Note that you may see cookies placed by Google for advertising, including the opt out cookie, under the Google. Her intense love of the Cairngorm Mountains shows with the wonderfully visual prose she puts in the pages.

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. For some people, reading so much description might be akin to reading poetry---requiring more attention to the page because there is no plot, little dialogue, and absolutely no suspense. I have carried a piece of juniper wood for months, breaking it afresh now and then to renew the spice. After some silence from her for a while, the narrator receives a message about a book she read on the theme being so very different from what she’d expected the ‘anthropocene’ to be, one which triggered off a tale, part dream, part memory of a story her grandmother had once told her, and it is this she shares with the narrator. With every step upward, disaster comes closer, but neither the tribes nor Anthropoi can or want to head back.Signed by Robert Macfarlane and Rose Strang, this new collector's edition brings together Shepherd's timeless prose with Strang's landscape paintings. It is a work deeply rooted in Nan Shepherd’s knowledge of the natural world, and a poetic and philosophical meditation on our longing for high and holy places. But there was an anonymous quote from this very newspaper on the back: "The finest book ever written on nature and landscape in Britain. For Shepherd, ‘we learn by scrutiny of the close-at-hand,’ we do not have to travel far but we do need to open our eyes and really observe rather than just look. Shepherd makes the utmost of her senses while walking through the region, often also sleeping outdoors, or experiencing extreme weather phenomena.

There is no doubt that The Living Mountain is a nice bit of writing and there were moments when I felt transported to the Cairngorms and into Shepherd's inner most musings on nature. I think the plateau is never quite so desolate as in some days of early spring, when the snow is rather dirty, perished in places like a worn dress; and where it has disappeared, bleached grass, bleached and rotted berries and grey fringe-moss and lichen appear, the moss lifeless, as though its elasticity had gone.At first glance, this seems like a deceptively simple and modest book: Nan Shepherd describes her experiences and explorations in the Cairgorm Mountains in northeastern Scotland, a region she has lived in for decades, in the first halve of the 20th century. The wisdom of this ban seems to have been borne out by the increasing dangers, brawls, ill-will and trash that have sullied the commercial summits of Mount Everest. You just have to be patient with it, read it slowly, and be prepared, as I am, to read it again some day because it surely has more to offer upon rereading. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.