Daniel Boone helped cut the Wilderness Road through Cumberland Gap in 1775, using a corridor already known to Indigenous peoples, and helped establish Boonesborough. His best-known survival episodes unfolded during violent struggles over Kentucky. In February 1778 Shawnee forces captured him and a party making salt at the Blue Licks. After months in captivity, during which he was adopted into a Shawnee household, he escaped in June and returned to Boonesborough. He later helped defend the settlement. Both his own published account and later histories helped turn a complicated life into a national legend.

Scottish novelist and poet from Cults, Aberdeen, who walked the Cairngorm massif for over sixty years — in all seasons, in all weathers, often alone and with no summit in mind. While other mountaineers conquered peaks, Shepherd immersed herself in the plateau, the corries, the lochans, and the granite. She knew every burn, every snowbed that lingers into August, every patch of woolly fringe-moss. In the 1940s she wrote a slim masterwork, The Living Mountain, that set aside conquest for what she called 'going into' the mountain — knowing it from its water to its air. The manuscript sat in a drawer for thirty years before publication in 1977. Today it is regarded as one of the finest works of nature and mountain literature ever written, and her face now appears on the Scottish £5 note, walking the hills she loved.

Born in Dunbar, East Lothian, John Muir emigrated to Wisconsin as a boy but never lost the wandering instinct he learned on the Scottish shore. In 1867, recovering from a factory blinding that restored his sight, he resolved to 'be true to myself' and walked a thousand miles from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico — collecting plants, sleeping outdoors, and living off the land. He walked the Sierra Nevada, Yosemite, and Glacier Bay, founded the Sierra Club, and became the father of the world's national parks. His Scottish childhood — scrambling on the cliffs at Dunbar, listening to the North Sea — shaped a man who believed the best way to know a place was to walk through it, sleeping under the stars.