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*
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 * *
If you read it, you too will feel changed. This is sublime, in the
18th-century sense, when landscapes like these were terrifying. And
she achieves it in language that is almost incantatory, like a
spell
* * Guardian * *
A masterpiece . . . Amongst the greatest works of nature writing to
come out of Britain
* * The Scotsman * *
An impressionistic and weather infused memoir of her experiences of
walking and living in the wild landscape of the Cairngorms . . . A
key influence on modern nature writers such as Robert
Macfarlane
* * Herald * *
I absolutely loved The Living Mountain - part memoir, part field
notebook, part lyrical meditation on nature and our relationship
with it, evocative of Rachel Carson and Henry Beston and John
Muir
* * New York Times * *
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