The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd

A slim volume of Place Writing

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Famously, this book was drafted thirty years before it was published; it languished in a drawer and only reached the reading public in 1977, four years before Nan Shepherd died. I don’t know how many times I’ve read this book—I never tire of it—and I’m thrilled to share it with you today.

At the beginning of this slim volume you’ll find a 26-page introduction by Robert Macfarlane. When you consider that Nan Shepherd’s writing covers just over one hundred pages I feel a sense of disproportion here. Even though this section provides a comprehensive critical analysis, I think it steals a bit of Shepherd’s thunder, so I suggest you go straight to her own Forward, which is short, then carry on reading. Afterwards, I would encourage you to revert back to Macfarlane’s Introduction to learn more about when, where, and how it was written.

There are twelve chapters beginning with Chapter 1:The Plateau, and ending with Chapter 12:Being.

‘Summer on the high plateau can be delectable as honey; it can also be a roaring scourge. To those who love the place, both are good, since both are part of its essential nature. And it is to know its essential nature that I am seeking here’ (p1).

The Cairngorm Mountains

So we are off to a good start. We understand that there’ll be high places, rugged places, much-loved places. Indeed, Shepherd is going to take us into the Cairngorm Mountains, in Scotland, not as a guide or a teacher but as a friend.

This is a wonderful book. It shows us how to look at the natural world, how to interact with it, and how to respect it. It’s about loneliness and being alone in the hills and high places of this terrain. The writing is authoritative and breathtaking. There are excellent examples on every page of powerful and visceral descriptions.

Shepherd uses lyrical magical words to evoke water in its different states: when it flows, when it freezes, when it snows. Wading into a narrow loch, she describes the experience in detail, with such clarity: ‘My spirit was as naked as my body. It was one of the most defenceless moments of my life’ (p13). My stomach shrinks on reading this… I sense her bravery. Do you?

Why is this Place Writing?

I think a place writer must fully know a landscape in order to express it with clarity. Therefore, one of the criteria for this genre, in my opinion, is evidence of repeated visits. Shepherd spends years in this area, becoming familiar with it in all seasons, and this results in precise authoritative prose:

‘When the snows melt, when a cloud bursts, or rain teems out of the sky for days on end without intermission, then the burns come down in spate’ (p26).

Accepting that many of us have little experience of being in or on mountains, I marvel at Shepherd’s ability to convey her own exposure to, and knowledge of, this specific landscape in such an easy manner—you can almost imagine sitting down and drinking tea with her while she talks about these beautiful and dangerous locations.

We hear of people who walk into the mountains never to return and, in telling these stories, Shepherd resists turning them into dramas. She reflects, in her down-to-earth style, on the power inherent in the rock and the fallibility of human nature.

‘Blizzard is the most deadly condition of these hills […] Of the lives that have been lost in the Cairngorms while I have been frequenting them (there have been about a dozen, excepting those who have perished in plane crashes) four were lost in blizzard. Three fell from the rock—one of the these a girl’ (p37).

Yet again I have a visceral reaction to Shepherd’s words, to facts so calmly presented; I swallow hard, worrying about the circumstances of these tragedies.

Readers and writers will equally enjoy this book. It’s a treasure that mercifully made it out of a drawer and into our hands.

• Do you know the Cairngorms?

• What books have you read that give you a physical reaction?

• If you’ve read this one I’d love to know what you think of it.

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Credits & Links

Image above is my own.

Shepherd, N. (2011). The Living Mountain. Canongate: Edinburgh. This affiliate link takes you to my online bookshop, but of course you can buy it elsewhere.

This post is one of a series—see my page Recommended Books. To my knowledge, no shelves exist in libraries or bookshops labelled ‘Place Writing’ and these books in my opinion are good examples of the genre. I see it as my mission to create more awareness of Place Writing. I hope that one day books like these will gain recognition as epitomising the genre and officially be categorised as such.