Twitter - Twitter is a real-time information network that connects you to the latest stories, ideas, opinions and news about what you find interesting. It would be merely fanciful to suppose that some spirit or emanation of the mountain had intention in thus absorbing my consciousness, so as to reveal itself to a naked apprehension difficult otherwise to obtain. For some people, reading so much description might be akin to reading poetry---requiring more attention to the page because there is no plot, little dialogue, and absolutely no suspense. So, simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Moisture in the air is also the cause of those shifts in the apparent size, remoteness, and height in the sky of familiar hills.

In this masterpiece of nature writing, Nan Shepherd describes her journeys into the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland. If I remember correctly, I read it in one evening at my mum’s house in Menston, and as so often happens with a book like this, it became connected in my imagination not only to the place it is actually about, but also the place where I read it. I’ve read many books about places I’ve never visited though and that hasn’t made a difference to me.

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. As I watch, it arches its back, and each layer of the landscape bristles – though 'bristles' is a word of too much commotion for it. And when the colonised finally rebel and reclaim their space, starting to follow in the path the colonisers have set before them as model, once again they are found fault with, and all blame for any harm placed on them.

Para ella la montaña con todos sus elementos: árboles, pájaros, animales, microclimas, sol, luna, ríos, arrollos, flores, nubes, etc, etc, incluyéndose a ella misma, era un todo, un conjunto casi indivisible. 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. 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.A number of readers of this Folio Society edition of this book have been very pleased with this celebratory and timeless ode to nature. I love its flash and gleam, its music, its pliancy and grace, its slap against my body; but I fear its strength. One autumn afternoon, about ten years ago, I sat on a mountainside in Colorado surrounded by aspens.

This book, written around the end of the Second World War and first published in 1977, has become a touchstone of landscape and place writing in the decade or so since Canongate published it in a new edition with an introduction from Robert Macfarlane. Like most widely applicable fables, The Living Mountain is not set in a clearly recognisable place, but there are clues to the deep Himalayan nature of the piece.The twelve chapter headings, like disciples, give you a hint as to the book's Cairngorm worship: "The Plateau," "The Recesses," "The Group," "Water," "Frost and Snow," "Air and Light," "The Plants," "Birds, Animals, Insects," "Man," "Sleep," "The Senses," and "Being. It’s a subtle, meditative, even mystical look at the forces of nature, which are majestic but also menacing: “the most appalling quality of water is its strength. It is a short book, originally written during the Second World War, containing 12 chapters centred around aspects of the mountain range. If you have a beating heart, you will have inadvertently paused to take in the simple majesty of that last sentence.

The story is of a people who lived under the benevolent protection of a mountain, the Mahaparbat, which gave them all they needed to live happy, contented lives, and which was treated as sacred and never interfered with. De sublieme natuurschrijver Robert MacFarlane (voorwoord) en literair icoon Jeanette Winterson (nawoord) omringen deze editie toepasselijk als reuzen. Nan Shepherd's aimless, sensual exploration of the Cairngorms is bracingly different -- ROBERT MACFARLANE [A] masterpiece of Scottish writing -- Anita Sethi * * Observer * * A masterpiece . His next book, In the Pines, is a novella about a lifelong connection to the forest and will be published by Influx Press in 2021. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields – these are as much as a man can fully experience…’ this is really her doctrine, the beauty of the minutiae as much as what is visible through a wide angle lens.It's like Shepherd's landscape, constantly renewed: "However often I walk on them, these hills hold astonishment for me.