I’ve read many books about places I’ve never visited though and that hasn’t made a difference to me.

A keen naturalist and mountaineer, Shepherd is best known for her non-fiction book The Living Mountain (1977; Folio 2021). Beautifully presented by Canongate, although the afterword by Jeanette Winterson completely misses the mark and descends into the banal wishy-washy thoughts that Shepherd has expertly managed to avoid in this short piece. I will quote the bit that made me realise what I was strongly suspecting – that I was reading a work of the highest calibre: "In no other way have I seen of my own unaided sight that the world is round.Most works of mountain literature are written by men, and most of them focus on the goal of the summit. 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 looking at photos, I can just imagine all the little nuances and details hiding there, ready to share with anyone attentive enough to take their time. The phenomenon lasts about an hour, precipice after precipice glowing to rose and fading again, though in some conditions of the air the glow lasts longer, and I have seen in intense still summer heat, not only the corries but the whole plateau burning with a hot violet incandescence until noon. 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.

While walking, I saw, heard, felt, smelled considerably more than usual; just as Shepherd describes, I felt like I was coming under the spell of the landscape. When the air is quite still, there is always running water; and up here that is a sound one can hardly lose, though on many stony parts of the plateau one is above the watercourses. While mountains have been considered sacred sites by many civilisations, the Himalayas hold a special place. I have carried a piece of juniper wood for months, breaking it afresh now and then to renew the spice.In the Canongate edition, The Living Mountain is only just over a hundred pages long, and yet within that short space Shepherd creates a richly detailed portrait of a place that was so important to her throughout her life – the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland. 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. As the wind blew, I could hear the leaves rustle, first from far away, then closer and closer, until I felt the wind in my hair, with leaves rustling loudly overhead. I live in a terribly flat country right now (Denmark), but reading this, I felt like I was there in Scotland, climbing my way through the looming crags and glimpsing the wondrous little worlds they contain.

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.

It is ephemeral and transcendent, but completely couched in the very real earthiness of the inhospitable environment.

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. The book is published alongside the music composition ‘The Living Mountain’ written by Thomas Larcher as composer-in-residence at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam (2019-2020). But picking up the book again this week, I found myself reminded not only of the Scottish landscapes I have known, but also the moors above my mum’s house and the walks we took during that visit nearly ten years ago, with Shepherd’s words still echoing around my head.

Featuring extraordinary illustrations by Clive Hicks-Jenkins and an exclusive introduction by Janina Ramirez, each of the 750 numbered copies has been signed by both contributors. Nan Shepherd’s tribute to the Cairngorm mountains, a hybrid of an essay, a travelogue and a prose poem, is a uniquely perceptive contribution to the alpine literature. Though there are some narrative threads run through in the form of brief anecdotes, this just-over-100-page nugget is chiefly rich description of mountains, weather, seasons, plants, animals, and humans related to the Cairngorms. You could see Ghosh’s tale as a simple retelling of the history of colonisation and extractive industrialisation, the twin themes that he has explored at least since the publication of The Hungry Tide in 2004.