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

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Shepherd illustrates this reality deeper than fact through her revelatory encounter with a narrow mountain loch that had never been sounded — a loch the depth of which she came to know on a level more dimensional than what is measured in feet or meters. From its first sentence – "Summer on the high plateau can be delectable as honey; it can also be a roaring scourge" – The Living Mountain draws you in with the feyness of its vision, the lucidity of its prose and Shepherd’s refreshing philosophy that mountains are more than peaks to be scaled. His work, particularly The Phenomenology of Perception (1945), was dedicated to enriching the idea of the body, such that it could be said both to perceive and to think. 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. There she encounters a world that can be breathtakingly beautiful at times and shockingly harsh at others.

This plunge into the cold water of a mountain pool seems for a brief moment to disintegrate the very self; it is not to be borne: one is lost: stricken: annihilated.Shepherd is also fascinated by mirages of the mountain-world, the illusions that can be brought on by snow, mist, cloud or distance.

These adverts enable local businesses to get in front of their target audience – the local community.The afterword by Jeanette Winterson on the essence of reading is so pertinent today that it alone deserves a review. 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. But her novels also invite us to frame conversations around modernity and modern literature to include the importance of the natural world and its living rural communities. She could not rely on the warm, waterproof and lightweight clothing and equipment that we have today.

In her final chapter, Shepherd notes that she understands why Buddhist pilgrims travel to mountains; her journey mirrors theirs: "It is a journey into Being; for as I penetrate more deeply into the mountain’s life, I penetrate also into my own. But even on that heavy-packed route march, I couldn’t stop grinning in the darkness, happy just to be up there, among the living mountains. 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. 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. Bella, symbolising pleasure, art and beauty, is related to a man who embodies labour, servitude and parochiality.A selection of these, with several hitherto unpublished poems, were first collected as Wild Geese: A Collection of Nan Shepherd's Writing, published in 2019 by Galileo Publishers. Her intense, poetic prose explores and records the rocks, rivers, creatures and hidden aspects of this remarkable landscape. Sometimes the Quoich waterfalls have violet playing through the green, and the pouring water spouts and bubbles in a violet froth. Its prose is weathered in both senses: filled with different kinds of climate, but also the result of decades of contact with "the elementals".

She swims in lochs, and sleeps on hillsides, to be woken by the sharp press of a robin's claw upon her bare arm or the snuffle of a grazing deer. She hiked the great mountain pass of the Lairig Ghru and visited the Pools of Dee, the “freezing water bubbling up from the ground,” as Nan described it. 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, who worked as a teacher for most of her life, wrote the book during the last years of the second world war and the first years of its aftermath.Its combination of intense scrutiny, deep familiarity and glittering imagery re-made my vision of these familiar hills. Focused for a moment out of time’ In this masterpiece of nature writing, Nan Shepherd describes her journeys into the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland.