Its waters are white, of a clearness so absolute that there is no image for them. Naked birches in April, lighted after heavy rain by the sun, suggest their brilliance. Yet this is too sensational. The whiteness of these waters is simple. They are elemental transparency. Like roundness, or silence, their quality is natural, but is found so seldom in its absolute state that when we do find it we are astonished. Summer on the high plateau can be delectable as honey; it can also be a roaring scourge. To those who love the place, both are good, since both are part of its essential nature. And it is to know its essential nature that I am seeking here. To know, that is, with the knowledge that is a process of living. This is not done easily nor in an hour. It is a tale too slow for the impatience of our age, not of immediate enough import for its desperate problems. Yet it has its own rare value. It is, for one thing, a corrective of glib assessment: one never quite knows the mountain, nor oneself in relation to it. However often I walk on them, these hills hold astonishment for me. There is no getting accustomed to them.” Nan Shepherd 1893–1981" (PDF). Scottish Literary Tour Trust. 2003 . Retrieved 22 December 2013. {{ cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= ( help) Macfarlane, Robert (27 December 2013). "How Nan Shepherd remade my vision of the Cairngorms". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 24 November 2019. Of water, she wrote, “I love its flash and gleam, its music, its pliancy and grace, its slap against my body; but I fear its strength.”

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Out of this awareness arises an enlargement of both the mind and the senses, of the very self, beyond the body and yet intensely of the body: Nothing personal Tilda, but there must be a million more suitable readers, perhaps not famous, available. The Living Mountain: Pioneering Scottish Mountaineer and Poet Nan Shepherd’s Forgotten Masterpiece About Our Relationship with Nature – The Marginalian

So vivid was this journey into the living mountain that I feel so much more relaxed after the book, as one would after a beautiful holiday immersed in nature. Nan Shepherd logged decades in Scotland's Cairngorms, a mountain range in that country's northeast, and wrote a book about her relationship with those mountains in the 1940s. The Living Mountain did not see print, however, until the 1970s. And now, among a subset of nature-writing fans, it is a mini-classic of sorts, a Scottish Walden born of the mountains instead of a pond. It was to be Elise’s first time in the Scottish Highlands and while she chose the summer of 2019 for her trip, she was treated to a full range of weather. I liked the book immediately. It’s like one long poem and the way she describes elements, such as water and the mountains, is beautiful. I wanted to explore as Nan would have done – and to try to understand her motivations and her love of the Cairngorms.”Shepherd does for the mountain what Rachel Carson did for the ocean— both women explore entire worlds previously mapped only by men and mostly through the lens of conquest rather than contemplation; both bring to their subject a naturalist’s rigor and a poet’s reverence, gleaming from the splendor of facts a larger meditation on meaning. Yet Elise, 30, was determined to make her adventure as authentic as possible. Her aim was to follow in the footsteps of the late Nan Shepherd, the trailblazing Scottish hillwalker and writer in the early to mid 20th century. As you might have guessed, Shepherd was a wayward type. She was an English teacher for many years in Aberdeen. Her job, as she understood it, was to prevent students from conforming to the "approved pattern’ of life". She followed this herself and was itinerant by nature. In her lifetime, she travelled to North Africa, Greece, and Italy, but never moved permanently away from the village of West Cults, Deeside. 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. Light in Scotland has a quality I have not met elsewhere. It is luminous without being fierce, penetrating to immense distances with an effortless intensity. So on a clear day one looks without any sense of strain from Morven in Caithness to the Lammermuirs, and out past Ben Nevis to Morar. At midsummer, I have had to be persuaded I was not seeing further even than that. I could have sworn I saw a shape, distinct and blue, very clear and small, further off than any hill the chart recorded. The chart was against me, my companions were against me, I never saw it again. On a day like that, height goes to one’s head. Perhaps it was the lost Atlantis focused for a moment out of time. I was in my late 20s, I had recently suffered a period of crippling anxiety and I decided I wanted to be fearless, to do something I wouldn’t normally dare. I decided to set out to follow in Alexandra’s footsteps.”