Nan Shepherd’s Vision of the Cairngorms, and Ours

A recent trip north into the Cairngorms was, to me, a timely reminder of the restorative virtues of a weekend in the mountains for all, but especially university students beset by deadlines and other stresses. These peaks and their surrounding wilderness offer scores of trekking opportunities, a privilege too seldom taken advantage of, considering their proximity to St. Andrews. The November air, chilled but not uncomfortable, blew through a landscape on the precipice of winter, and my walking companions and I couldn’t help but marvel at a landscape still largely undiluted by visible human infringement.

What’s more, the allure of these mountains dominating the eastern Highlands is not a new phenomenon, as demonstrated by a remarkable book detailing an experience of the Cairngorms observed in the first half of the last century. The Living Mountain, Nan Shepherd’s account of her walking holidays in the Cairngorms, was written in the 1940s but not published for another three decades and stands as proof of the enduring resonance of the mountain experience.

Born near Aberdeen towards the end of the 19th century, Shepherd had burnished her reputation as a modernist novelist before writing The Living Mountain, her first foray into non-fiction and her second work to feature the Cairngorms as its subject, after a volume of poetry on the peaks and valleys she frequented was published years earlier. Whereas her early literary career had been prolific in its output, The Living Mountain was written after that early urgency had passed, as a decade had passed from the publication of the poetry collection in 1934 when the project that would become The Living Mountain began to take shape. By the time the draft of The Living Mountain had been finished in the summer of 1945, her outburst of 1928-1933, when she published three novels in a five-year span, was long past. Aside from The Living Mountain and occasion contributions to periodicals, she published little else for the rest of her life.

Shepherd’s account of her walking experiences in the Cairngorms is prescient in its recognition of and dissatisfaction with the divorce of the human condition from the natural world, a phenomenon that has only become more acute in the decades since. In this sense, The Living Mountain is a warning. The nature writer Robert MacFarlane, commenting on this process, notes that “more and more of us live more and more separately from contact with nature … we are literally losing touch, becoming disembodied, more than in any previous historical period.”

What’s more, in recent years studies have shown what most people having spent time in a natural setting already intuited — that even brief getaways to natural environments have a considerable benefit for mental well-being, not to mention physical health. The evidence for this has only increased. Contact with nature is, as a 2019 study in Scientific Advances put it, “associated with increases in happiness, subjective well-being, positive affect, positive social interactions and a sense of meaning and purpose in life, as well as decreases in mental stress.”

Neurologists are among those who have taken an ever-increasing interest in studying the virtues of time spent in nature, and their findings point in a similar direction. One such study compared walking in a wilderness setting and an urban one, finding that those in the natural setting performed better on memory tasks and showed “increased activity in the subgenual prefrontal cortex , an area of the brain whose deactivation is affiliated with depression and anxiety”, suggesting the important impacts on mood that such activities have.

Shepherd’s recognition of the almost therapeutic quality of the act of hill walking is a subject returned to many times over the course of The Living Mountain. “The sustained rhythm,” she writes, “of movement in a long climb has also its part in inducing the sense of physical wellbeing, and this cannot be captured by any mechanical mode of ascent.”

Though the experience of walking in the Cairngorms is extolled, Shepherd maintains a recognition of the hardships that come with this sort of trekking, and this interplay recurs throughout The Living Mountain. The experience of ascending into a cloud is a “delicate” one, “wet but not wetting”, while a remembrance of climbing in driving rain dramatically alters the reader’s perspective on the formerly sublime landscape. Here, “the desolation of these empty stretches of land strikes at one’s heart. The mountain becomes a monstrous place.” This tension is an ever-present element, that of the mountains as a place of risk and reward, with a heightening of the senses as a result that is not only welcome, but essential.

Nor is Shepherd blind to the potential dangers of the mountains, and in a lengthy passage detailing the deadly incidents having occurred in the Cairngorms, including a former student of hers who is lost in an avalanche and “a group of schoolchildren, belated, fail to find the hut where they should have spent the night” before perishing, she is perceptive about the anguish these tragedies have brought to small mountain communities. This acknowledgement prevents The Living Mountain from the kind of unreserved rhapsodizing that it might otherwise engage in, and for Shepherd this understanding leads to a vision of the Cairngorms that eschews too much talk of mountain places as Edenic and unspoilt, but rather as more complicated and interesting than that.

While the remedial appeal of the mountains, as a tonic offering relief from the ordinary stresses of life, whether those of an overwhelmed university student or otherwise, might seem to be in some tension with the function of stimulating contemplation or rumination that the mountains serve for some, the example of Nan Shepherd shows how these can intertwine. As her teaching position in Aberdeen and growing reputation from her fiction brought on an intensification of her responsibilities, Shepherd’s excursions into the Cairngorms became her respite. Writing to her contemporary Neill Gunn, she declared, “I’m going to run away from the novel yet once again before winter – end of next week – for another blessed mountain week.”

The experience of solitary climbing has plenty of merits unto itself, though with unpredictable conditions trekking with others is both prudent and potentially a more memorable experience. In The Living Mountain, Shepherd equivocates on the second point, writing that “the presence of another person does not detract from, but enhances” a day’s climb, “if the other is the right sort of hill companion.” That said, for those whose years of climbing have included many instances of solo ascents, many seem to have expanded the definition of companionship, at least in the mountains. The writer Kerri Andrews describes the sight of tracks left by animals and birds as transformative, as they turned a seemingly empty world “into a populous one.” She found herself “companioned” on the path. Shepherd echoes this. Passing through the Lairig Ghru pass on a solitary walk, she notes that “man might be a thousand years away. Yet, as I look round me, I am touched at many points by his presence. His presence is in the cairns, marking the summits, marking the paths, marking the spot where a man has died, or where a river is born. It is in the paths themselves; even over boulder and rock man’s persistent passage can be seen.” A peculiar kind of limbo is recognised, where the walker finds themselves in the company of others who passed through before them. As Andrews observes, separation is not possible “where there are paths, which serve as links between not only places, but people, and which cross not only space but time.”

The experience of the Cairngorms, as described through the prose of Nan Shepherd, its most erudite advocate and chronicler, stands as evidence of the enduring appeal of these mountains for those seeking days of reflection and respite from the outside world, and a timely reminder of the necessity of time spent in the natural world.

Illustration: Sarah Knight