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.

The inaccessibility of this loch is part of its power. Silence belongs to it. If jeeps find it out, or a funicular railway disfigures it, part of its meaning will be gone. The good of the greatest number is not here relevant. It is necessary to be sometimes exclusive, not on behalf of rank or wealth, but of those human qualities that can apprehend loneliness. Here in this book she writes of what she has experienced over the years walking, rambling, sleeping in the mountains. They are old mountains, eroded and no longer high. They reach up to a plateau, split and fissured. She draws them with all her senses—sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. Reading, one becomes aware of what one has missed, what one has failed to pay attention to when walking. Have you considered the unique aroma of a sodden birch forest? A place can come to speak to us with more than just the five senses. She asks if perhaps there are other senses we fail to recognize. She goes on to show us that life is a constant search for knowledge and understanding, that often cannot be attained. It is the search itself that is important. The book goes beyond one of nature writing; it takes on a philosophical bent. The first five days were very wet and windy,” says Elise. “I had not expected it to be so cold in July and it gave me great admiration for Nan in practical terms. She could not rely on the warm, waterproof and lightweight clothing and equipment that we have today. In the audiobook, Tilda Swinton reads the original writing by Nan Shepherd. Robert Macfarlane reads his section and Jeanette Winterson hers. All are easy to follow and clearly read. I have given the narration a four star rating. It is all very well done. The book is in 12 sections, each of which explores an aspect of the Cairngorms and life on them: "Water, Frost and Snow", "The Recesses", "The Senses", "Man", "Being". Reading the book, you realise that these apparently separate sections are bound laterally to each other by rhymes of colour, thought and word, so that they form a transverse weave. In this way, too, the book's form acts out its central proposition, which is that the world will not fall into divisible realms, as an apple may be sliced, but is instead a meshwork of interrelations. "So there I lie on the plateau," writes Shepherd.Eye and foot acquire in rough walking a co-ordination that makes one distinctly aware of where the next step is to fall, even while watching sky and land.” 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 In 2009 – inspired in part by another classic of place-literature, J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine (1967) – I made a Natural World film for BBC2 called The Wild Places of Essex, which sought to find and celebrate the remarkable ‘modern nature’ of that much-maligned county. This contains some of the most beautiful prose I’ve read in a long time but is not going to please everyone. In spite of talking about little else than nature, it is far more an interior rumination on the author’s part.

It was to be Elise’s first time in the Scottish Highlands and while she chose the summer of 2019 for her trip, she was treated to a full range of weather. Her prose also rings with the joy of being in the mountains: the pleasure of drinking deeply from the ‘strong white’ water of an upland stream, say, or the feel of lying on sun-baked granite on a summer evening. I am a Naturalist (not a Naturist which are the type that run around nude, holding hands and giggling on blankets in the sun), but a Naturalist. An appreciator and observor of all things nature. Birds, insects, plants, landscape and so on and so forth, and I regard myself as a fair to middling judge of nature writing.Yet often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone out merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with him.” In one memorable passage, Shepherd describes looking at a croft during a rain shower. The wet air acts as a lens, multiplying and redistributing her sightlines, so that she seems to view all sides of the barn simultaneously. Shepherd's own style possesses a similar stereoscopic quality. Reading The Living Mountain, you experience a curious visual dissonance. Your sight feels . . . scattered, as though you've suddenly gained the compound eye of a dragonfly. This effect is created by her refusal to privilege a single perspective. The prose watches now from the point of view of the eagle, now from that of the walker, now from that of the creeping juniper. In this way we are brought to see the earth "as the earth must see itself". After reading the introduction by Robert MacFarlane, a renowned nature writer himself, I wasn’t sure I was going to really like this. I’m not particularly interested in Shepherd’s having been influenced by Buddhism, Taoism and the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a contemporary of hers. However, in this book one can dig into the more intellectual/philosophical approach if wanted, or like me glance off the spots that don’t necessarily interest.

Robert Macfarlane (30 August 2008). "I walk therefore I am". The Guardian . Retrieved 22 December 2013. Around the time Virginia Woolf beheld the magnificent interleaving of every part of nature in the epiphany that made her an artist and before Rachel Carson made ecology a household word, Shepherd serenades the intricate ecosystem of the mountain: Such sleep [outdoors] may last for only a few minutes, yet even a single minute serves this end of uncoupling the mind. 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. I do not ascribe sentience to the mountain; yet at no other moment am I sunk quite so deep into its life. I have let go my self. The experience is peculiarly precious because it is impossible to coerce. This focus on The Living Mountain tends to obscure the creative achievement of Shepherd’s three novels, The Quarry Wood (1928), The Weatherhouse (1930) and A Pass in the Grampians (1933), with their attention to rural communities under pressure from modernity. 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.Her language is also original and playful, who would think of describing moths as ‘tart’ – ‘On a wet windy sunless day, when moths would hardly be expected to be visible at all, we have found numbers of these tart little creatures on the milk-vetch clumps…’ or hare in flight like ‘rising smoke…’ There are many things that go into my rating a non fiction on Goodreads. Skill with the written word is most definitely a necessity if a book wants 3 star or higher out of me, but to get into the 4 and 5 star range a book has to offer more than fine writing and nice structure. It must make me feel something. And to be a 5 star, I must be feeling something pretty special. Step by step she also shows how for her the mountains have an inner, almost a soul, which also influences everything that lives on it or walks on it. Of course, she doesn't mean this religiously, but it comes very close to it. She explicitly refers to Taoism and Buddhism and the way in which interaction between human physicality (being in the body) and seemingly 'lifeless' matter is nevertheless possible. Amazing how subtle she does this, without falling into New Age-like or esoteric grumbling. It reminded me very much of Gregory Bateson and his intuition about everything being pervaded by 'mind'.