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

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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: Her emphasis is on human activity and in that sense, as Robert Macfarlane rightly states in his introduction, she presents a specific form of humanism. A humanism that emerges in a special way in the activity of walking, as a merging into the landscape and a moving experience of existence through physicality: “ Walking thus, hour after hour, the senses keyed, one walks the flesh transparent. But no metaphor, transparent, or light as air, is adequate. The body is not made negligible, but paramount. Flesh is not annihilated but fulfilled. One is not bodiless, but essential body. It is therefore when the body is keyed to its highest potential and controlled to a harmony profound deepening into something that resembles trance, that I discover most nearly what it is to be. I have walked out of the body and into the mountain. I am a manifestation of its total life, as is the starry saxifrage or the white-winged ptarmigan”. For a long time in Scottish arts and letters she was known only as a minor writer of the early 20th century Scottish Renaissance. Between 1928 and 1935 she published three modernist novels – The Quarry Wood being superlative – and one book of poetry. From then until her death in 1981, she published only one more, The Living Mountain. It was written during the latter years of the World War Two but, following advice of novelist Neil Gunn, left in a drawer. No publisher would take a punt on such an unusual book, he argued. 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

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.” As you might have guessed, Shepherd was a wayward type. She was an English teacher for many years in Aberdeen. Her job, as she understood it, was to prevent students from conforming to the "approved pattern’ of life". She followed this herself and was itinerant by nature. In her lifetime, she travelled to North Africa, Greece, and Italy, but never moved permanently away from the village of West Cults, Deeside. She was drawn to the "forceful and gnarled personalities, bred of the bone of the mountain" that lived around The Cairngorms, like the "granite boss" of the region, Maggie, who would find a place to sleep for any lost late-night rambler or weary climber. 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. 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.

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In 2017 a commemorative plaque was placed outside her former home, Dunvegan, in the North Deeside Road, Cults. [18] See also [ edit ] 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.” Most probably, Shepherd began composing it sometime in the final years of WWII, drawing on her lifelong love and intimate knowledge of mountains in a masterpiece of observation and contemplation, both precise and spacious. But something stopped Shepherd from publishing it. Instead, she rested it in a drawer, where it was to remain for more than four decades, until it finally entered the world in the final years of her life as The Living Mountain ( public library) — a most unusual braiding of memoir, field notebook, and philosophical inquiry irradiated with the poetic and endowed with what geologist Hans Cloos celebrated as the rare art of hearing Earth’s music. Art by Toshikado Hajiri from You Are an Echo by Misuzu Kaneko 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.

Shepherd's fiction brings out the sharp conflict between the demands of tradition and the pull of modernity, particularly in the nature of women's lives in the changing times. All three novels assign a major role to the landscape and weather in small northern Scottish communities they describe. [4] Poetry [ edit ] 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. Galileo Publishing - in the Cairngorms by Nan Shepherd -Foreword by Robert Macfarlane". Archived from the original on 14 July 2014 . Retrieved 10 July 2014. 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.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. 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.