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

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One autumn afternoon, about ten years ago, I sat on a mountainside in Colorado surrounded by aspens. As the wind blew, I could hear the leaves rustle, first from far away, then closer and closer, until I felt the wind in my hair, with leaves rustling loudly overhead. Then slowly, the rustling moved further away, until the sequence started again. Sitting, listening with all my senses, made me feel a part of the mountain. I could smell the autumn leaves, feel a slight chill in the air, hear and feel the wind as a movement.

Such sleep [outdoors] may last for only a few minutes, yet even a single minute serves this end of uncoupling the mind. It would be merely fanciful to suppose that some spirit or emanation of the mountain had intention in thus absorbing my consciousness, so as to reveal itself to a naked apprehension difficult otherwise to obtain. I do not ascribe sentience to the mountain; yet at no other moment am I sunk quite so deep into its life. I have let go my self. The experience is peculiarly precious because it is impossible to coerce.Yet often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone out merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with him.' 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:

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. Anna Shepherd (known as Nan) was born on 11 February 1893 at East Peterculter, and died in Aberdeen on 27 February 1981. Her father, John Shepherd, was a civil engineer, and her mother came from a family well established in Aberdeen. The family moved to Cults soon after she was born, and Shepherd lived in the same house there for most of the rest of her life. She went to Aberdeen High School for Girls, and studied at Aberdeen University, graduating with an MA in 1915. She then joined the staff of Aberdeen Training Centre for Teachers, (later the College of Education) and taught English literature there until her retirement in 1956 – by all accounts an inspiring teacher, with a feminist approach in her lectures which was ahead of her time. After retirement, she edited the Aberdeen University Review from 1957 until 1963; in 1964 the University awarded her an honorary doctorate.

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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 2017 a commemorative plaque was placed outside her former home, Dunvegan, in the North Deeside Road, Cults. [18] See also [ edit ] 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? 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.