It is thick with the kinds of perception that come only from "staying up for a while"; from the repeated idle traversals of a landscape: "Birch needs rain to release its odour. I loved each description of beautiful metallic green colors, the transparency or glimmer of water in each little loch and pond and waterfall, the changing soundscape of the howling swirl of the winds, and the shades of sunlight against the rocks.

As I watch, it arches its back, and each layer of landscape bristles—though bristles is a word of too much commotion for it. Nan Shepherd logged decades in Scotland's Cairngorms, a mountain range in that country's northeast, and wrote a book about her relationship with those mountains in the 1940s. Shepherd's short non-fiction book The Living Mountain, written in the 1940s, [9] reflects her experiences walking in the Cairngorm Mountains. TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses. An impassioned ode to Nan Shepherd's beloved Cairngorm mountains in the Scottish Highlands, her poetic descriptions and astute observations transport the reader to this beautiful, remote and rugged landscape.The Scottish landscape and weather played a major role in her novels and were the focus of her poetry.

The afterword by Jeanette Winterson on the essence of reading is so pertinent today that it alone deserves a review. Anna “Nan” Shepherd was born on February 11, 1893, in East Peterculter and died in Aberdeen aged 88 on February 23, 1981. If you have a beating heart, you will have inadvertently paused to take in the simple majesty of that last sentence. I could smell the autumn leaves, feel a slight chill in the air, hear and feel the wind as a movement. From its first sentence – "Summer on the high plateau can be delectable as honey; it can also be a roaring scourge" – The Living Mountain draws you in with the feyness of its vision, the lucidity of its prose and Shepherd’s refreshing philosophy that mountains are more than peaks to be scaled.

Shepherd was born in Aberdeen in 1893 and died there in 1981, and during her long life she spent hundreds of days and covered thousands of miles exploring the Cairngorms on foot. Water, that strong white stuff, one of the four elemental mysteries, can here be seen at its origins. She had a keen sense of ecology, an understanding that to "deeply" know a place was to know something of the whole world. Shepherd sent it off once, received a polite letter of rejection, and then left it in a drawer until 1977, when Aberdeen University Press printed a small edition. But I was surprised by how little known she is, to this day, and especially compared to male explorers.