Nan Shepherd is currently number one on the list of people I want to be when I grow up. This is partly because I’ve seen a photograph of her as a young woman and I love both her attitude and her amazing hair. But it’s mostly because she lived a life which, though difficult and unusual for the time, appears to have been constructed on her own terms. She was born, grew up, lived, and died in a little cottage in the Cairngorms, teaching at a college in Aberdeen. She wrote novels and poetry and non-fiction; took lovers but never married; and devoted much of her life to exploring the wild landscapes by which she was surrounded.
I read her memoir The Living Mountain last year - a book about the Cairngorms, its flora and fauna, and the powerful, almost spiritual connection that she formed with the area after a lifetime of walking it - and it left such a lasting impression on me that it inspired a trip to Scotland.
Now, the whole of 2014 (plus the beginning of 2015) was quite the annus horribilis for me and, as a result, I regarded the rest of 2015 as a sort of psychological gap year, in which my main objective was to piece myself back together again, i.e. regain emotional stability, trust in the world, and a sense of who I was as a person. Somewhat unsurprisingly, this led to a lot of me doing whatever I felt like (consequences be damned! etc.), eventually culminating in an autumnal Nan Shepherd adventure.
Basically, despite the bafflement and concern of parents, friends, and colleagues, I decided to spend a week on my own in the middle of the Cairngorms in a shepherd’s hut with no electricity or running water. It was amazing. I walked a lot of walks, thought lots of thinks, cried a few crys, and chopped up and burned a lot of logs (turns out it’s pretty cold in the mountains in October). I shunned human companionship, drank whisky, wore thermal underwear and a silly hat, and greeted my ovine neighbours politely as I passed them. I also read a lot of books and, given the circumstances, it seemed only appropriate that I take something by Nan with me: in this case, the exceedingly apposite collection of poems, In The Cairngorms.
To be honest, poetry isn’t Shepherd’s strongest point. The Living Mountain is far better than this book - by which I do absolutely mean that it’s life-changingly good and everyone should go and read it. She struggles to find her voice at times, instead leaning too heavily on imitating older poetic traditions and employing archaisms that are both overused and overwrought.
But! But but but. There are a few moments of genuine beauty: poems in which she captures the spirit of the place she’s writing about; something real and true, crisp and clear and wonderful. For me, ‘Singing Burn’ is one such example: succinct, yet evocative. Another that I loved is ‘Strange gifts of pleasure’, a poem which is about man’s (or, in this case, quite specifically, woman’s) relationship with landscapes, the way that wild places can soothe the soul, providing a safe place in which to break yourself down into your component parts and then rebuild yourself from the ground up (”Now she may re-create herself. / Now is the primal day.”).
And yes, given that at the time of reading I was on my own in a shepherd’s hut in the middle of the forest at the end of a year of sorting my life out, it’s probably not too surprising that that particular poem leapt out at me. But 1. That was the point of the trip and 2. I’ve reread it since and I still love it.
How to read it: In the Cairngorms. In a shepherd’s hut. Obviously.