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

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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". 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 Grampian Quartet: The Quarry Wood: The Weatherhouse: A Pass in the Grampians: The Living Mountain

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Walking in mist tests not only individual self-discipline, but the best sort of interplay between persons.” 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: It is the eye that discovers the mystery of light, not only the moon and the stars and the vast splendours of the Aurora, but the endless changes the earth undergoes under changing lights.” 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 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. Around the same time, ten latitude degrees north, Nan Shepherd (February 11, 1893–February 23, 1981) — another woman of immense literary talent and altitudinal ardor — was reverencing another mountain range and gleaning from it abiding wisdom on the art of living.

Exploring conflicting worlds

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. I was in my late 20s, I had recently suffered a period of crippling anxiety and I decided I wanted to be fearless, to do something I wouldn’t normally dare. I decided to set out to follow in Alexandra’s footsteps.” Illustrated Card Cover. Condition: Very Good -. Munro, Ian (illustrator). 1st Identical Reprint. vii + 95pp; A Recent classic. Format exactly as first edition of 1977. No foxing but signs of light reading wear.Tight and clean and no marks or signatures.In very collectible condition of this classic. See scans. The more one learns of this intricate interplay of soil, altitude, weather, and the living tissues of plant and insect (an intricacy that has its astonishing moments, as when sundew and butterwort eat the insects), the more the mystery deepens. Knowledge does not dispel mystery.” 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.

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.From which detail you may deduce that this was written, or experienced, at a time when hob-nailed climbing boots were the norm. (I am tempted to buy or make a pair of my own to experience this phenomenon for myself.) The manuscript was completed in 1944, she showed it to a friend, who although loving it wondered whether it might not need a map and some photographs. And added that it might be difficult to find a publisher. Most novels I’ve read don’t dig quite as deeply into the past as this, and the few that do don’t in …