Nan Shepherd’s The Residing Mountain isn’t a ebook about conquering peaks or mapping uncharted terrain. It’s as a substitute a deeply felt, poetic stumble upon with the Cairngorms.
This huge mountain vary in north-east Scotland has been formed via historic glaciers and identified for its prime plateaus, deep corries and transferring gentle. Those mountains, one of the most very best in the United Kingdom, are rugged, far off, and ceaselessly treacherous. But, they cling a stark, detached attractiveness.
First written in opposition to the top of the second one international warfare, The Residing Mountain remained unpublished in a drawer till 1977, its quiet brilliance simplest progressively recognised. Now, with writer Scribner bringing out its first US version, a brand new target audience will uncover this landmark of nature writing.
Shepherd, a Scottish author, educator, and poet, had an unprecedented courting with the mountains. One of the best ways to explain this can be a phrase she herself used: feyness. There’s a deep, nearly mystical sensitivity in the way in which she strikes throughout the panorama. She does no longer search to grasp it, however to are aware of it in detail – its ice, its rock, its gentle.
Nan Shepherd.
John Grant Roger
Every bankruptcy of The Residing Mountain specializes in a component of this huge vary: the plateau, the recesses, the crops, and, maximum strikingly for me, the water. Her description of Loch Etchachan made me wish to pass there in an instant, however such is the readability of her prose that I felt as though I already had. Its pristine waters shimmering within the transferring gentle, the stillness damaged simplest via the wind and the sheer presence of where evoked so vividly that it felt much less like studying and extra like remembering.
Shepherd’s writing jogs my memory of the Scottish poet Norman MacCaig – regardless that the place MacCaig wrote ceaselessly of Assynt within the a ways north-western nook of Scotland, Shepherd’s area was once the Cairngorms. Each percentage an awe, a humility and a way of reverence in opposition to their topic.
There’s a poetic tenderness all over Shepherd’s writing, within the cadence of her sentences, within the cautious weight of each and every phrase. At round 30,000 phrases, this can be a quick ebook, but each word feels hewn from the web page, as enduring because the granite she describes.
A line I go back to ceaselessly is person who Shepherd makes use of to explain the water on the top of those peaks: “It does nothing, absolutely nothing, but be itself.” That is the essence of Shepherd’s philosophy. The mountains don’t exist for our amusement or our conquest. They just are.
This can be a ebook no longer about “Munro bagging” – the observe of ticking off Scotland’s 282 mountains over 3,000 ft – however about being with the land, strolling it slowly, attentively, over an entire life.
A delicate land
The Residing Mountain is being republished via Scribner on March 18 2025.
Scribner
But, The Residing Mountain may be a stark reminder of the fragility of that international. Shepherd notes, as early as 1934, that summer time snow is disappearing: “Antiquity has gone from our snow.” Was once this, unwittingly, one of the most earliest literary observations of local weather trade? Round the similar time, British engineer Man Callendar had begun linking emerging world temperatures to CO₂ emissions, regardless that his findings had been pushed aside. Nearly a century on, Shepherd’s phrases really feel prophetic.
For US readers encountering The Residing Mountain for the primary time, they will surprise what a far off vary within the japanese Highlands of Scotland provides them. However those mountains comprise, in their very own approach, the spirit of the Santa Cruz mountains, the Appalachians, the Rockies. Of their solitude and permanence, they provide the similar humility, the similar admire, the similar quiet self-reflection that incorporates encountering one thing so huge and detached to human lifestyles.
With a framing advent via Robert Macfarlane, a British author identified for his books on panorama and nature, and an afterword via Jenny Odell, an American artist and educator, this version provides The Residing Mountain the platform it merits. This isn’t only a ebook about position – this can be a ebook this is position. It stays as essential because the mountains themselves, urging us to seem extra carefully. To pay attention extra deeply. To transport throughout the international with the similar quiet reverence that Shepherd as soon as did.
