‘The Living Mountain’

 If you’re interested in the notion of place and in natural places, Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain is excellent.

Shepherd, who taught at a college for teachers in Aberdeen, Scotland, walked the Cairngorms, a plateau with several peaks, for decades. She wrote The Living Mountain during World War II but, apparently discouraged by some remarks from a friend, put it in a drawer for 30 years.

The book was published in the 1977. It took off when Robert Macfarlane, who writes a lot about place, championed it and wrote an introduction to an edition published in 2011.

Macfarlane has a lot of interesting things to say about the book. Two remarks convinced me to read it. Macfarlane said the book had changed how he sees the world. He also said he sees something new in the book each time he reads it.

A sample of what the book is like would be more helpful than a summary of its argument.

The first impulse, in exploring mountains, is to go from peak to peak. Shepherd said she was cured when an experienced walker took her to Loch Coire an Lochain, which sits on ledge below a peak. You can’t see the lake until you’re on it. The lake, with waterfalls feeding and draining it, catches water that has run off granite. The water is clear, and so is the mountain air. The lake shines with light.

Shepherd returned to the lake with another friend, a woman, and they waded into the shining water.

 

Then I looked down; and at my feet there opened a gulf of brightness so profound that the mind stopped. We were standing on the edge of a shelf that ran some yards into the loch before plunging down to the pit that is the true bottom. And through that inordinate clearness we saw the depth of the pit. So limpid was it that every stone was clear.

 

In Shepherd’s telling, the natural world is full of elemental things: wind, light, water, mist, snow, heather, birds, deer. Those elemental things we find on the mountain can somehow awaken the elemental things within ourselves.

• Source: Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain; New York: Scribner, 2025, pp. 12-13.