The Living Mountain (Canons): A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland: 6

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This focus on The Living Mountain tends to obscure the creative achievement of Shepherd’s three novels, The Quarry Wood (1928), The Weatherhouse (1930) and A Pass in the Grampians (1933), with their attention to rural communities under pressure from modernity. 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. I also found a new rhythm to my days and it was much slower than the modern world. I did not have a mobile phone or any modern technology and nor did I have a torch. Just candles and no convenience foods. Shepherd, Nan (2011). The living mountain: a celebration of the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland. Edinburgh: Canongate. ISBN 978-0-85786-183-2. OCLC 778121107. There were magical moments, too, when I was surrounded by the silent, high landscape. I tiptoed into the crystal water of Loch Avon, thinking of Nan’s words, ‘Gazing into its depths, one loses all sense of time.’ I began to understand Nan’s world on a deeper level.”

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. The Cairngorm mountains of north-east Scotland are Britain's Arctic. In winter, storm winds of up to 170mph rasp the upper shires of the range, and avalanches scour its lee slopes. Even in summer, snow lies in the deeper corries of the massif, sintering slowly into ice. The aurora borealis can be seen from its summits - billowing curtains of green or, more rarely, red light. In places, the wind blows so insistently that pine trees grow to just a few inches high, spreading across the ground in densely woven dwarf forests. It is a terrain shaped by what Nan Shepherd, in her masterpiece about the region, called "the elementals". At the start of the book I failed to see what Nan was describing. I saw only that which I myself had experienced before. Give the book time. You get caught up in it. You come to understand where she is heading and what she is speaking about. Walking, rambling, on a hike, one gets an intimate sense of place. How? Through the use of all one’s senses piled together, and then….you get something more. A walker will know what I mean and will understand what Nan is saying. Shepherd's writing conveys wonder in the face of these mountains because she was comfortable with uncertainty. Following the young River Dee, she notes, Robert Macfarlane (30 August 2008). "I walk therefore I am". The Guardian . Retrieved 22 December 2013.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. Elise, a part-time marketing professional from London, became fascinated by Nan after reading her book. 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. The essays are loosely themed (water, light, plants, sleep), meandering both physically and introspectively all over the Cairngorms and highlighting Shepherd's favorite sights, sensations, events. From the chapter on water: 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.

It was to be Elise’s first time in the Scottish Highlands and while she chose the summer of 2019 for her trip, she was treated to a full range of weather. But I was surprised by how little known she is, to this day, and especially compared to male explorers.” I found that I awoke when the sun came up and went to sleep as it set. I learned to sit and think, to be still – to let myself simply sit and be content – to write my journal and to eat simple meals cooked on a basic stove.” And some, most movingly, related to the experience of being human and fully engaged in a living landscape: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. 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." Shepherd was a major contributor to early Scottish Modernist literature. Her first novel, The Quarry Wood (1928) has often been compared to Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, published four years later, as they both portray restricted, often tragic lives of women in Scotland at that time. [6] Her second novel, The Weatherhouse (1930), concerns interactions between people in a small Scottish community. [7] Her third and final novel, A Pass in the Grampians, appeared in 1933. [4] Shepherd subsequently lectured for the Aberdeen College of Education. [4] She retired from teaching in 1956, but edited the Aberdeen University Review until 1963. The university awarded her an honorary doctorate in 1964. [5] She remained a friend and a supporter of other Scottish writers, including Neil M. Gunn, Marion Angus and Jessie Kesson. The inaccessibility of this loch is part of its power. Silence belongs to it. If jeeps find it out, or a funicular railway disfigures it, part of its meaning will be gone. The good of the greatest number is not here relevant. It is necessary to be sometimes exclusive, not on behalf of rank or wealth, but of those human qualities that can apprehend loneliness.

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. There is no doubt that The Living Mountain is a nice bit of writing and there were moments when I felt transported to the Cairngorms and into Shepherd's inner most musings on nature. 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. In a sentiment that calls to mind philosopher Simone Weil’s assertion that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” Shepherd considers how an attentive and benevolent curiosity about this living mountain — about anything beyond oneself, indeed — effects a generous enlargement of both self and other: 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's eureka moment comes when she concludes that there is an "inner" mountain as well as the much more distracting outer one. It is, in a sense, alive, if you choose to see it that way, with its moods and beauties and terrors, with its propensity to make like an Old Testament God by giving and taking away. The hands have an infinity of pleasure in them. The feel of things, textures, surfaces, rough things like cones and bark, smooth things like stalks and feathers and pebbles rounded by water, the teasing of gossamers . . . the scratchiness of lichen, the warmth of the sun, the sting of hail, the blunt blow of tumbling water, the flow of wind - nothing that I can touch or that touches me but has its own identity for the hand as much as for the eye."

Nature writing these days is as much about the person as the place. Refreshingly, Shepherd – like JA Baker in his book The Peregrine – is not there as a personality, rather a human presence in the landscape, complete with roving eye and senses wide open. She understood nature’s ultimate indifference (it doesn’t care who you are), yet also how much she was a part of it. She had a keen sense of ecology, an understanding that to "deeply" know a place was to know something of the whole world. Her chapters, for example, move through every element of the mountains, from water to earth, on to golden eagles and down to the tiniest mountain flowers, like the genista or birdsfoot trefoil. Robert McFarlane has argued that is why she is a truly universal writer. In 1945, Nan wrote a part-memoir, part-field study of the Cairngorms, The Living Mountain, although it was not published until 1977. Today, the book is described as “one of the finest books ever written on nature and landscape in Britain”. In the audiobook, Tilda Swinton reads the original writing by Nan Shepherd. Robert Macfarlane reads his section and Jeanette Winterson hers. All are easy to follow and clearly read. I have given the narration a four star rating. It is all very well done. I am a Naturalist (not a Naturist which are the type that run around nude, holding hands and giggling on blankets in the sun), but a Naturalist. An appreciator and observor of all things nature. Birds, insects, plants, landscape and so on and so forth, and I regard myself as a fair to middling judge of nature writing.

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Out of this awareness arises an enlargement of both the mind and the senses, of the very self, beyond the body and yet intensely of the body: And then, half a lifetime of silence — it would be another forty-three years until Shepherd published her next, final, and greatest book.