The Cairngorm mountains of Scotland, explored in extraordinary depth, and over many years, by the poet, novelist and academic Nan Shepherd. She wrote four books in six years, and then there was nothing. She didn't publish another book for 43 years. She wrote The Living Mountain in the last years of The Second World War - and then it was put away in a drawer for 40 years. It was finally published by Aberdeen University in 1977. Hebditch, Jon (June 2017). "Plaque to be put in place for Aberdeen poet Nan Shepherd". The Press and Journal . Retrieved 25 November 2020. Shepherd's writing conveys wonder in the face of these mountains because she was comfortable with uncertainty. Following the young River Dee, she notes, In the second half of her thirties, Shepherd was possessed with a wild burst of creativity perhaps best described by the Scots term fey in its mountaineering context — the iridescent exhilaration that comes over climbers, making them appear, in Shepherd’s own words, “a little mad, in the eyes of the folk who do not climb.” Over the course of six years, she published four books: three novels before she was forty and, in her forty-first year, a slim, immensely beautiful collection of poetry — the form she held above all other arts as concentrating “in intensest being the very heart of all experience”— titled The Cairngorms after her most beloved mountain range.

Nan Shepherd | Justin Marozzi | Slightly Foxed literary review". Slightly Foxed. 1 December 2018 . Retrieved 24 November 2019. Shepherd did not talk about walking up mountains but walking into them. Her writing is sometimes mystical but never gushingly romantic – water is “appalling” in its strength, birches are most beautiful when “naked”. She was a keenly acute observer, each of her words chosen with such razor-sharp precision that she feared that her writing would be considered cold and inhuman.Reflecting on the exhilarating feyness that overtakes her every time she ascends the mountain and surrenders to its elements, both geologic and living, Shepherd adds: urn:lcp:livingmountaince0000shep:lcpdf:190cafe8-b9c4-423b-9a97-d9365be16e24 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier livingmountaince0000shep Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s28pvhf8r4f Invoice 1652 Isbn 9780857861832 Lccn 2012429517 Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-1-g862e Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9144 Ocr_module_version 0.0.14 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-WL-2000073 Openlibrary_edition

Shepherd, Nan (2019). The living mountain. Robert Macfarlane, Jeanette Winterson. Great Britain. ISBN 978-1-78689-735-0. OCLC 1084507268. {{ cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher ( link) Heel fijn onthaastend boek om te lezen, prachtig geschreven vol liefde voor de bergen van de Cairngorms, waar ze in een dorpje aan de voet ervan, haar hele leven heeft gewoond. Zo subtiel in al haar waarnemingen, heel herkenbaar, het brengt al die keren in mijn leven dat ik liep in de Schotse bergen terug. Het is er zó mooi! Nan Shepherd was born on 11 February 1893 at Westerton Cottage, Cults, now a suburb of Aberdeen, to John and Jane Shepherd. Shortly after her birth, the family moved to Dunvegan, Cults, the house she then lived in for most of her life. [3] She attended Aberdeen High School for Girls and graduated from the University of Aberdeen in 1915. Internationalist in its aims and appeal, and often modernist in its influences and aesthetics, Scottish culture in this period was still deeply rooted in the rural. In her three novels, Shepherd, from Aberdeen, was a key contributor to this Scottish cultural revival. Exploring conflicting worldsShepherd's short non-fiction book The Living Mountain, written in the 1940s, [9] reflects her experiences walking in the Cairngorm Mountains. She chose not to publish it until 1977, but it is now the book for which she is best known. [10] It has been quoted as an influence by prominent nature writers such as Robert Macfarlane and Joe Simpson. The Guardian called it "the finest book ever written on nature and landscape in Britain". [11] Its functions as a memoir and field notes combine with metaphysical nature writing in the tradition of Thoreau or John Muir. [ citation needed] The 2011 Cannongate edition included a foreword by Robert Macfarlane and an afterword by Jeanette Winterson, [12] these were also included in the 2019 edition by the same publisher. [13] Annabel Abbs retraced Shepherd's steps through the Cairngorms for her book, Windswept: Walking in the Footsteps of Trailblazing Women ( Two Roads, 2021). She’s an incredibly inspiring figure, and an unusual one, in the sense of being a woman writing about mountains and the wilderness and nature,” he said. “She found her own path in life and in literature, and it feels like she’s so far ahead of us – we’re always only starting to catch Nan up. Philosophically and stylistically, she was extraordinary.” Anna Shepherd (known as Nan) was born on 11 February 1893 at East Peterculter, and died in Aberdeen on 27 February 1981. Her father, John Shepherd, was a civil engineer, and her mother came from a family well established in Aberdeen. The family moved to Cults soon after she was born, and Shepherd lived in the same house there for most of the rest of her life. She went to Aberdeen High School for Girls, and studied at Aberdeen University, graduating with an MA in 1915. She then joined the staff of Aberdeen Training Centre for Teachers, (later the College of Education) and taught English literature there until her retirement in 1956 – by all accounts an inspiring teacher, with a feminist approach in her lectures which was ahead of her time. After retirement, she edited the Aberdeen University Review from 1957 until 1963; in 1964 the University awarded her an honorary doctorate. 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. 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.

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".

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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.” I think the plateau is never quite so desolate as in some days of early spring, when the snow is rather dirty, perished in places like a worn dress; and where it has disappeared, bleached grass, bleached and rotted berries and grey fringe-moss and lichen appear, the moss lifeless, as though its elasticity had gone. The foot sinks in and the impression remains. One can see in it the slot of deer that have passed earlier. This seems to me chiller than unbroken snow. 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.” In 2017 a commemorative plaque was placed outside her former home, Dunvegan, in the North Deeside Road, Cults. [18] See also [ 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.

Just as Rachel Carson was preparing to sound her courageous clarion call for protecting nature from political and commercial exploitation across the Atlantic, Shepherd adds a cautionary lamentation:

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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. 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. Summer 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. That is not to say that you, whomever is reading this review, would feel the same way. 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. Their physiognomy is in the geography books — so many square miles of area, so many lochs, so many summits of over 4000 feet — but this is a pallid simulacrum of their reality, which, like every reality that matters ultimately to human beings, is a reality of the mind.