The Living Mountain (Canons): A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland: 6

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It is a scent with body to it, fruity like old brandy, and on a wet warm day one can be as good as drunk with it. Page after page, line after line, contains something as arresting as that, as plain and bracing as the water of a mountain stream. The recently announced Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing points to the growing relevance of The Living Mountain in an age of environmental crisis. In the same years that Shepherd composed The Living Mountain, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty developed his influential theory of the body-subject. But I was surprised by how little known she is, to this day, and especially compared to male explorers.

I think the environmentalists and nature lovers amongst us also gain an even deeper enjoyment from this novel – anyone who pleasures in simply going for a hike knows what deep therapy the natural world offers. Most works of mountain literature are written by men, and most male mountaineers are focused on the goal of the summit. Flowing from granite, with no peat to darken it, it has never the golden amber, the ‘horse-back brown’ so often praised in Highland burns.Most probably, Shepherd began composing it sometime in the final years of WWII, drawing on her lifelong love and intimate knowledge of mountains in a masterpiece of observation and contemplation, both precise and spacious. He thinks this book is hugely important as more and more of us experience less and less contact with the outside world; "We are, literally, losing touch.

Internationalist in its aims and appeal, and often modernist in its influences and aesthetics, Scottish culture in this period was still deeply rooted in the rural. Like her friend and fellow modernist novelist Neil Gunn, and like the Scottish explorer-essayist WH Murray, Shepherd had read deeply in Buddhism. Influenced by Zen Buddhism, the book illustrates the importance of the natural world to human well-being.It is an experience that grows; undistinguished days add their part, and now and then, unpredictable and unforgettable, come the hours when heaven and earth fall away and one sees a new creation. Her ace card is her capacity to lead the reader by the hand through the stunning Scottish Cairngorm ranges, walking together with her as an experienced and well seasoned guide along the marshy tracks, along the heathen plateaus and through the disorienting mist, seeing this magic world through her wide eyes that seem to take in every macro and micro detail. I loved each description of beautiful metallic green colors, the transparency or glimmer of water in each little loch and pond and waterfall, the changing soundscape of the howling swirl of the winds, and the shades of sunlight against the rocks. Reading the book, you realise that these apparently separate sections are bound laterally to each other by rhymes of colour, thought and word, so that they form a transverse weave. In 2017 a commemorative plaque was placed outside her former home, Dunvegan, in the North Deeside Road, Cults.

My aim is to highlight incredible women, whose achievements were often overlooked compared to those of their male counterparts.It is thick with the kinds of perception that come only from "staying up for a while"; from the repeated idle traversals of a landscape: "Birch needs rain to release its odour. Those struggles make The Living Mountain even more precious, a beautifully written and observed account of Shepherd's beloved Cairngorms, based on a lifetime's worth of walks. She was drawn to the "forceful and gnarled personalities, bred of the bone of the mountain" that lived around The Cairngorms, like the "granite boss" of the region, Maggie, who would find a place to sleep for any lost late-night rambler or weary climber. She says, “It is a 1940s tent, made of old canvas, and has a clever two-part design that allowed me to wear half of it as a poncho.