The Living Mountain: A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland (The Grampian Quartet Book 4)

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a b c Ali Smith, "Shepherd, Anna (1893–1981)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, Retrieved 22 December 2013. Shepherd was a major contributor to early Scottish Modernist literature. Her first novel, The Quarry Wood (1928) has often been compared to Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, published four years later, as they both portray restricted, often tragic lives of women in Scotland at that time. [6] Her second novel, The Weatherhouse (1930), concerns interactions between people in a small Scottish community. [7] Her third and final novel, A Pass in the Grampians, appeared in 1933. [4] The Quarry Wood follows Martha Ironside growing up in the farming community of Wester Cairns. Martha, like Shepherd, goes to Aberdeen University, an environment very different to home. The Living Mountain" is poetic prose in praise of the Cairngorm Mountains of northeastern Scotland. It's nature writing with a philosophical feeling to it. Nan Shepherd started exploring the Cairngorms at an early age, and continued mountain walking until she was aged. Although she was well-traveled, she always returned to her home near the eastern side of the mountain range. Shepherd had climbed its peaks, but she seemed to draw more pleasure from the plateau--observing wildlife, exploring the lochs, and following springs to their natural source. She was a very observant person who often took in the activity of the natural world while she maintained stillness. Shepherd wrote descriptions that use all the senses in appreciating the beautiful, but sometimes unforgiving, mountains. Shepherd subsequently lectured for the Aberdeen College of Education. [4] She retired from teaching in 1956, but edited the Aberdeen University Review until 1963. The university awarded her an honorary doctorate in 1964. [5] She remained a friend and a supporter of other Scottish writers, including Neil M. Gunn, Marion Angus and Jessie Kesson.

That is not to say that you, whomever is reading this review, would feel the same way. You, who is an individual in your own right, who sees nature in your unique way and who reacts to prose work with distinctly differing reflections. At the start of the book I failed to see what Nan was describing. I saw only that which I myself had experienced before. Give the book time. You get caught up in it. You come to understand where she is heading and what she is speaking about. Walking, rambling, on a hike, one gets an intimate sense of place. How? Through the use of all one’s senses piled together, and then….you get something more. A walker will know what I mean and will understand what Nan is saying. Shepherd’s book records – with luminous precision – details of the Cairngorm world: ‘the coil over coil’ of a golden eagle’s ascent on a thermal, a pool of ‘small frogs jumping like tiddly-winks’, a white hare crossing sunlit snow with its accompanying ‘odd ludicrous leggy shadow-skeleton’.

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In the second half of her thirties, Shepherd was possessed with a wild burst of creativity perhaps best described by the Scots term fey in its mountaineering context — the iridescent exhilaration that comes over climbers, making them appear, in Shepherd’s own words, “a little mad, in the eyes of the folk who do not climb.” Over the course of six years, she published four books: three novels before she was forty and, in her forty-first year, a slim, immensely beautiful collection of poetry — the form she held above all other arts as concentrating “in intensest being the very heart of all experience”— titled The Cairngorms after her most beloved mountain range. However, this was no scientific or geological piece, although those disciplines had their place. This was a drawing together and fusion of her own knowledge and experience of the area, of her interest in spirituality and philosophy and literature and people annealed into a beautiful end product. She had a great economy and compression in the way she wrote, drawing out the essence of each of her very varied experiences of these mountains in a paragraph or two. This was one of the reasons for reading slowly and savouring the book. Read with any speed and you risked losing the richness and beauty of each sentence. Read one of her paragraphs with real attention to detail and you had a very vivid reflection of what the walking and climbing experience is like.

Summer on the high plateau can be delectable as honey; it can also be a roaring scourge. To those who love the place, both are good, since both are part of its essential nature. And it is to know its essential nature that I am seeking here. To know, that is, with the knowledge that is a process of living. This is not done easily nor in an hour. It is a tale too slow for the impatience of our age, not of immediate enough import for its desperate problems. Yet it has its own rare value. It is, for one thing, a corrective of glib assessment: one never quite knows the mountain, nor oneself in relation to it. However often I walk on them, these hills hold astonishment for me. There is no getting accustomed to them.Nan Shepherd believed that it was 'a grand thing to get leave to live.' She did this by spending every minute she could in her beloved Cairngorms. In her 88-years, she covered thousands of miles on foot and became minutely aware of the rhythms of these wild places.

The term ‘nature writing’ didn’t exist in the 1940s when Nan Shepherd wrote The Living Mountain, a book in which she describes exploring the Cairngorm Mountains in north-east Scotland as a walker and writer. Shepherd sent her manuscript to a novelist friend called Neil Gunn. He responded with praise (“This is beautifully done,” he wrote) but suggested that Shepherd might find it hard to get her work published unless she added photographs and a map.I had spent nearly 20 years exploring them on foot and ski: winter-climbing in the gullies of their corries, camping out on the high tundra of their plateaux. But Shepherd’s prose showed me how little I really knew of the range. Its combination of intense scrutiny, deep familiarity and glittering imagery re-made my vision of these familiar hills. It taught me to see them, rather than just to look at them. Shepherd, Nan (2019). The living mountain. Robert Macfarlane, Jeanette Winterson. Great Britain. ISBN 978-1-78689-735-0. OCLC 1084507268. {{ cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher ( link) I'm a bit embarrassed when I say that I haven't explored much of Scotland, my home country. The parts I have explored have been incredible. The Isle of Harris (Western Isles) is one of my most recent explorations of Scotland, and what a beautiful part of the world it is. The edgy and cragged land of greens and greys, the long, winding single roads on the twisted hills, the purest, clearest waters, a piece of land far from conventional settlements.

Yet often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have merely gone out to be with the mountain as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with him. Shepherd, born Anna and self-christened Nan, was only an adolescent when she discovered her dual calling to literature and altitude. She roamed the Highlands of her native Scotland as zealously as she copied passages of the books she was devouring — novels, poetry, philosophy — into her commonplace book. By her twenties, she was writing original works of her own. Nan Shepherd Shepherd's writing conveys wonder in the face of these mountains because she was comfortable with uncertainty. Following the young River Dee, she notes, Their physiognomy is in the geography books — so many square miles of area, so many lochs, so many summits of over 4000 feet — but this is a pallid simulacrum of their reality, which, like every reality that matters ultimately to human beings, is a reality of the mind.Most probably, Shepherd began composing it sometime in the final years of WWII, drawing on her lifelong love and intimate knowledge of mountains in a masterpiece of observation and contemplation, both precise and spacious. But something stopped Shepherd from publishing it. Instead, she rested it in a drawer, where it was to remain for more than four decades, until it finally entered the world in the final years of her life as The Living Mountain ( public library) — a most unusual braiding of memoir, field notebook, and philosophical inquiry irradiated with the poetic and endowed with what geologist Hans Cloos celebrated as the rare art of hearing Earth’s music. Art by Toshikado Hajiri from You Are an Echo by Misuzu Kaneko She’s an incredibly inspiring figure, and an unusual one, in the sense of being a woman writing about mountains and the wilderness and nature,” he said. “She found her own path in life and in literature, and it feels like she’s so far ahead of us – we’re always only starting to catch Nan up. Philosophically and stylistically, she was extraordinary.”