The Living Mountain: A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland (The Grampian Quartet Book 4)

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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. In 2017 a commemorative plaque was placed outside her former home, Dunvegan, in the North Deeside Road, Cults. [18] See also [ edit ]

For almost all her life, Shepherd lived in the house where she had been born. She travelled widely but always returned to the hills she loved. Macfarlane suggests that Shepherd’s focus on a particular place, one not far from her doorstep, led to a deepening rather than a restriction of knowledge. “ The Living Mountain needs to be understood as parochial in the best sense,” he has written.The book was written in the last years of the Second World War. You catch this in the details. It was put in a drawer and not published until 1977. Complaints were made that maps and photos should be added. In fact, I thought this myself, but only at the start. You must pay attention and listen. You do not want to be diverted. The writing is lyrical, and it leaves you thinking. Shepherd's writing conveys wonder in the face of these mountains because she was comfortable with uncertainty. Following the young River Dee, she notes,

And last October, just as winter was tightening its grip upon the Highlands, I travelled to the Cairngorms to make a Secret Knowledge programme about Nan and the range. The film adapted a chapter of a book of mine called Landmarks, which explores the huge power of language – single words, strong style – to shape our sense of place.The Quarry Wood follows Martha Ironside growing up in the farming community of Wester Cairns. Martha, like Shepherd, goes to Aberdeen University, an environment very different to home. 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. 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: Shepherd does for the mountain what Rachel Carson did for the ocean— both women explore entire worlds previously mapped only by men and mostly through the lens of conquest rather than contemplation; both bring to their subject a naturalist’s rigor and a poet’s reverence, gleaming from the splendor of facts a larger meditation on meaning. And" is one of Shepherd's favourite words in The Living Mountain, being the conjunction that implies connection without hierarchy.

In The Living Mountain, Shepherd describes making a similar discovery when she began walking in Scotland. She writes: “At first, mad to recover the tang of height, I made always for the summits and would not take time to explore the recesses.” A turning point came when a friend took Shepherd to Loch Coire an Lochain, a stretch of water that lies hidden in the hills. It was a September day, following a storm, and “the air was keen and buoyant, with a brilliancy as of ice”. 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? It's become increasingly rare to have an intimate and lasting relationship with a wild space. If you have one, I think you will identify with many of Shepherd's experiences; if you don't, perhaps this book will provide the impetus to get out there and find your own living mountain (or dune, or forest, or whatever). 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. And there it might have been forgotten, but Robert Macfarlane was introduced to it by "a former friend" (as he rather darkly puts it). "I read it, and was changed," he says in his first-rate introduction (I can think of no higher praise than to say it stands up to Shepherd's prose). 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.Even though it is so short, Shepherd still manages to covey the sense of place, the beauty and the wildness of the Cairngorms with such amazing brevity. The prose is lyrical and poetic with an incredible eye for detail, as she describes the colours of the earth and heathers or the pure quality of the streams and rivers, or the luminosity of the light. 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. Sensual is one of the words Macfarlane uses to describe Shepherd’s work. She herself wrote that she found “a joyous release” in walking and climbing, often toiling through foul weather. The Living Mountain begins with the observation: “Summer on the high plateau can be as sweet 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.”

Light in Scotland has a quality I have not met elsewhere. It is luminous without being fierce, penetrating to immense distances with an effortless intensity. So on a clear day one looks without any sense of strain from Morven in Caithness to the Lammermuirs, and out past Ben Nevis to Morar. At midsummer, I have had to be persuaded I was not seeing further even than that. I could have sworn I saw a shape, distinct and blue, very clear and small, further off than any hill the chart recorded. The chart was against me, my companions were against me, I never saw it again. On a day like that, height goes to one’s head. Perhaps it was the lost Atlantis focused for a moment out of time.The Cairngorm Mountains are a mass of granite thrust up through the schists and gneiss that form the lower surrounding hills, planed down by the ice cap, and split, shattered and scooped by frost, glaciers and the strength of running water. 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. Where was my epiphany? I am sure it said on the tin that I was due one and I feel rather ripped off. My favourite chapter was the one about Man in the Cairngorms. The various characters she sketched were a delight to read about. The final chapter, although very short, compressed all the layers of reflection, knowledge and experience, into something jewel-like, as she celebrated the holistic nature of her overall experience of those mountains, and the unending experiences and insights to be gained by concentration on the simplest of objects or happenings or from the landscape. If you read it, you too will feel changed. This is sublime, in the 18th-century sense, when landscapes like these were terrifying. And she achieves it in language that is almost incantatory, like a spell: "... birdsfoot trefoil, tormentil, blaeberry, the tiny genista, alpine lady's mantle ..." runs one short list of the local flora, and it was only on rereading that I realised I had never heard of one of these flowers before, or could tell what they looked like.