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

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Their physiognomy is in the geography books — so many square miles of area, so many lochs, so many summits of over 4000 feet — but this is a pallid simulacrum of their reality, which, like every reality that matters ultimately to human beings, is a reality of the mind.

Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-01-22 07:17:15 Bookplateleaf 0002 Boxid IA40334603 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifierShe’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.”

In 2017 a commemorative plaque was placed outside her former home, Dunvegan, in the North Deeside Road, Cults. [18] See also [ edit ] And some, most movingly, related to the experience of being human and fully engaged in a living landscape: Around the time Virginia Woolf beheld the magnificent interleaving of every part of nature in the epiphany that made her an artist and before Rachel Carson made ecology a household word, Shepherd serenades the intricate ecosystem of the mountain:

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. The term ‘nature writing’ didn’t exist in the 1940s when Nan Shepherd wrote The Living Mountain, a book in which she describes exploring the Cairngorm Mountains in north-east Scotland as a walker and writer. Shepherd sent her manuscript to a novelist friend called Neil Gunn. He responded with praise (“This is beautifully done,” he wrote) but suggested that Shepherd might find it hard to get her work published unless she added photographs and a map. Up on the plateau nothing has moved for a long time. I have walked all day, and seen no one. I have heard no living sound. Once, in a solitary corrie, the rattle of a falling stone betrayed the passage of a line of stags. But up here, no movement, no voice. Man might be a thousand years away.'

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 ] And last October, just as winter was tightening its grip upon the Highlands, I travelled to the Cairngorms to make a Secret Knowledge programme about Nan and the range. The film adapted a chapter of a book of mine called Landmarks, which explores the huge power of language – single words, strong style – to shape our sense of place.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? The Quarry Wood follows Martha Ironside growing up in the farming community of Wester Cairns. Martha, like Shepherd, goes to Aberdeen University, an environment very different to home.