Art, adventure, volunteering and fundraising for an exceptional outdoor youth work charity!! What to do when you fancy a really big challenge to throw yourself right out of your comfort zone? Well, this is the outline of my planned project, as it stood pre Covid-19 pandemic:

I believe everyone should be able to experience the benefits of getting into the great outdoors, locally or further afield. I spend as much time as I can in the wilderness, create art inspired by my adventures, and volunteer at Venture Scotland, a charity working with young adults on a lifechanging one year self development programme in the Scottish outdoors.

To support their work, and to challenge myself, I plan to hike 370 kms/ 230 miles from Fort William to Cape Wrath in April/May 2020, through the remotest and most rugged wildernesses in the UK, and create artworks about the experience. I will be walking solo for most of it, joined in a couple of stages by people meeting me to resupply. Along the way I will wild camp and stay in bothies.
When I’m not navigating bogs or the wild scottish weather, I will be sketching along the route, and afterwards, and will sell these to raise more funds for VS.
I’ll be sharing the whole adventure and the artworks on the Kath’s Cape Wrath Adventure facebook page as well as on here!-

So….it’s now the beginning of July and, well, I’ve not left Glasgow since March! Crazy times of global pandemic, so my walk is postponed, most likely until 2021 now.
BUT the young adults Venture Scotland supports need more support than ever as we are all going through difficult times. So the best thing I could do was to adapt the project, so that the fundraising was kept alive throughout lockdown, and until I cango on the actual walk. Which is where the Virtual Cape Wrath Trail came in! Read about it on my Virtual Cape Wrath post here.

Since the start of this project I have been absolutely blown away by peoples generosity and support. To date we have raised more than £1800, and still rising on this Just Giving page, if you have the price of a coffee to spare, every donation is appreciated!
So it is still very much ongoing, I have a bit longer to plan and get fit, and I have learnt HEAPS along the way already. (Not least that putting yourself out there on social media -asking for support and being visible- is pretty scary!)

But mainly, that people are awesome and want to help!! So huge thank you, and I’ll keep updating as I go!