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

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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. Heel fijn onthaastend boek om te lezen, prachtig geschreven vol liefde voor de bergen van de Cairngorms, waar ze in een dorpje aan de voet ervan, haar hele leven heeft gewoond. Zo subtiel in al haar waarnemingen, heel herkenbaar, het brengt al die keren in mijn leven dat ik liep in de Schotse bergen terug. Het is er zó mooi!

In 2017 a commemorative plaque was placed outside her former home, Dunvegan, in the North Deeside Road, Cults. [18] See also [ edit ] Eye and foot acquire in rough walking a co-ordination that makes one distinctly aware of where the next step is to fall, even while watching sky and land.” Of water, she wrote, “I love its flash and gleam, its music, its pliancy and grace, its slap against my body; but I fear its strength.” Elise says that the Himalayas and Cairngorms posed different challenges but both show-cased the ground-breaking nature of these women’s paths. This year, she plans to follow in the footsteps of Freya Stark, who wrote The Valleys of the Assassins and other Persian Travels. 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.Nan Shepherd believed that it was 'a grand thing to get leave to live.' She did this by spending every minute she could in her beloved Cairngorms. In her 88-years, she covered thousands of miles on foot and became minutely aware of the rhythms of these wild places. There were magical moments, too, when I was surrounded by the silent, high landscape. I tiptoed into the crystal water of Loch Avon, thinking of Nan’s words, ‘Gazing into its depths, one loses all sense of time.’ I began to understand Nan’s world on a deeper level.” 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. a b c Ali Smith, "Shepherd, Anna (1893–1981)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, Retrieved 22 December 2013. And some, most movingly, related to the experience of being human and fully engaged in a living landscape:

The brilliant introduction notes that ‘Reading The Living Mountain, your sight feels scattered – as though you’ve suddenly gained the compound eye of a dragonfly, seeing through a hundred different lenses at once…’ I couldn’t think of a more fitting description. It is ephemeral and transcendent, but completely couched in the very real earthiness of the inhospitable environment. We feel the chill of the gales, the crisp delicacy of crunching new snow beneath our boots, the verdant scent of damp moss and marvel at the resplendent abundance of the flora and fauna in so harsh an environment. 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.The Living Mountain" is poetic prose in praise of the Cairngorm Mountains of northeastern Scotland. It's nature writing with a philosophical feeling to it. Nan Shepherd started exploring the Cairngorms at an early age, and continued mountain walking until she was aged. Although she was well-traveled, she always returned to her home near the eastern side of the mountain range. Shepherd had climbed its peaks, but she seemed to draw more pleasure from the plateau--observing wildlife, exploring the lochs, and following springs to their natural source. She was a very observant person who often took in the activity of the natural world while she maintained stillness. Shepherd wrote descriptions that use all the senses in appreciating the beautiful, but sometimes unforgiving, mountains. 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. 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.'