This slim book of essays is an account of Nan Shepherd's lifelong explorations of the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland. The Living Mountain is not a memoir (we learn little about Nan Shepherd beyond who she is when she's in the Cairngorms). Nor is it an adventure story filled with triumph and camaraderie and testosterone. It is perhaps described best as a love story between one person and a place. 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. This was a part of the world that Shepherd loved and lived close to all her life. 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. Shepherd's fiction brings out the sharp conflict between the demands of tradition and the pull of modernity, particularly in the nature of women's lives in the changing times. All three novels assign a major role to the landscape and weather in small northern Scottish communities they describe. [4] Poetry [ edit ] The first nine chapters detail Shepherd's exploration of the Cairngorms. Here she lovingly describes the plateaus, the air and light, the plant and animal life, the water and weather, and man's relation to the Cairngorms, historically and socially. The final few chapters did if for me, as Shepherd goes deep within herself to find her purpose in her external surroundings. Her prose turns philosophical, but also playful, as the final short chapters explore her purest feelings towards the mountains, embracing a strong spiritual connection to the land, a love that can barely be described analytically, only fully experienced. And a connection like that, I'd say is an example of purest living, an existence of love and respect to nature.

Macfarlane spent many of his childhood holidays in the Cairngorms, where he developed a love for the Scottish Highlands. But he came across Shepherd’s writing only just over a decade ago. He has since read and reread her books and poetry, as well as teaching regularly on Shepherd and her work to both undergraduates and graduates. Macfarlane, Robert (27 December 2013). "How Nan Shepherd remade my vision of the Cairngorms". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 24 November 2019. That experience came to mind as I read Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain. Drafted in 1945, published in 1977, the slender book is a meditation on Scotland's Cairngorm Mountains, and a master class in listening to and seeing the landscape from someone who dedicated her life to being fully present in these mountains. Nan Shepherd is best known as the author of the The Quarry Wood, The Weatherhouse, and A Pass in the Grampians, novels which she wrote from 1928-1933. In Robert Macfarlane's sensitive introduction to The Living Mountain, he describes Shepherd's struggles with writing after that time. Those struggles make The Living Mountain even more precious, a beautifully written and observed account of Shepherd's beloved Cairngorms, based on a lifetime's worth of walks. As Macfarlane notes, "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. This multiplex effect is created by Shepherd’s refusal to privilege a single perspective." In 2017 a commemorative plaque was placed outside her former home, Dunvegan, in the North Deeside Road, Cults. [18] See also [ edit ]

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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. Most works of mountain literature are written by men, and most male mountaineers are focused on the goal of the summit. Shepherd, however, goes into the Cairngorms aimlessly, "merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend, with no intention but to be with him". "I am on the plateau again, having gone round it like a dog in circles to see if it is a good place," she begins one section, "I think it is, and I am to stay up here for a while." Outstanding piece of multi-media art... inspired literature, gorgeously curated music and innovative filmmaking collide in a mosaic of integrated art."

Her emphasis is on human activity and in that sense, as Robert Macfarlane rightly states in his introduction, she presents a specific form of humanism. A humanism that emerges in a special way in the activity of walking, as a merging into the landscape and a moving experience of existence through physicality: “ Walking thus, hour after hour, the senses keyed, one walks the flesh transparent. But no metaphor, transparent, or light as air, is adequate. The body is not made negligible, but paramount. Flesh is not annihilated but fulfilled. One is not bodiless, but essential body. It is therefore when the body is keyed to its highest potential and controlled to a harmony profound deepening into something that resembles trance, that I discover most nearly what it is to be. I have walked out of the body and into the mountain. I am a manifestation of its total life, as is the starry saxifrage or the white-winged ptarmigan”. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-01-22 07:17:15 Bookplateleaf 0002 Boxid IA40334603 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifierSummer 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. Unfortunately, though, these important debates are being spoiled by a vocal minority of trolls who aren’t really interested in the issues, try to derail the conversations, register under fake names, and post vile abuse. 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. 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 through a process of immersion – sleeping outdoors, wading through streams, and sometimes swimming in the burns, watching and observing – that Shepherd got to know the colours and textures of the Cairngorms. Long before ecology became fashionable, she spoke about the interconnectedness of nature in a way that sprung from feeling rather than learning. But while reading it, they are – because of the power of the surrounding writing – fleetingly visible. Does that sound like nonsense? I hope not. (And I will fight anyone who says this book is nonsense. It's common sense, cubed.) 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. The Living Mountain did not see print, however, until the 1970s. And now, among a subset of nature-writing fans, it is a mini-classic of sorts, a Scottish Walden born of the mountains instead of a pond.It is a short book, originally written during the Second World War, containing 12 chapters centred around aspects of the mountain range. She writes about the quality of the light up in the mountains, the water, how the landscape changes when it snows. There are chapters on the plants that scratch out a living and the animals and birds, in particular the eagle, and even though it is a harsh place the impact that man still has had.

Up on the plateau nothing has moved for a long time. I have walked all day, and seen no one. I have heard no living sound. Once, in a solitary corrie, the rattle of a falling stone betrayed the passage of a line of stags. But up here, no movement, no voice. Man might be a thousand years away.' Robert Macfarlane takes inspiration from writer Nan Shepherd on a very special poetic pilgrimage to the Cairngorms. And some, most movingly, related to the experience of being human and fully engaged in a living landscape: a b c Ali Smith, "Shepherd, Anna (1893–1981)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, Retrieved 22 December 2013. As you might have guessed, Shepherd was a wayward type. She was an English teacher for many years in Aberdeen. Her job, as she understood it, was to prevent students from conforming to the "approved pattern’ of life". She followed this herself and was itinerant by nature. In her lifetime, she travelled to North Africa, Greece, and Italy, but never moved permanently away from the village of West Cults, Deeside. She was drawn to the "forceful and gnarled personalities, bred of the bone of the mountain" that lived around The Cairngorms, like the "granite boss" of the region, Maggie, who would find a place to sleep for any lost late-night rambler or weary climber.Perched in time partway between Thoreau’s meditation on the splendors of mystery in the age of knowledge and Feynman’s legendary Ode to a Flower monologue about the reciprocity of knowledge and mystery, Shepherd writes: 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'. That book, The Living Mountain, is a slender masterpiece of place-writing, and one of the most astonishing works of landscape literature I have ever read. I thought I knew the Cairngorms well before I encountered Shepherd’s book. 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". Everyone in Scotland knows what Nan Shepherd looks like. Her face, complete with bejewelled bandanna, stares out from the Scottish five-pound note. Yet how people many have read her books?