The Cairngorm Mountains of north-east Scotland are Britain’s Arctic. In winter, storm winds of up to 170 miles per hour rasp the upper shires of the range, avalanches scour its slopes and northern lights flare green and red above the summits. Even in high summer, snow still lies in the deepest corries, sintering slowly into ice. Year-round the wind is so insistent that on the plateaus there are bonsai pines, fully grown at six inches, and juniper bushes which flatten themselves across the rocks to form densely woven dwarf forests.
Two of Scotland’s great rivers—the Dee and the Avon—have their sources here: falling as rain, filtered by rock, pooling as the clearest water into which I have ever looked and then running seawards with gathering strength. The range itself is the eroded stump of a mass of magma that rose up through the earth’s crust in the Devonian period, cooled into granite, then emerged out of the surrounding schists and gneiss. The Cairngorms were once higher than today’s Alps, but over millions of years they have been eroded into a lowslung wilderness of whale-backed hills and shattered cliffs. Born of fire, carved by ice, finessed with wind, water and snow, the massif is a terrain shaped by what Nan Shepherd—in this slender masterpiece about the region—calls “the elementals,”
Anna (Nan) Shepherd was born near Aberdeen in 1893 and died there in 1981, and during her long life she spent hundreds of days and thousands of miles exploring the Cairngorms on foot. Her reputation as a writer rests chiefly on her three modernist novels—The Quarry Wood, The Weatherhouse, A Pass in the Grampians—but to my mind her most important prose work has until recently been her least-known: The Living Mountain, which she wrote during the last years of the Second World War.
Crucially, The Living Mountain needs to be understood as a parochial work in the most expansive sense.
Shepherd was a localist of the best kind: she came to know her chosen place closely, but that closeness served to intensify rather than to limit her vision. She had a modest middle-class upbringing and a modestly regional life: she attended Aberdeen High School for Girls, graduated from Aberdeen University in 1915 and worked for the subsequent forty-one years as a lecturer in English at what is now the Aberdeen College of Education (wryly describing her teacherly role there as the “heaven-appointed task of trying to prevent a few of the students who pass through our Institution from conforming altogether to the approved pattern”).
She travelled widely—including to Norway, France, Italy, Greece and South Africa—but only ever lived in the village of West Cults on north Deeside. The Cairngorms, whose foothills rise a few miles from West Cults, were her heartland. Into and out of those mountains she went in all seasons, by dawn, day, dusk and night, walking sometimes alone, and sometimes with friends, students or fellow walkers from the Deeside Field Club. Like all true mountain-lovers, she got altitude sickness if she spent too long at sea-level.
From a young age, Shepherd was hungry for life. She seems to have lived with a great but quiet gusto. Writing to a friend about a photograph of herself as a toddler on her mother’s knee, she describes herself as “all movement, legs and arms flailing as though I were demanding to get at life—I swear those limbs move as you look at them.” Intellectually, she was what Coleridge once called a “library-cormorant;” omnivorous and voracious in her reading. On May 7, 1907, aged just fourteen, she started the first of what she called her “medleys”—commonplace books into which she copied literary, religious and philosophical citations, and which reveal the breadth of her reading as a young woman.
Shepherd published her three novels in an extraordinary five-year burst of creativity between 1928 and 1933. Hard on their heels came a collection of poetry titled In the Cairngorms, which was published in 1934 in a tiny print run and is now almost impossible to find. It was the book of which she was most proud. Shepherd had a clear genre hierarchy in her mind, and poetry was at its pinnacle. “Poetry,” she wrote to the novelist Neil Gunn (with whom she had a flirty and intellectually ardent correspondence), holds “in intensest being the very heart of all experience,” and offers glimpses of “that burning heart of life.” She felt that she could only produce poetry when she was “possess[ed],” when her “whole nature…suddenly leaped into life.” But she worried aloud to Gunn that her poems—”about stars and mountains and light”—were too “cold,” too “inhuman.” Still, she admitted, “[w]hen I’m possessed that’s the only kind of thing that comes out of me.”
