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

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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.

The book is in 12 sections, each of which explores an aspect of the Cairngorms and life on them: "Water, Frost and Snow", "The Recesses", "The Senses", "Man", "Being". Reading the book, you realise that these apparently separate sections are bound laterally to each other by rhymes of colour, thought and word, so that they form a transverse weave. In this way, too, the book's form acts out its central proposition, which is that the world will not fall into divisible realms, as an apple may be sliced, but is instead a meshwork of interrelations. "So there I lie on the plateau," writes Shepherd. 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. The twelve chapter headings, like disciples, give you a hint as to the book's Cairngorm worship: "The Plateau," "The Recesses," "The Group," "Water," "Frost and Snow," "Air and Light," "The Plants," "Birds, Animals, Insects," "Man," "Sleep," "The Senses," and "Being." It is in this last chapter that the word "Buddhism" gets mentioned for the first and last time, but its presence is there throughout, especially if you are aware of mountains' role in Buddhist history. Personally, I need go no farther than the hermit Hanshan's Cold Mountain to make the connection. Shepherd was a keen hill-walker. Her poetry expresses her love for the mountainous Grampian landscape. While a student at university, Shepherd wrote poems for the student magazine, Alma Mater, but not until 1934 was a collection of her poetry, In the Cairngorms, published. [5] This was reissued in April 2014 by Galileo Publishers, Cambridge, with a new introduction by Robert Macfarlane. [8] Non-fiction [ edit ] 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.

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Shepherd’s appearance in the public sphere will raise the profile of an author whose work has at times risked falling from view, and whose writing helped to lay the foundations for the current flowering of writing about place, people and nature. The accolade accorded her by RBS has been welcomed by the growing number of readers who enjoy Shepherd’s prose and poetry – all of which is centred on her deep appreciation of the Scottish landscape. I had spent nearly 20 years exploring them on foot and ski: winter-climbing in the gullies of their corries, camping out on the high tundra of their plateaux. But Shepherd’s prose showed me how little I really knew of the range. Its combination of intense scrutiny, deep familiarity and glittering imagery re-made my vision of these familiar hills. It taught me to see them, rather than just to look at them. The Cairngorm Mountains are a mass of granite thrust up through the schists and gneiss that form the lower surrounding hills, planed down by the ice cap, and split, shattered and scooped by frost, glaciers and the strength of running water. 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.

Nan Shepherd 1893–1981" (PDF). Scottish Literary Tour Trust. 2003 . Retrieved 22 December 2013. {{ cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= ( help) 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. That book, The Living Mountain, is a slender masterpiece of place-writing, and one of the most astonishing works of landscape literature I have ever read. I thought I knew the Cairngorms well before I encountered Shepherd’s book. Out of this awareness arises an enlargement of both the mind and the senses, of the very self, beyond the body and yet intensely of the body:Just as Rachel Carson was preparing to sound her courageous clarion call for protecting nature from political and commercial exploitation across the Atlantic, Shepherd adds a cautionary lamentation:

Unfortunately, though, these important debates are being spoiled by a vocal minority of trolls who aren’t really interested in the issues, try to derail the conversations, register under fake names, and post vile abuse. Outstanding piece of multi-media art... inspired literature, gorgeously curated music and innovative filmmaking collide in a mosaic of integrated art." She lists the ‘eruption’ of the resort of Aviemore, the growing impact of tourism and terrible tragedies of lives lost in accidents. She follows her list with a message that speaks of her intense relationship with landscape in all its moods: “All these are matters that involve man. But behind them is the mountain itself, its substance, its strength, its weathers. It is fundamental to all that man does to it or on it.” A bewitching work of wisdom and light and, for the truth it expresses, the most important record you will listen to this year." Shepherd's writing conveys wonder in the face of these mountains because she was comfortable with uncertainty. Following the young River Dee, she notes,Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-01-22 07:17:15 Bookplateleaf 0002 Boxid IA40334603 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier