The Living Mountain, Nan Shepherd

We don’t doubt that we speak for a lot of people when saying that Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain is our rock. Over time, just like the subject of which it speaks in such caring detail, our love for it has grown and strengthened slowly and steadily with every page turned. Luminous and acute observation upon wit and wisdom, layer upon layer upon layer upon layer. And again like its subject, the goal when reading this book isn’t always to reach the end — to start and finish and tick it off a list — but to weave your way into its crevices and find hidden pockets of radiance that you missed the first time around.

Anna (Nan) Shepherd was born in 1893 and died in 1981. Closely attached to Aberdeen and her native Deeside, she graduated from her home university in 1915 and for the next forty-one years worked as a lecturer in English. An enthusiastic gardener and hill-walker, she made many visits to the Cairngorms with students and friends. She also travelled further afield – to Norway, France, Italy, Greece and South Africa – but always returned to the house where she was raised and where she lived almost all of her adult life, in the village of West Cults, three miles from Aberdeen on North Deeside. To honour her legacy, in 2016, Nan Shepherd’s face was added to the Royal Bank of Scotland five-pound note.
(Biography taken from The Nan Shepherd Prize, a literary prize for underrepresented voices in nature writing, and who very kindly donated The Living Mountain to The Nature Library. Thank you!)

If you haven’t yet read it or feel like now is a good time to pick it up again, nature writer Robert Macfarlane has begun an online reading group, starting with The Living Mountain. Details of how to get involved can be found on his Twitter feed.