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. 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.

Dipping her fingers into the frost-cold waters, Shepherd listens to the sound of the waterfall until she no longer hears it. She lets her eyes travel over the surface of the water from shore to shore – not once but twice. “There is no way like that for savouring the extent of a water surface,” she writes. “This changing of focus in the eye, moving the eye itself when looking at things that do not move, deepens one’s sense of outer reality.” 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. She lists the ‘eruption’ of the resort of Aviemore, the growing impact of tourism and terrible tragedies of lives lost in accidents. She follows her list with a message that speaks of her intense relationship with landscape in all its moods: “All these are matters that involve man. But behind them is the mountain itself, its substance, its strength, its weathers. It is fundamental to all that man does to it or on it.” a b c Ali Smith, "Shepherd, Anna (1893–1981)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, Retrieved 22 December 2013.

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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. 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. The Living Mountain" is poetic prose in praise of the Cairngorm Mountains of northeastern Scotland. It's nature writing with a philosophical feeling to it. Nan Shepherd started exploring the Cairngorms at an early age, and continued mountain walking until she was aged. Although she was well-traveled, she always returned to her home near the eastern side of the mountain range. Shepherd had climbed its peaks, but she seemed to draw more pleasure from the plateau--observing wildlife, exploring the lochs, and following springs to their natural source. She was a very observant person who often took in the activity of the natural world while she maintained stillness. Shepherd wrote descriptions that use all the senses in appreciating the beautiful, but sometimes unforgiving, mountains.

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.' Nan Shepherd | Justin Marozzi | Slightly Foxed literary review". Slightly Foxed. 1 December 2018 . Retrieved 24 November 2019.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. Galileo Publishing - in the Cairngorms by Nan Shepherd -Foreword by Robert Macfarlane". Archived from the original on 14 July 2014 . Retrieved 10 July 2014. As opposed to lyrical I found the prose far too literal. As opposed to poetic I found it sometimes nudging prosaic. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-01-22 07:17:15 Bookplateleaf 0002 Boxid IA40334603 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier

Shepherd was a keen hill-walker. Her poetry expresses her love for the mountainous Grampian landscape. While a student at university, Shepherd wrote poems for the student magazine, Alma Mater, but not until 1934 was a collection of her poetry, In the Cairngorms, published. [5] This was reissued in April 2014 by Galileo Publishers, Cambridge, with a new introduction by Robert Macfarlane. [8] Non-fiction [ edit ] The clear water was at our knees, then at our thighs. How clear it was only this walking into it could reveal. To look through it was to discover its own properties. What we saw under water had a sharper clarity than what we saw through air. We waded on into the brightness, and the width of the water increased, as it always does when one is on or in it, so that the loch no longer seemed narrow, but the far side was a long way off. Then I looked down; and at my feet there opened a gulf of brightness so profound that the mind stopped. We were standing on the edge of a shelf that ran some yards into the loch before plunging down to the pit that is the true bottom. And through that inordinate clearness we saw to the depth of the pit. So limpid was it that every stone was clear. In 2017 a commemorative plaque was placed outside her former home, Dunvegan, in the North Deeside Road, Cults. [18] See also [ edit ] Robert Macfarlane (30 August 2008). "I walk therefore I am". The Guardian . Retrieved 22 December 2013. 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:Where was my epiphany? I am sure it said on the tin that I was due one and I feel rather ripped off. 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.