Four books in six years, and then—nothing. Shepherd would not publish another book for forty-three years. It’s hard now to tell if her literary silence was down to discretion or to block. In 1931—even at the apex of her output—she was smitten by something close to depression at her inability to write. “I’ve gone dumb,” she wrote blackly to Gunn that year. “One reaches (or I do) these dumb places in life. I suppose there’s nothing for it but to go on living. Speech may come. Or it may not. And if it doesn’t I suppose one has just to be content to be dumb. At least not shout for the mere sake of making a noise.” “Speech” did come back to her after 1934, but only intermittently. She wrote little save for The Living Mountain—itself only about 30,000 words long—and the articles she contributed occasionally to the Deeside Field Club’s journal.
Precise information about the composition of The Living Mountain is hard to come by. It was written mostly during the closing years of the Second World War, though it draws on Shepherd’s lifetime of mountain experiences. War exists as distant thunder in the book: there are the airplanes that crash into the plateau, killing their crew; the blackout nights through which she walks to the one radio in the area to hear news of the campaigns; the felling of Scots pines on the Rothiemurchus estate for the war effort. We know that Shepherd had completed a draft by the late summer of 1945, because she sent a version to Gunn then for his scrutiny and opinion. “Dear Nan, You don’t need me to tell you how I enjoyed your book,” begins his astute reply:
This is beautifully done. With restraint, the fine precision of the artist or scientist or scholar; with an exactitude that is never pedantic but always tribute. So love comes through, & wisdom…you deal with facts. And you build with proposition, methodically and calmly, for light and a state of being are facts in your world.
Gunn straightaway identifies the book’s distinctive manners: precision as a form of lyricism, attention as devotion, exactitude as tribute, description structured by proposition and facts freed of their ballast such that they levitate and otherwise behave curiously. But then his letter turns a little patronizing. He thinks that it will be “difficult, perhaps” to get it published. He suggests that she add photographs, and a map to help readers for whom the “proper nouns” of the Cairngorms will mean nothing. He warns her away from Faber, who are in a “mess,” and suggests considering serial publication in Scots Magazine. He congratulates her—his “water sprite!”—on having written something that might interest “hill & country lovers.”
Unable or unwilling to secure publication at the time, Shepherd placed the manuscript in a drawer for more than four decades, until Aberdeen University Press finally and quietly published it in 1977. That same year, Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts and John McPhee’s Coming into the Country appeared; a year later came Peter Matthiessen’s Zennish mountain epic, The Snow Leopard. To my mind, The Living Mountain stands equal to these four far better-known classics of place and travel. Along with J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine (1967)—with which it shares a compressive intensity, a generic disobedience, a flaring prose-poetry and an obsession (ocular, oracular) with the eyeball—it is one of the two most remarkable twentieth-century British studies of a landscape that I know.
For many reasons—but especially given the current surge of interest in “nature writing”—it is a book that should find new generations of readers. I must be careful with the claims I make about it, for Shepherd despised blandishment. In a 1930 letter to Gunn she condemned “the too too flattering ejaculations of the Scots press” who had reviewed her first two novels. “Don’t you loathe having your work over-praised?,” she asked him. “It makes me feel positively nasty towards the praiser.” I find it hard to imagine “over-praising” this book, given how highly I regard it, but—the warning having been clearly issued—I will watch my step.
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The Living Mountain is a formidably difficult book to describe. A celebratory prose-poem? A geo-poetic quest? A place-paean? A philosophical enquiry into the nature of knowledge? A metaphysical mash-up of Presbyterianism and the Tao? None of these descriptions quite fits the whole, though it is all of these things in part. Shepherd herself calls it “a traffic of love,” with “traffic” implying “exchange” and “mutuality” rather than “congestion” or “blockage,” and with a shudder of eroticism to that word “love.” The language of the book is weathered in both senses: filled with different kinds of climate, but also the result of decades of contact with “the elementals.”
Tonally, it is characterized by the co-existence of “clarity of the intellect” with “surge[s] of emotion,” and generically by the commingling of field-note, memoir, natural history and philosophical meditation. It is both exhilaratingly materialist—thrilled by the alterity of the Cairngorm granite, by a mountain-world which “does nothing, absolutely nothing, but be itself”—and almost animist in its account of how mind and mountain interact.
There is an implicit humility to her repeated acts of traverse, which stands as a corrective to the self-exaltation of the mountaineer’s hunger for an utmost point.
Crucially, The Living Mountain needs to be understood as a parochial work in the most expansive sense. Over the past century, “parochial” has soured as a word. The adjectival form of “parish,” it has come to connote sectarianism, insularity, boundedness: a mind or a community turned inward upon itself, a pejorative finitude. It hasn’t always been this way, though. Patrick Kavanagh (1904–67), the great poet of the Irish mundane, was in no doubt as to the importance of the parish. For Kavanagh, the parish was not a perimeter but an aperture: a space through which the world could be seen. “Parochialism is universal,” he wrote. “It deals with the fundamentals.” Note that Kavanagh, like Aristotle, doesn’t smudge the “universal” into the “general.” The “general,” for Aristotle, was the broad, the vague and the undiscerned. The “universal,” by contrast, consisted of fine-tuned principles, induced from an intense concentration on the particular. Again and again Kavanagh returned to this connection between the universal and the parochial, and to the idea that we learn by scrutiny of the close-at-hand. “All great civilisations are based on parochialism,” he wrote finely:
To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields—these are as much as a man can fully experience.
Shepherd came to know the Cairngorms “deeply” rather than “widely,” and they are to her what Selborne was to Gilbert White, the Sierra Nevada were to John Muir and the Aran Islands are to Tim Robinson. They were her inland-island, her personal parish, the area of territory that she loved, walked and studied over time such that concentration within its perimeters led to knowledge cubed rather than knowledge curbed. What, Shepherd once wondered to Gunn, if one could find a way to “irradiate the common?” That, she concluded, “should make something universal.” This irradiation of the “common” into the “universal” is what she achieved in The Living Mountain.
Most works of mountaineering literature have been written by men, and most male mountaineers are focused on the summit: a mountain expedition being qualified by the success or failure of ascent. But to aim for the highest point is not the only way to climb a mountain, nor is a narrative of siege and assault the only way to write about one. Shepherd’s book is best thought of, perhaps, not as a work of mountaineering literature but one of mountain literature. Early on, she confesses that as a young woman she had been prone to a “lust” for “the tang of height,” and had approached the Cairngorms egocentrically, apprising them for their “effect upon me.” She “made always for the summits.”
The Living Mountain relates how, over time, she learned to go into the hills aimlessly, “merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend, with no intention but to be with him.” “I am on the plateau again, having gone round it like a dog in circles to see if it is a good place,” she begins one section, chattily. “I think it is, and I am to stay up here for a while.” Circumambulation has replaced summit-fever; plateau has substituted for peak. She no longer has any interest in discovering a pinnacle-point from which she might become the catascopos, the looker-down who sees all with a god-like eye. Thus the brilliant image of the book’s opening page (which has forever changed the way I perceive the Cairngorms) in which she proposes imagining the massif not as a series of individual summits, but instead as an entity: “The plateau is the true summit of these mountains; they must be seen as a single mountain, and the individual tops…no more than eddies on the plateau surface.”
As a walker, then, Shepherd practices a kind of unpious pilgrimage. She tramps around, over, across and into the mountain, rather than charging up it. There is an implicit humility to her repeated acts of traverse, which stands as a corrective to the self-exaltation of the mountaineer’s hunger for an utmost point. The pilgrim contents herself always with looking along and inwards to mystery, where the mountaineer longs to look down and outwards onto total knowledge.
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Adapted from the introduction to The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd. Introduction copyright © 2011 by Robert Macfarlane. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC. Featured painting: detail from “The Cairngorms From Aviemore,” by James Torrington Bell.”
