Director of Programs and Education Martha Williams recommends The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd.
Nan Shepherd (1893-1981) lived for most of her life in the same house in Cults, Scotland, near Aberdeen. She attended and then taught at her local university her entire career, and in her spare time she traversed the nearby Cairngorm Mountains on foot—seemingly every inch of them.
A Modernist writer, she depicted her beloved Scottish landscape in novels and poetry, but it was in non-fiction where her love of “hill walking,” observation, and reflection found its heights.
The Living Mountain was written in the 1940s (during the closing years of World War II) but not published until 1977 after sitting in a drawer for more than four decades. An ode to the Cairngorms and Shepherd’s many years wandering the plateau’s peaks, valleys, streams, and lochs, it has become her best-known work, compared in importance to the nature writing of Muir, Thoreau, Chatwin, and McPhee.
The Cairngorms are a wild place that we get to know intimately through the author’s lyrical writing. Each short chapter focuses on a particular place among the mountains, or on an element that has shaped them. But it’s not only the exterior landscape that we come to understand through in this short book…
…the mountain is living after all, its own being apart from us humans, but willing to offer us its lessons.
Shepherd’s essays are a study in being open to constantly learning about the world around us, and she demonstrates how humbling this practice can be. I knew when I had looked for a long time that I had hardly begun to see, she writes of studying Loch Avon, a nearly inaccessible place in the Cairngorms that she returns to again and again, discovering something new about the loch, and herself, with each visit.
In a new-ish edition of the book, Robert Macfarlane offers a lovely introduction to Shepherd’s writing, describing how she 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.
In a world moving ever-more quickly, where travel to far reaches is easy and Instagrammable, I am mesmerized by Shepherd’s intense focus on what lies just outside her door and under her feet. To the unglamorous but magical places her walks take her. To her observations of the tiniest stones and the highest peaks, of standing in a cloud or near a stream, of enjoying the profound mysteries of the living mountain that she loved, mediated on, and shared with the world in her writing.
