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

Description

'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.

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 was added to the Royal Bank of Scotland five-pound note.

The finest book ever written on nature and landscape in Britain * * Guardian * * Most works of mountain literature are written by men, and most of them focus on the goal of the summit. Nan Shepherd's aimless, sensual exploration of the Cairngorms is bracingly different -- ROBERT MACFARLANE [A] masterpiece of Scottish writing -- Anita Sethi * * Observer * * A masterpiece . . . Amongst the greatest works of nature writing to come out of Britain -- Chitra Ramaswamy * * Scotsman * * Reading [The Living Mountain] seems to me to explain why reading is so important. And odd. And necessary. And not like anything else. There is no substitute for reading -- JEANETTE WINTERSON Tilda Swinton...narrates with a warm, slightly husky intensity that matches Shepherd's prose. The experience of reading it in a single sitting was, she said, "like riding the best possible hunter over the brightest possible hill: exhilarating barely covers it". -- Christina Hardyment * * The Times * *