Why did I love this book?
To my mind the finest meditation on the experience of walking among the hills, looking inward and out. Written in the Forties, this short book is at once timeless and decades ahead of its time. It is profoundly philosophical yet utterly rooted in experience - environmental, ecological, spiritual, the product of many years of wandering and musing in the Cairngorms. Hauntingly lovely and true, without ever being inflated or sentimental, it goes to the heart of our being, and the mountains’ being. I had the pleasure and privilege of recommending this long out-of-print book to Canongate for its series of Canongate Classics, since when it has become more widely read and treasured.
6 authors picked The Living Mountain as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
'The finest book ever written on nature and landscape in Britain' Guardian
Introduction by Robert Macfarlane. Afterword by Jeanette Winterson
In this masterpiece of nature writing, Nan Shepherd describes her journeys into the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland. There she encounters a world that can be breathtakingly beautiful at times and shockingly harsh at others. Her intense, poetic prose explores and records the rocks, rivers, creatures and hidden aspects of this remarkable landscape.
Shepherd spent a lifetime in search of the 'essential nature' of the Cairngorms; her quest led her to write this classic meditation on the magnificence of mountains, and…