The Living Mountain (Canons): A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland: 6

Product Information

This Folio Society 'New' condition book is a much-praised new edition of a classic celebration of, and love letter to, the Cairngorn Mountains in Scotland.

Considering it was barely 100 pages long, this book took a long time to read, even taking into account the 2 week break when I left it behind when going on holiday. The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report.While walking, I saw, heard, felt, smelled considerably more than usual; just as Shepherd describes, I felt like I was coming under the spell of the landscape. Heel fijn onthaastend boek om te lezen, prachtig geschreven vol liefde voor de bergen van de Cairngorms, waar ze in een dorpje aan de voet ervan, haar hele leven heeft gewoond.

Shepherd's story is only 108 pages, so the publishers added a way over-long Forward by Robert Macfarlane and an Afterword by Jeanette Winterson to beef it up. She brings a very detailed picture of what can be seen and experienced on the Cairgorms: the sights, the sounds, the light, the water, the smells , the plants and animals, the human tracks, and so on. He is the author of internationally prize-winning and bestselling books about nature, people and place, including Mountains of the Mind (2003), The Wild Places (2007), The Old Ways (2012), Landmarks (2015) and Underland (2019), as well as The Lost Words (2017) and The Lost Spells (2020), children’s books of nature spells created in partnership with the artist Jackie Morris. The brilliant introduction notes that ‘Reading The Living Mountain, your sight feels scattered – as though you’ve suddenly gained the compound eye of a dragonfly, seeing through a hundred different lenses at once…’ I couldn’t think of a more fitting description. The Cairngorms are a mountain range roughly in the middle of Scotland, it is can be a breathtaking beautiful part of the world, but in bad weather can be harsh, unforgiving and unrelenting.Ghosh describes how “A great orgy of bloodletting filled our Valley, bringing slaughter and destruction on a scale far beyond that which the Anthropoi had inflicted on us in the past. I read this book before a winter climbing trip to the Cairngorms, and know I will revisit this book as often as I revisit the mountains.

I think the environmentalists and nature lovers amongst us also gain an even deeper enjoyment from this novel – anyone who pleasures in simply going for a hike knows what deep therapy the natural world offers. The Living Mountain is a poetic and philosophical account of the author's decades of wandering in the Cairngorms. Human beings who want to experience the grace of partaking in this web of life have to hone their humility, patience and quiescence, their powers of observation, curiosity and willingness to stray from the beaten path.Such moments come in mist, or snow, or a summer’s night (when it is too cool for the clouds of insects to be abroad), or a September dawn. Written towards the end of World War Two, the manuscript for 'The Living Mountain' was tucked away for almost 30 years before it was published to critical acclaim in 1977. There are little glimpses into human lives in the mountains too, how the mountains create sensory feelings for mountain climbers and hikers on different days. I stared until, dropping my eyes, I saw with astonishment between me and it a loch that I knew perfectly well was there.