The Living Mountain: A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland

Nan Shepherd

Nov 2008 · Canongate Books

About this ebook

AS SEEN ON BBC’S WINTERWATCH WITH CHRIS PACKHAM AND MICHAELA STRACHAN 'The finest book ever written on nature and landscape in Britain' Guardian In this masterpiece of nature writing, Nan Shepherd describes her journeys into the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland. There she encounters a world that can be breathtakingly beautiful at times and shockingly harsh at others. Her intense, poetic prose explores and records the rocks, rivers, creatures and hidden aspects of this remarkable landscape. Shepherd spent a lifetime in search of the 'essential nature' of the Cairngorms; her quest led her to write this classic meditation on the magnificence of mountains, and on our imaginative relationship with the wild world around us. Composed during the Second World War, the manuscript of The Living Mountain lay untouched for more than thirty years before it was finally published.

Ratings and reviews

"So I am on the plateau again, having gone round it like a dog in circles to see if it is a good place. I think it is, and I am to stay up here for a while. I have left at dawn, and up here it is still morning. The midsummer sun has drawn up the moisture from the earth, so that for part of the way I walked in cloud, but now the last tendril has dissolved into the air and there is nothing in all the sky but light. I can see to the ends of the earth and far up into the sky. As I stand there in the silence, I become aware that the silence is not complete. Water is speaking. I go towards it, and almost at once the view is lost: for the plateau has its own hollows, and this one slopes widely down to one of the great inward fissures, the Garbh Coire."— — — Nancy transports the reader to a far far mountain of deconstruction and learning the senses again. Consider giving you a chance to enjoy this magnetic book.

as a non reader this book has inspired me to read others .the style of writing had me hooked as it reads like a poem .all the other books I've attempted never get finished .this one has helped me visualise and feel what the writer had conveyed. a very peaceful and satisfying read .thankyou

About the author

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. -- Nan Shepherd