Landmarks (5 page)

The Cairngorm Mountains of north-east Scotland are Britain’s Arctic. In winter, storm winds of up to 170 miles per hour rasp the upper shires of the range, and avalanches scour its slopes. Even in high summer, snow still lies in the deepest corries, sintering slowly into ice. The Northern Lights flare green and red above its summits. The wind is so strong that on the plateau there are bonsai pines, fully grown at six inches, and juniper bushes which flatten themselves across the rocks to form densely woven dwarf forests. Two of Scotland’s great rivers – the Dee and the Avon – have their sources there: falling as rain, filtered by rock, pooling as the clearest water into which I have ever looked, and then running seawards with gathering strength. The range itself is the eroded stump of a mass of magma that rose up through the earth’s crust in the Devonian, cooled into granite, then emerged out of the surrounding schists and gneiss. The Cairngorms were once higher than today’s Alps, but over billennia they have been eroded into a low-slung wilderness of whale-backed hills and shattered cliffs. Born of fire, carved by ice, finessed with wind, water and snow, the massif is a terrain shaped by what Nan Shepherd – in her slender masterpiece about the region,
The Living Mountain
– calls
‘the elementals’
.

Anna ‘Nan’ Shepherd was born near Aberdeen in 1893 and died there in 1981, and during her long life she spent hundreds of days
and thousands of miles exploring the Cairngorms on foot. For decades her reputation rested on her three fine modernist novels,
The Quarry Wood
(1928),
The Weatherhouse
(1930) and
A Pass in the Grampians
(1933), all set in small communities in north-east Scotland, and all concerned with strong young women making their way against the current of convention. But to my mind her most important book was a work of non-fiction,
The Living Mountain
, written in the 1940s but not published until 1977.

Shepherd was a localist of the best kind: she came to know her chosen place closely, but that closeness served to deepen rather than to limit her vision. She had a modest middle-class upbringing and what looked like a modestly regional life: she attended Aberdeen High School for Girls, graduated from Aberdeen University in 1915 and was appointed to the staff of the Aberdeen Training Centre for Teachers, where she became a full-time lecturer in 1919 and from which she retired in 1956 (she wryly characterized her role there as the
‘heaven-appointed task
of trying to prevent a few of the students who pass through our Institution from conforming altogether to the approved pattern’). She travelled widely – including to Norway, France, Italy, Greece and South Africa – but lived for eighty-eight years in the same house in the Deeside village of Cults, now a suburb of Aberdeen.
‘I have had the same bedroom all my life!’
she once said, gladly. The house was called Dunvegan, and it was a two-storey granite Victorian villa sunk in its own steeply sloping grounds, with a pine-treed garden backing onto the railway line. Inside, it was a maze of curtained alcoves, frosted glass, oak-lined corridors, worn flagstones, and stairs that led upwards into shadow. The house served as Shepherd’s retreat and also – in time – as a defence against those who were curious about her own refusal to conform ‘altogether to the approved pattern’. For she never married, was never known
to be in a relationship, and devoted the second half of her life to the care first of her mother, and then of her housekeeper and friend, Mary ‘Mamie’ Lawson.

Dunvegan was Nan’s demesne; the Cairngorms, which rose to the west of her home, were her heartland. Into and out of those mountains she went in all seasons, by dawn, day, dusk and night, walking sometimes alone, and sometimes with friends, students or fellow hikers from the Deeside Field Club. She had use of a howff above Braemar on the side of Morrone, which served as a base for exploring the southern reaches of the range, and access to a shepherd’s bothy north of the Lairig Ghru which was equipped with camp beds and sleeping bags. Like all true mountain-lovers, she got altitude sickness if she spent too long at sea level.

From a young age, Nan was hungry for life. She seems to have lived with a great but quiet gusto. Writing to a friend about a photograph of her as a toddler, she describes herself as
‘all movement
, legs and arms flailing as though I were demanding to get at life – I swear those limbs move as you look at them’. Intellectually, she was what Coleridge once called a
‘library-cormorant’
– omnivorous and voracious in her reading. On 7 May 1907, aged fourteen, she started the first of what she called her ‘medleys’ – commonplace books into which she copied literary, religious and philosophical citations, and which reveal the breadth of her reading as a young woman.

