been part of the grand master plan, but something that you would possibly only dream of. They obviously saw something in me and immediately thought what I could bring to the team. So as well as the practical part of the maintenance, I'm involved in the Facebook page for the Ayrshire Coastal Path and to make sure that we put engaging content on and increase the number of people who were aware the path exists, engaged with the work that we do as volunteers but also trying to bring in what else is happening in Ayrshire along the coast that people may want to feed into when visiting the area.

Graeme:   13:00
Well it's certainly a full time job, you know I don't how you have time to do anything else? But I was wondering, you know, over the past three years I think it's about three years of being involved. So over that time what fundamental changes have you've seen within the coastal path itself and also how has the group developed. What are the key changes?

Gillian:   13:01
So the group dynamic has changed a lot in terms of who's involved. The number of people involved has grown a lot; in the last three years it's doubled. What that means is that there's a bigger bank of people to call on for that weekly work party.

Graeme:   13:22
Why would they have doubled then? What are the principal reasons? You just get out on selling the message?

Gillian:   13:27
So I think I've got probably a lot to do with that. So when I joined there were about 20 men, retired men in the Path Minders team. I think me coming along was a big change for them, but also I started then appearing in photos that would go out on Facebook for what we were doing this week so other women would start to see that. At first, it was the wife of so and so who was already involved so thought, oh, well, maybe I could come in and help, but in general, a moment about quite a lot. And I meet people on walks and you get chatting and you realise that this person has always been quite keen to do something like that, others due to retire soon. And what could I do? Introduce the concept of coming the Path minder and it just kind of grows like that.

Graeme:   14:25
So you mentioned earlier, actually alongside volunteering with the Ayrshire Coastal Path you also have a website Gillians's Walks dot com. How did that come about?

Gillian:   14:34
So this is going back to 2016. I had a two-year-old at the time and a four-year-old.  I'm taking the year's maternity leave from work, and this was me into year two. I had tried an online business which hadn't gone well, and I was looking at where my life was gonna go. I knew that I didn't want to go back to the type of work I had before because it was in quite a high level, stressful position. I haven't taken the time away from that. I knew that something was going to change. I didn't really know what so I put the little one in a buggy and went a walk. So walking is always beeen for me my thinking time, especially if you're on your own. I guess I just kind of had this moment of clarity on that walk. I can quite vividly remember. We were on Prestwick and walking along the prom. That was January. It was freezing cold. There's a lot of things you might not like about it but I was in my element. I just thought I'm gonna try and do the 100 walks this year. I wasn't going back to work at that point. I was fortunate enough to be a full time mum, and there weren't plans for what I would do when I went back to work. So I just went about walking. I didn't have really an idea of where that would take me, I didn't imagine that it would lead to work. I just was doing what I liked to do. Really, the writing up of the walks started just as a reference for me to look back on. Maybe when I did, when the little one was older, the walks we had done together with him in his buggy so really a personal thing to start with. But people started showing interest in it. How are you finding all these walks? Where do you go? I've got a little one in the buggy as well. Where you taking him? Where's that photo from? And so it just started to grow. And the more people showed an interest, the more I was encouraged to do it. So that's how it started and it just grew arms and legs really on its own, and was growing to be quite big and people recognised it as a place to go.
So the website you is Gillian's Walk dot com, and it has almost 190 links on there now. If you go to them, you'll find photos, information, a map and a link to a programme I use which tracks the walk. So if you have the app, you can download and my follow in my footsteps electorally. There's always a little story about my experience of walking that route.  So that's how it started and it has a Facebook page attached to that. I think we've about 3600 followers now. That's amazing. The website gets somewhere in the region of 20,000 hits a month so people are using it. That's what makes it worthwhile for me to spend time on it.

Graeme:   18:18
Do you know the impact it's having in the community, I mean people giving you feedback? Getting that many hits on the website is amazing but what feedback are you getting directly from people using it?

Gillian:   18:30
So okay, I get contacted by people all the time to say that, for example, there's people who have recently moved to the area from other parts of Britain and who have been able to see parts of Ayrshire that they wouldn't have otherwise known about. There's also people who maybe have mental health challenges who enjoy walking but maybe had come away from it but they have been inspired by what they read, explored and got back into it and it's helped their state of mind. But also just bringing people together as well. I'm someone who loves to walk but more than that I love to go and explore and see how places join together. If I am walking past a footpath I've never been on I have an urge to go and see where that leads and I come home and tell people that.

