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

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Shepherd, born Anna and self-christened Nan, was only an adolescent when she discovered her dual calling to literature and altitude. She roamed the Highlands of her native Scotland as zealously as she copied passages of the books she was devouring — novels, poetry, philosophy — into her commonplace book. By her twenties, she was writing original works of her own. Nan Shepherd

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.” Macfarlane, Robert (27 December 2013). "How Nan Shepherd remade my vision of the Cairngorms". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 24 November 2019. 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. 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: However, this was no scientific or geological piece, although those disciplines had their place. This was a drawing together and fusion of her own knowledge and experience of the area, of her interest in spirituality and philosophy and literature and people annealed into a beautiful end product. She had a great economy and compression in the way she wrote, drawing out the essence of each of her very varied experiences of these mountains in a paragraph or two. This was one of the reasons for reading slowly and savouring the book. Read with any speed and you risked losing the richness and beauty of each sentence. Read one of her paragraphs with real attention to detail and you had a very vivid reflection of what the walking and climbing experience is like.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.

Imagination is haunted by the swiftness of the creatures that live on the mountain - eagle and peregrine falcon, red deer and mountain hare. The reason for their swiftness is severely practical: food is so scarce up there that only those who can move swiftly over vast stretches of ground may hope to survive. The speed, the whorls and torrents of movement, are in plain fact the mountain's own necessity. But their grace is not necessity. Or if it is - if the swoop, the parabola, the arrow-flight of hooves and wings achieve their beauty by strict adherence to the needs of function - so much the more is the mountain's integrity vindicated. Beauty is not adventitious but essential.” At first glance, this seems like a deceptively simple and modest book: Nan Shepherd describes her experiences and explorations in the Cairgorm Mountains in northeastern Scotland, a region she has lived in for decades, in the first halve of the 20th century. The Cairgorms is in essence a huge granite plateau (one of the highest in Europe), with a few bulges, cut through by unsightly rivers, some lochs and especially overgrown with heather. All in all a very scanty landscape where the wind is the master. This is an attempt to experience and sing the living, total mountain. Not as a thing, or even as an ecosystem, but as a pulsating holon, of which the tiniest slivers of light and matter reflects the delicacy and wonder of the whole. Human beings who want to experience the grace of partaking in this web of life have to hone their humility, patience and quiescence, their powers of observation, curiosity and willingness to stray from the beaten path. And so the mountain turns into a metaphor for our own lives, enmeshed as they are in a wondrous cosmos. Nan Shepherd’s tribute to the Cairngorm mountains, a hybrid of an essay, a travelogue and a prose poem, is a uniquely perceptive contribution to the alpine literature. The introductory essay by Robert MacFarlane is very worthwhile too. A book to read and reread. 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. 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.Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours. In the last months of the Second World War, a teacher called Anna ‘Nan’ Shepherd finished a short book about a place she had long loved: the Cairngorm mountains of north-east Scotland, a wild landscape of glens, peaks and storms. 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.

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.” My hope was that it might change in some measure the ways we imagine the landscape of Essex, and of south-east England more generally. The programme was an hour long, but took almost a year in the field to film.

Exploring conflicting worlds

Nan Shepherd is commemorated in Makars' Court outside the Writers' Museum, Lawnmarket, Edinburgh. Selections for such commemoration are made by The Writers' Museum, The Saltire Society and The Scottish Poetry Library. 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.”

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. 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? Shepherd'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).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). 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. 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".