“The Living Mountain” by Nan Shepherd

                                       

          Dear Reader, I am a bit of a reading slut. I will curl up with any book of an evening. I will pick it up, read it, digest it, dog-ear it, throw it to one side. Sometimes, however, my lust gives way to love. Then every sentence flows and trickles and eddies into my consciousness so that it becomes not an act of reading but a balm for the soul. “The Living Mountain” by Nan Shepherd is such a book. Every time I pick it up, I become very quickly serene, very gently calm, and very subtly transported. Miss Shepherd grew up on the periphery of the Cairngorm National Park in Aberdeenshire. There it was that she explored and embraced the local mountains as a child and an adult until, during the Second World War, she wrote this little gem of a book which remained unseen by the public until 1977 when it was published some 4 years before her death.

     So one evening here in North Vancouver, I was out for a walk when friends of mine appeared from their house, returning my copy of the book. They really did not have to say anything, I could tell that they too had enjoyed it. Acclaimed author Robert Macfarlane wrote the introduction. It, in itself, is about a third of the size of the book and supports it so much better because it was written in 2011. It is a contemporary picture of an old classic. So I was reminded again that here was a man, an outstanding author in his own right, who was writing a paean for an author whom he so much admired. He obviously was passionate about her writing, no praise was too high, she had written a classic, the only real book worth reading about the Cairngorms. What was so interesting to me about this introduction was that the skills in the language of the eulogist were so much better than those of the author herself. Quite simply, Robert Macfarlane is a better writer than Nan Shepherd.

    My brother, George, put me onto Robert Macfarlane a few years ago. I have read and re-read, “The Old Ways” and “Mountains of the Mind”. If ever I want to move away from the stress and anxiety of life, then I only need to reach and read a chapter of his trickling flow to be in an English meadow, gallivanting a Scottish glen or nursing a Norwegian memory. To me this is a greater transport than a TV travelogue, more inducing of a sunny somnolence than any photograph or picture. Like every act of reading we are not influenced by anybody’s commentary or any film crew’s preference. All is in our mind’s eye, all is ours and ours alone. Very rarely, in my opinion, is the film better than the book.

I have walked the Lairig Ghru, the ‘gloomy path’, several times in my life. It is a long day hike. Walking from west to east, from Aviemore to Linn of Dee, it splits the Cairngorm massif. One starts at Rothiemurchus along a cushioned peaty path by a tinkling burn accompanied by heather and Scots Pine. Deer and grouse can occasionally be seen. Soon one leaves the vegetation behind and one moves into sparse rockiness, a barren bleakness where weather can change in the blink of an eye. Cold winds whistle down the gap which soon becomes shadowed by the peaks of Ben Macdhui on one side and Braeriach and Cairn Toul on the other. The ascent becomes rocky until one reaches the Pools of Dee, the wee lochans, which give their name to the River Dee, to Royal Deeside and eventually Aberdeen, the ‘mouth of the Dee’, where it enters the sea. The descent to Aberdeenshire and Mar Lodge eventually becomes a repetition, a bookend of where one started the day amongst the heather, the trees and the wildlife. The day is a climb away from gentle, natural beginnings to an aura of bleak tumultuous possibilities and back again to a more welcoming, calmer conclusion. It is a challenge of beginnings and endings; a 20 mile day of variation and possibility; a clamber of coires and corners; a pantheon of panoramas. It is, quite simply, an absolute joy.

   Our father, Wattie Davidson, had experienced the area in the scouts as a boy. He had camped under the Shelter Stone at Loch Avon. One summer he dropped me and my younger brothers, Bill and George, at the Rothiemurchus side of the path, drove the Northern periphery and walked up from Mar Lodge to meet us. I don’t know what he expected our reaction to be. We would not have effused, if I remember, we would likely have dozed off on the drive to my Grannie’s house in Aberdeen. He would not have expected excited gratitude from his teenage sons. Yet our father was a wise man, I think that he would have known that we would still remember the experience some 50 years after its occurrence. And that, Dear Reader, would have been enough for Dr. Wattie Davidson.

I have included a 19 minute you tube record of two young fellows completing the trek from the Aberdeenshire side. It is worth a look. I know not why the Lidl bag with the bottle of vodka in it did not make its way into the backpack but each to his own!!

      Thank you for taking the time to read.