Graeme:   19:34
My job allows me that joy of wandering around the countryside and it is amazing what you stumble across.  You go down the route and you never know what's gonna be there. It could be a large house that you never thought would be there or just a beautiful landscape. It's a wonderful thing to do. So you're also involved with Plogging. I wasn't entirely sure what it was, but maybe just tell us a little bit more about that.

Gillian:   19:57
Plogging came from Scandinavia and it means jogging  and litter picking at the same time, but we've kind of adapted it to just be picking up litter when we're on the move in any form. So when you're involved in leading walks like I do,  there are certain themes that come into conversation often along the way along with the weather. There's nothing worse than being out in the country and litter draws you eye. So rather than just complain about it all the time,  the solution of plogging was brought to my attention, so I decided to do something. So that came in the form of starting a Facebook group called Plogging Scotland which I was surprised didn't exist already. It really just encouraged people who probably were already doing this but don't know what it was called.  People who walked the dogs down the beach and were quite in the habit of picking up a few things to say they're doing it or take before and after pictures to say here's my haul for the day. The idea was to encourage other people to start doing it as well.  They would say, You know I take my dog there all the time I never thought to take a bag. So it grew  to about 1000 people all over Scotland.

Graeme:   21:34
Is it getting better or worse? Is it an  ongoing challenge?

Gillian:   21:40
I think it's an ongoing challenge. I think there's definitely more awareness around what's happening to tackle it, and there's a lot more awareness around plastic pollution in the sea because of things like the BBC's Blue Planet programme which got a lot of attention. Incidentally, as a result of that programme, we've actually, on the coastal path, now got blue barrels stationed on some of the more remote beaches which are designed for people to put plastic in when they're walking along the beaches and some of our path wardens will come along and empty those. I think it's definitely a movement happening. Will it ever not be a problem, I don't know, but it's good to see people are taking notice.

Graeme:   22:36
It's such a positive thing. And actually, I was remembering that I was working on the Clyde walkway a few months ago and there was an older gentleman walking with his dog every single day, and he always had a bag and he always filled up. It was just something he did. He wasn't looking for any praise, it was just something he did.  Collected as much rubbish, squeeze into that bag and off he went and deposited it in the nearest bin. That was a wonderful thing to see. Really positive actually. The litter is there, but it's wonderful people are trying to deal with that as much as possible. So what's next for Ayrshire Coastal Path?

Gillian:   23:10
Well, we're actually working now on launching a completion certificate. That's hot off the press, by the way. So we're designing a certificate for people who finish the 100 miles can download for free online. Not exactly sure how it will work yet, but it doesn't cost anything. All we're gonna ask in return is feedback on their experience of walking the path and that's a way for us to be able to know about any problems or trends that people maybe have the same opinion certain parts. It also gives us an idea of the number of people walking the trial, which has actually always been a challenge because some parts of the Ayrshire Coastal Path are walked regularly by the same people. But to get an idea of who's walking from one end to the other is actually really difficult. So hopefully this will give us an idea of some sort. And, what else is gonna come up? Well, we'll have to keep you posted.

Graeme:   24:27
So you'll be pleased to hear we're actually on the last question which is fantastic for you but not for us as we've really enjoyed listening to you. But you touched upon earlier that you like to explore You go out for a walk. You like to take a route that maybe you haven't done before and you go and explore it. So tell us, do you have a favourite walk and if so where is it and why is it your favourite? You know, people ask me that all the time so I don't know why I don't just have an answer to that Make one up

Gillian:   24:59
You know, people ask me that all the time so I don't know why I don't just have an answer to that.  When I started all this, the more you walk in an area, the more you discover and I honestly feel like, even just taking Ayrshire as a region, that there are more walks here than I could ever do and that's disregarding the whole of the rest of Scotland. I've got a huge list of to-do walks that people have recommended to me or that I've seen photos of on Facebook and taking notes down. It would be really difficult to say what my one favourite one would be because there's just so many. I'm sorry.

Graeme:   25:43
Well maybe you could post it on Facebook or on the website at some point in the future, we look forward to seeing it. Well, thank you, Gillian, that's been wonderful actually really enjoyed listening to everything you had to say. Thanks for talking to you.

Gillian:   25:56
Thanks for having me. And thanks for coming down.

Graeme:   25:58
My pleasure.