An extraordinary studio portrait exists of Shepherd as a university student. Her chin is tilted up, and she stares out of the top right of the frame, as if at a far-off prospect of hills. She is wearing a brocaded blouse and a broad headband with a jewel set into its centre. Her hair is parted down the middle, and thick glossy plaits tumble either side of her brow. The overall appearance is faintly Native American, without any implication of parody or foolish fancy-dress.
She is a charismatic presence: strong, bold-eyed and strikingly beautiful. This is the Shepherd who was remembered by a fellow undergraduate as
‘a tall slim figure with a halo
of chestnut plaits, a Blessed Damozel expression and an awe-inspiring dispatch case’. That ‘dispatch case’ was evidence of her commitment to study. She was shaped by the teaching of Herbert Grierson, the first Professor of English Literature at the University of Aberdeen, a ‘
long lean man
’ who ‘spoke like a torrent’. It was Grierson who led her, she later recalled, ‘to understand how minute, precise and particularised knowledge had to be, and then [to see] to our delight that it need not cease to exhilarate’. An allegiance to ‘precise’ and ‘particularised’ knowledge would become an insignia of Shepherd’s own ‘exhilarating’ work. Throughout her life she carried with her an air of what her friend Erlend Clouston calls
‘dark wisdom, almost sorcery
’. ‘Close up there were these tingling hazel eyes set between copper cheeks and a froth of wiry hair – Nan never went to a hairdresser,’ he remembers, ‘and seen from further off – striding over the moors, say – she was a swirling ziggurat of tawny cardigans, scarves and skirts. Never trousers. When the wind blew against her slender frame, she resembled a giant ruffled eagle’s feather.’

Shepherd published her three novels in an extraordinary five-year burst of creativity. Shortly afterwards came a collection of poetry entitled
In the Cairngorms
(1934), published in a handsome green-and-sable hardback by the Moray Press of Edinburgh. The print run was tiny and the copies of this original edition are now almost impossible to find. It was the book of which she seems to have been most proud. Shepherd had a clear genre hierarchy in her mind, and poetry was at its pinnacle.
‘Poetry
’, she wrote to the novelist Neil Gunn – with whom she had a flirty and intellectually ardent correspondence – holds ‘in intensest being the very heart of all experience’ and offers glimpses of ‘that burning heart of life’
. She felt that she could produce poetry only when she was
‘possess[ed]
’, when her ‘whole nature … suddenly leaped into life’. This happened rarely: it took her a quarter of a century to gather the forty-six poems of
In the Cairngorms
, and it was to be her only collection of poetry. Despite taking such patient care over the book’s creation, she was dissatisfied with it, worrying aloud to Gunn that her poetry – ‘about stars and mountains and light’ – was too ‘cold’, too ‘inhuman’. Still, she admitted, ‘When I’m possessed that’s the only kind of thing that comes out of me.’

It is true that her poems are often ‘cold’, for they excel in a spare boreal grammar (the
‘snow driving dim on the blast
’, or a winter sky that is ‘green as ice’). But they are not chilly and they are certainly not inhuman. Shepherd’s great subject as a writer across all forms was the inter-animating relationship of mind and matter. She was thrilled by evidence of the earth’s vast indifference to human consciousness: the granites and schists of the corries, and the upwelling stream water of the plateau that
‘does nothing, absolutely nothing, but be itself’
. But she also believed, like Wordsworth in
The Prelude
, that sustained contemplation of outer landscapes led – at last, after ‘toil’ – to a subtler understanding of the ‘spirit’. In the Cairngorms, therefore, she came to feel
‘not out of myself, but in myself’
, and this doubled motion – the exploratory movement out into wild landscape simultaneous with the confirming movement back into the self – lends her poems their uncanny atmosphere, whereby the hills are both hostile and habitual, unsettling and enfolding. This is keenest in the four short lyrics written in Doric, the north-east dialect of Scots, which stud the book like garnets in granite. Keen, also, in the first two lines of the opening poem of the collection, which catch much of her poetry’s strange magic:
‘Oh burnie with the glass-white
shiver, / Singing over stone …’
What a start it is – at once homely and eerie, pitched somewhere between lullaby and cantrip. Out of the water’s stone-song springs Nan’s own quick lyric. I have read those lines a dozen times or more, and they send a glass-white shiver down my spine on each new occasion. The tiny poem of which they are part still haunts my ear; I hear it when I am in the hills.

Shepherd produced four books in six years and then, for almost half a century – nothing. It is hard now to tell if her literary silence was down to discretion or to block. In 1931 – even at the apex of her output – she was smitten by something close to depression at her inability to write.
‘I’ve gone dumb
,’ she wrote blackly to Gunn that year:

One reaches (or I do) these dumb places in life. I suppose there’s nothing for it but to go on living. Speech may come. Or it may not. And if it doesn’t I suppose one has just to be content to be dumb. At least not shout for the mere sake of making a noise.

