Scottish Borders Council has employed a new Paths to Health 'Walk it' Co-ordinator. As you will read, Denise Carmicahel is just the lady to fill those boots, having joined our team just before Christmas.
She was only four years old when the family came to live in Scotland. Her father had taken a job as a farm labourer so that the family could have an extended holiday. He fell in love with the landscape and never left.
Denise's dad, Alan Turner, wa
s a painter and decorator to trade so at the end of the summer he gave up the farm job and soon the family would be renovating a property in Jedburgh to turn it into the Canongate Gallery. Alan is a well-known artist in the Borders and in his 40 years of painting in Scotland he stayed loyal to the landscape of the area
Behind Denise's corporate image there is a girl who grew up in a cottage on Bairnkine Farm near Jedburgh. Her parents grew their own vegetables, and they reared pet lambs to help the farmer at lambing time.
Denise can change her fashion boots to the walking variety. She and her father would go walking around the countryside and at school Denise excelled in sport, finding herself in the first hockey XI. Even before leaving school she gained a place in the Jed ladies team.
After school, Denise gained a BA in communication studies at Napier College in Edinburgh. The course included journalism, marketing and media subjects. She admits: "I was vague, you know how it is."
For personal reasons, she went to London to work. This led to a successful career in IT. Her work called in the skills she had learned at college covering, proof-reading, writing and marketing IT training manuals; she also set up training schedules.
After 10 years in London, she moved back to the Borders to give birth to her son and bring him up in a more rural place. The company that employed her allowed her to work from Edinburgh. While her domestic base was in Earlston for eight years, she became the operations manager for Scotland and Ireland.
Three years later, at the age of 40, Denise joined the board, becoming director of UK operations. However, this move came at a cost and for the next year she had to make people redundant during a company buy-out.
Although, within the newly bought company she had to continue managing redundancies, she remained for another year. "This was an unpleasant job," she tells me, "changing the lives of a loyal workforce. Eventually I could not continue with this and I took voluntary redundancy."
Rather than hardening her personality, these latter few years changed her attitude to life. Denise started a course in counseling last autumn and turned back to the experiences of her childhood.
Denise tells me about what attracted her to the Paths to Health post: "I had lost touch with my upbringing when I had time to enjoy the landscape. I was also becoming aware of my own personal fitness, two parts of my life that had been lost during a corporate career. This post was a complete antithesis to my last few years with the IT company because I can encourage people in a different way."
