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

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My favourite chapter was the one about Man in the Cairngorms. The various characters she sketched were a delight to read about. The final chapter, although very short, compressed all the layers of reflection, knowledge and experience, into something jewel-like, as she celebrated the holistic nature of her overall experience of those mountains, and the unending experiences and insights to be gained by concentration on the simplest of objects or happenings or from the landscape. 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.

When the aromatic savour of the pine goes searching into the deepest recesses of my lungs, I know it is life that is entering. I draw life in through the delicate hairs of my nostrils.” Shepherd's writing conveys wonder in the face of these mountains because she was comfortable with uncertainty. Following the young River Dee, she notes,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.” So vivid was this journey into the living mountain that I feel so much more relaxed after the book, as one would after a beautiful holiday immersed in nature.

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. 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? It's become increasingly rare to have an intimate and lasting relationship with a wild space. If you have one, I think you will identify with many of Shepherd's experiences; if you don't, perhaps this book will provide the impetus to get out there and find your own living mountain (or dune, or forest, or whatever).Where was my epiphany? I am sure it said on the tin that I was due one and I feel rather ripped off. Shepherd, Nan (2019). The living mountain. Robert Macfarlane, Jeanette Winterson. Great Britain. ISBN 978-1-78689-735-0. OCLC 1084507268. {{ cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher ( link)

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. a b c Ali Smith, "Shepherd, Anna (1893–1981)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, Retrieved 22 December 2013. 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.”Opgetekend in de jaren 40, gepubliceerd in 1977 en nu pas vertaald: de vitale ode van Nan Shepherd aan haar beminde Schotse bergketen Cairngorms bewandelde een talmend pad. De sublieme natuurschrijver Robert MacFarlane (voorwoord) en literair icoon Jeanette Winterson (nawoord) omringen deze editie toepasselijk als reuzen. Shepherd’s trektochten die enkel gericht waren op de glorie van onbegrensde ontdekkingen en haar zintuiglijke zinnen die zonder poëtische opsmuk de natuurelementen deden zingen, vormen het ideale alternatief voor uw afgelaste klimvakantie. 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. Its waters are white, of a clearness so absolute that there is no image for them. Naked birches in April, lighted after heavy rain by the sun, suggest their brilliance. Yet this is too sensational. The whiteness of these waters is simple. They are elemental transparency. Like roundness, or silence, their quality is natural, but is found so seldom in its absolute state that when we do find it we are astonished. 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.

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".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. Yet often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have merely gone out to be with the mountain as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with him. 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.”