Why did The Living Mountain wait thirty years to be published?

The plain answer is that one publisher turned it down and Nan Shepherd put it away. She wrote The Living Mountain in the 1940s, showed it to her friend the novelist Neil Gunn, sent it to a single publisher and, after that refusal, left it unpublished for the better part of three decades. Aberdeen University Press brought it out in 1977, four years before she died. According to a University of Cambridge profile, Gunn remained the book’s only reader until then.

That is the whole mystery, and it is worth stating bluntly because the book has since gathered a good deal of romance. Nobody suppressed it. It was a short, odd manuscript that fitted no shelf, and its author seems to have been in no hurry.

A short history of one short book

1. 1928 to 1933. Shepherd publishes three novels: The Quarry Wood, The Weatherhouse and A Pass in the Grampians. These, not the mountain book, are what she was known for.
2. 1940s. She writes The Living Mountain. Gunn replies with praise (“This is beautifully done”) but warns that it may be hard to place without photographs and a map.
3. Soon after. The one publisher she tries declines it.
4. 1977. Aberdeen University Press publishes it, with a map and no photographs.
5. 1981. Shepherd dies, aged 88.
6. 2011. Canongate issues a new edition, with an essay by Robert Macfarlane at the front.
7. 2016. The Royal Bank of Scotland announces a new £5 note with her portrait on it, to the evident pleasure of her old university, where she had graduated in 1915.

In the preface she added for the 1977 printing, Shepherd shrugs at the gap. Thirty years in the life of a mountain, she says, is “the flicker of an eyelid”. She does list what had changed in the Cairngorms during those years, including the growth of Aviemore and the lives lost in accidents, so the shrug is not indifference. Her point is about scale.

What kind of book it turns out to be

Anyone expecting a route guide will be disappointed. A University of Aberdeen news release described it as less a hillwalking manual than a meditation on being in the hills, and that is fair.

The central move is a change of direction. As a young walker Shepherd went for the tops, “mad to recover the tang of height”. Then a friend took her to Loch Coire an Lochain, tucked up in the hills, and she began to pay attention to what lay inside the range rather than on its summits. Cambridge’s profile sums up what followed neatly: she did not talk about walking up mountains but walking into them.

So this is a book about ways of knowing a place rather than an account of a journey. Cambridge describes a process of immersion: sleeping outdoors, wading through streams, sometimes swimming in the burns. An essay in The Conversation notes that she sometimes walked barefoot so as to feel grass, mud and heather on her skin, and traces a debt to Zen Buddhism. You do not need any of that background to read her, though it helps explain the calm.

What strikes us most on rereading is how little she asks to be admired. Macfarlane, in a line quoted by Cambridge, says her writing taught him “how to see these familiar hills rather than just to look at them”. That is a good description of what it is like to read her: your attention gets better for an hour or two, and you are not sure how it was done.

Is it really as good as its reputation?

A book can suffer from being praised this much. Readers who arrive having been told it will change their lives may find it quiet, even slight, on a first go. It is not long: Canongate lists its 2011 paperback at 160 pages, and you could finish it in an evening.

We would suggest not doing that. It reads better in sittings of a few pages, ideally a long way from a screen, and better again the second time. The sentences are exact rather than lush, and exactness takes a little longer to enjoy. If you keep a notebook, try copying out a paragraph by hand, or use her habit of looking twice as an exercise. We say more about that in our guide to keeping a nature notebook.

Two cautions about the legend. First, her reputation now rests so heavily on this one book that the novels can get forgotten. The Conversation’s essay makes a good case for The Weatherhouse as her most complex fiction, and for her place in the Scottish literary revival of the period. Second, she is sometimes treated as the founding mother of the genre, as if every recent writer descended from her. Yet this book had no public readers at all until 1977, and Cambridge notes that her work has at times risked falling from view. Her influence is real and fairly recent, which is a different thing. We look at that wider picture in our piece on the new nature writing.

Which edition, and what else to read alongside it

Canongate’s listing shows a paperback, a hardback and audio editions, with an introduction by Robert Macfarlane and an afterword by Jeanette Winterson; the audiobook is read by Tilda Swinton. Any of them will do, and second-hand copies are worth looking for. We would read Macfarlane’s introduction afterwards, since it does some of your noticing for you.

If Shepherd is your way in, the natural next step is backwards to Gilbert White, who also spent a lifetime looking at one small area, though in a very different temper. Our starter reading list suggests some other routes.

One practical note. The book can make the high Cairngorms sound like an old friend, and they are serious mountains in any season. If it sends you up there, plan properly and check the specialist forecast from the Mountain Weather Information Service before you go.