‘Speech’ did come back to her after 1934, but only intermittently. She wrote little save for
The Living Mountain
– itself only about 30,000 words long – and the articles she contributed occasionally to the journal of the Deeside Field Club.

The Living Mountain
was written mostly during the closing years of the Second World War, though it draws on Shepherd’s earlier decades of mountain experiences. War exists as distant thunder in the book: there are the aeroplanes that crash into the plateau, killing their crew; the blackout nights through which she walks to hear news of the campaigns on the one radio in the area; the felling of Scots pines on the Rothiemurchus estate for the war effort. We know that
Shepherd had completed a draft of her book by the late summer of 1945, because she sent a version to Gunn then for his scrutiny and opinion.

‘Dear Nan, You don’t need me to tell you
how I enjoyed your book,’ begins his astute reply:

This is beautifully done. With restraint, the fine precision of the artist or scientist or scholar; with an exactitude that is never pedantic but always tribute. So love comes through, & wisdom … you deal with facts. And you build with proposition, methodically and calmly, for light and a state of being are facts in your world.

Gunn instantly identifies the book’s distinctive manners: precision as a form of lyricism, attention as devotion, exactitude as tribute, description structured by proposition, and facts freed of their ballast such that they levitate and otherwise behave curiously. But then his letter turns a little patronizing. He thinks that it will be ‘difficult, perhaps’ to get it published. He suggests that she add photographs, and a map to help readers for whom the ‘proper nouns’ of the Cairngorms will mean nothing. He warns her away from Faber, who are in a ‘mess’, and suggests considering serial publication in
Scots Magazine
. He congratulates her – his ‘water sprite!’ – on having written something that might interest ‘hill & country lovers’.

Unable or unwilling to secure publication at the time, Shepherd placed the manuscript in a drawer for more than forty years, until Aberdeen University Press finally and quietly published it in 1977, in an unlovely edition with a purple hillscape on its dust jacket. The same year Bruce Chatwin’s
In Patagonia
, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s
A Time of Gifts
and John McPhee’s
Coming into the Country
appeared; a year later came Peter Matthiessen’s mountain epic,
The Snow Leopard
. To my mind,
The Living Mountain
stands easily equal to these four better-known classics of place and travel.

~

Shepherd was a word-hoarder. As Finlay and Anne gathered the Gaelic of the Hebridean moors, so Nan collected the Scots of the Cairngorms.
The Living Mountain
carries a glossary that is longer than its last chapter, and that is vivid with walking words (
spangin’
, meaning ‘walking vigorously’) and weather words (
smored
, meaning ‘smothered in snow’, and
roarie-bummlers
, meaning ‘fast-moving storm clouds’). She also treasured the Gaelic place-names of the range: Loch an Uaine, ‘the green loch’, or Stac Iolaire, ‘the eagle’s crag’. To Shepherd, such terms were means to convey both ‘exactitude’ and ‘tribute’, as Gunn had put it. She described her book as
‘a traffic of love’
, with ‘traffic’ implying ‘exchange’ and ‘mutuality’ rather than ‘congestion’ or ‘blockage’, and with a shudder of eroticism to that word ‘love’. It is both exhilaratingly materialist, and almost animist in its account of how mind and mountain interact; both a geo-poetic quest into place, and a philosophical enquiry into the nature of knowledge.

The Living Mountain
needs to be understood as a parochial work in the most expansive sense. Over the past century,
parochial
has soured as a word. The adjectival form of
parish
, it has come to connote sectarianism, insularity, boundedness: a mind or a community turned inward upon itself, a pejorative finitude. It hasn’t always been this way, though. Patrick Kavanagh (1904–67), the great poet of the Irish mundane, was sure of the parish’s importance. For Kavanagh, the parish was not a perimeter but an aperture: a space through which the world could be seen.
‘Parochialism is universal
,’ he wrote. ‘It deals with the fundamentals.’ Kavanagh, like Aristotle, was careful not to smudge the ‘universal’ into the ‘general’. The ‘general’, for Aristotle, was the broad, the vague and the undiscerned. The ‘universal’, by contrast, consisted of fine-tuned principles, induced from an intense concentration on the particular. Kavanagh often returned to this connection between the universal and the parochial, and to the idea that we learn by scrutiny of the close-at-hand. ‘All great civilisations are based on parochialism,’ he wrote: