Remembering Nan Shepherd

In the months​ following my parents’ deaths, I decided to buy a flatbed scanner as a partial fix for the drifts of paper they had accumulated after sixty years in the same house – receipts, letters, photographs, notes and diaries. I found that scanning their old 35mm slides kept their absence at bay. Scanning is a robotic task. Stretch the marquee tool. Preview the image. Select the resolution. Name the file. Scan. A file opens and I’m staring at a summer day in 1976 or a picnic in 1980, marvelling at sandals and knitwear, deckchairs and azaleas. Some of the older slides record the construction of their suburban house in 1964 on fields above the village of Cults, in the valley of the River Dee, just outside Aberdeen. One slide taken before the house was built shows the field with its drystane dyke made from the detritus of the last Ice Age. On the other side of this wall was the Quarry Wood, a long-overgrown granite works which gives Nan Shepherd’s first novel its title. My father once told me that the hardcore base of our driveway was made from the Quarry Wood wall. Sure enough, another slide showed the boulders chipped bone-white and crushed into a foundation. Growing up in Cults, I felt the presence of this past – walls, cairns, excavations – almost like the imprint of flagstones under linoleum. As Shepherd put it in The Quarry Wood, ‘the stones summed up existence.’

My parents were not from Cults and they didn’t know many older folk in the village, apart from Nan Shepherd. She had taught my mother, whose name was May Salmond, between 1950 and 1953 at Aberdeen Training Centre, where students were ‘trained’ to be teachers. The general method of instruction conformed to the norms of the 1950s classroom: students were addressed like children, desks were laid out in rows and the lectures were practical rather than intellectual. Shepherd was an exception. Her English literature class was for her students’ educational benefit rather than that of the children they might one day teach. ‘I loved her from the first class we had with her,’ my mother said. When my parents moved out to Cults a decade or so later, she was happy to renew the acquaintance. My mother referred to her as ‘Nan Shepherd’, never ‘Nan’ or ‘Miss Shepherd’; it was always both her names because she was a both-her-names kind of person. People in the class knew of her love of the Cairngorms and of Deeside in particular. They knew she had written novels, but my mother certainly hadn’t read them, nor had most of the other students. The novels weren’t the point. The point of Nan Shepherd was herself. My mother described what a thrill it was to be carried along by her flow, to circle in the eddies of her experience and her asides. She liked to arrange the students in a horseshoe, a corrie of attention, placing herself in its opening and channelling an ice torrent of thought that refreshed or chastened depending on the readiness of the listener. Her lectern was usually adorned with flowers and she would lean on it like the living subject of a Rossetti painting, removing her cardigan with a flourish at the start of the class.

My own recollection of Nan Shepherd is little more than a fragment. I remember visiting her house, Dunvegan, a large granite semi with a garden that sloped down to the old railway line. There was an austere grandeur to the house, as there was about its elderly owner. What stays with me is the boredom: the dreadful stillness of adult conversation in the conservatory, my mother’s irritation with my restlessness. It wasn’t much of an encounter. We were at opposite ends of life, Nan Shepherd and I. ‘She asked to see you,’ my mother told me. ‘She said that I should “bring the child.”’ But my presence tested the patience of host and guest alike, until I could force our escape back up the brae to the new houses Shepherd disliked. ‘The houses stretch up and up the hill as far as my childhood’s playground, the Quarry Wood,’ she complained to her friend Edith Robertson. ‘But at least they can’t build up my view in front … so I still rejoice in space and distance and the sky.’

Not long after this visit, Shepherd departed to a nursing home further into Deeside. ‘It’ll be odd for me to have a new address,’ she told the writer Jessie Kesson, ‘for I’ve never lived anywhere but here. But if people will take on more than the allotted share of life, they shouldn’t take on more than the allotted share of space!’ No one in those days could say that Shepherd took up too much cultural space. When a retired geography teacher, Roy Howard, published a history of the village, she didn’t even warrant a mention. It’s been quite a transformation, not just since her death in 1981, but since the quiet decades that followed it. The Living Mountain, her lyrical celebration of the Cairngorms, is now heralded as ‘the finest book ever written on nature and landscape in Britain’, as one Guardian writer put it. Her words are carved into an Edinburgh pavement: ‘It’s a grand thing to get leave to live.’ Her image as an ardent young woman graces the Royal Bank of Scotland £5 note. There’s a growing academic literature. Every year brings a stream of new tributes. A play performed at the Pitlochry Festival Theatre last year – Nan Shepherd: Naked and Unashamed – captures the tenor of recent appreciation (it’s being reprised in June). ‘She loved to strip naked and swim in lochs,’ its writer and director, Richard Baron, told the Herald. ‘She didn’t do housework and … she practised free love.’ I guess that’s one way of saying that she was too posh to do the scrubbing (she had a live-in housekeeper, Mary Lawson) and was tight-lipped about her intimate life.

One explanation for the current enthusiasm for Shepherd is her previous neglect and the romantic idea of unrecognised genius. Another is the potent image of the manuscript in the drawer: The Living Mountain, written in the 1940s, wasn’t published until 1977. In many ways she remains an opaque figure. She’s still best known for her rhapsodic mysticism, as well as for being the banner under which women’s experience of and writing about the outdoors assailed a hostile publishing genre. Literary reputations always have a life of their own, but I struggle to reconcile Nan Shepherd of Cults with the cult of Nan Shepherd.

Her correspondence, edited by Kerri Andrews, takes us back to Cults.* Much of the collection consists of letters from a select group: the poets Marion Angus and Helen B. Cruickshank, the novelist and playwright Jessie Kesson, and the historian and writer Agnes Mure Mackenzie. Together with Neil M. Gunn and Christopher Grieve (better known as Hugh MacDiarmid), they form what Andrews describes as Shepherd’s ‘epistolary world’.

There’s not a lot of gossip in the book. Nor is there much nature reverie, but this is perhaps a necessary restoration of balance. It’s good to be reminded that Shepherd was just another writer, that she took it seriously, and had all the usual preoccupations and anxieties. Mackenzie is the pick of her correspondents. ‘Nancy wumman. I am no hand at letters’ is one of her brisk openers, though it is untrue: her letters are often funny and unsparing. After reading the newly published Quarry Wood, she reassures its author that ‘the thing is a great book, if there’s any meaning in the adjective. And the general lay-out is all right: the arrangement is logical & inevitable. What’s wrong is in the actual writing.’ ‘Do come round by Aberdeen,’ Shepherd writes to Gunn, ‘and confirm me in my faith that art matters supremely.’ The letters suggest an epistolary world at some remove from ordinary folk. This of course makes it harder to write about them: ‘I haven’t the necessary contact with life,’ Mackenzie tells Shepherd, ‘I don’t know how people talk’ (her growing deafness might have been an explanation unavailable to the others). Shepherd writes to Gunn that ‘our housekeeper, an unlettered person but a character, enjoyed Morning Tide exuberantly.’ She reports to Grieve about introducing his work to the Scottish Literature and Song Association and the Workers’ Educational Association: ‘The audience was definitely not high-brow – indeed the former is a body whose usual faire is Lady Nairne’s songs or a demonstration of country dancing … one fat comfortable elderly wife … took every point in the most unexpected way … you certainly got them.’ Yet they are ill at ease with being rarefied: ‘I’m not really a literary person,’ Shepherd says to Gunn. ‘There’s a great big bit of me detached, and amused, and quite often cynical, that weighs the wind of the Spirit with the weights for corn and potatoes and things.’ Gunn does the same thing: ‘I am not really a literary man. I realise this with striking force when I meet many of my friends (e.g. C.M. Grieve). I play a little bit at it, but I laugh a little too.’

It all makes me wonder whether Shepherd is an ideal avatar for inclusive writing. It’s great to have a £10,000 Nan Shepherd Prize for under-represented voices in nature writing, but does its value lie as much in admonition as in tribute? According to the late ecologist Adam Watson, Shepherd was ‘a snob towards most working-class folk’. In a 2016 review, he described The Living Mountain as ‘fanciful, contrived and fundamentally anthropocentric’ and complained that ‘she did not know the Braemar area or its folk well.’ Shepherd does deal with humans in The Living Mountain – one chapter is called ‘Life: Man’ – but her Cairngorms are a transcendent place, not an artefact of human labour. Watson wasn’t easy to please, but his view was shared by other locals. In 2003, my mother hosted a group of former students and neighbours to reminisce about Shepherd, at the behest of the geographer Hayden Lorimer. In Lorimer’s recording, one Cults resident recalls her mother saying that on the morning train to Aberdeen Shepherd ‘never took them on because they were ordinary’. Another chimes in: ‘She was an intellectual snob, no question … there were certain people she wasn’t interested in.’ ‘She was remote from us,’ my mother’s friend Rose Graham added. Above the clink of teacups, the group exchanged outlandish theories about Shepherd’s love life and speculated on the whereabouts of her correspondence.

Shepherd must have been aware that her words might one day be read by strangers, not least because she gave some of her correspondence with Gunn to the National Library of Scotland in 1971. But the letters seem unencumbered by writerly self-consciousness. Gunn and Shepherd didn’t meet often – Andrews notes that ‘their friendship exists mostly in their letters’ – but over more than forty years they developed a rare kind of ease. Shepherd addresses him as ‘Neil me lad’. He tells her that ‘a letter like yours is the birch tree itself & the afterglow through & beyond it.’ In 1964, after his wife’s death, Gunn is unable to recall whether he has already written to Shepherd:

I feel tired. However, I can still float out into things, and though the flowers this summer have whiles been too lovely & me looking at them alone, I can deal with them, too, in my (& your) wordless fashion. In this, we have always gone the same way, & it’s a way with silent companionship in it. So if I really didn’t write to you, still I did.

In my mother’s closing years, her spark dampened by dementia, I showed her the Shepherd £5 note. She recognised her old teacher, but beheld the money with a confusion that was something more than the disease. How do we account for the fact that writing that was once published but didn’t sell is now its own publishing currency? Canongate republished The Quarry Wood in 1987, then The Weatherhouse in 1988 and then in 1996 collated these two, along with A Pass in the Grampians and The Living Mountain, in an edition called The Grampian Quartet. But it took the apostolic arrival of Robert Macfarlane, who proclaimed her works in The Old Ways and in an introduction to the 2011 edition of The Living Mountain, to turn Shepherd into a publishing sensation. It’s a chippy Aberdonian thing to say, but I notice that this validation had to come from elsewhere, that there’s the power of good writing and the power to deem writing good and that these are different things with a distinct geography (elsewhere needn’t be so far away: Edinburgh-based Canongate is an ingredient in the Shepherd revival). It’s notable how little the correspondence contains about The Living Mountain. There isn’t even a letter from Shepherd that mentions its publication in 1977 by Aberdeen University Press (several of the literary friends who might have cheered were dead), nor was there much discussion of it in the 1940s. Mackenzie and Gunn both offered advice but neither was optimistic about the book’s prospects: ‘I can see, Nan, that the world doesn’t want the well water,’ Gunn wrote. ‘It doesn’t know that it needs it.’

In Aberdeen in the 1970s and 1980s, only oil wells mattered. Parts of the city started to shine as grey granite was cleaned up. But something subtle began to change in the years after Shepherd died. In February 1983 Bill Forsyth’s film Local Hero was released, about a village that yields to the temptations of oil wealth (‘we won’t have anywhere to call home but we’ll be stinking rich,’ one resident says). The conscience of Fulton Mackay’s character, an old beachcomber called Ben, eventually saves the village, but there was no saving Aberdeenshire from oil. In Cults, stables and workshops were turned into mews and executive apartments; the quarriers’ cottages described in The Quarry Wood were replaced or upgraded. In May 1983, Aberdeen beat Real Madrid 2-1 in extra time to win the European Cup Winners’ Cup. A far from jubilant city went nuts. In September the same year, a random horror shook our village: a taxi driver called George Murdoch was robbed of £21 of takings and garrotted with a cheese wire just up from the old station at the east end of Cults. No one was charged. Then in October, I was cycling to school when I heard the sound of an explosion. The cushion of my bike tyres meant that, unlike most people, I didn’t feel the ground shake. Several people had reported the smell of gas near the Royal Darroch Hotel, four hundred metres east of Shepherd’s house. The Royal Darroch’s ‘Texan-sized’ cocktail bar was an embodiment of Aberdeen’s oil wealth and had hosted many of its beneficiaries. At 8.53 that morning the ground floor collapsed into its basement, parts of the roof were blown off and masonry, wood, glass and plaster were cast across the North Deeside Road. Six staff and guests were killed, scores more injured.

This local tragedy – caused by an unvented leak from a fractured gas pipe – didn’t really have anything to do with the fading promise of oil, but it somehow announced change. Even now I find the sight of it hard to dislodge. My paper round took me past the shell of the Royal Darroch, burned curtains flapping, as the fatal accident inquiry dragged on for a year and the hotel couldn’t be demolished until it concluded. Sheriff Principal Stewart Bell eventually ruled that the incident had been avoidable, but didn’t recommend bringing charges. The more obvious end to the boomtown years came in July 1988 when a gas explosion on an Occidental Petroleum Corporation rig, Piper Alpha, killed 165 workers and two rescuers. It was the world’s worst offshore oil and gas disaster. No one was charged in connection with that either. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up later that year. It would tell us that oil was our common ruin.

In the foreword to The Living Mountain, Shepherd complains that ‘Cairn Gorm grows scruffy, the very heather tatty from the scrape of boots,’ though these scrapes were minor compared with the gashes caused by the ski developments at Coire Cas and the construction around the turn of the millennium of the (now broken) funicular railway. Outdoor gear had evolved from green waxed cotton to pink Gore-Tex, protecting our bodies from rain and sweat while introducing to them a cocktail of per and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAs) – the forever chemicals. Fossil fuel wasn’t the antithesis of outdoor culture but an enabling condition. Three decades after Shepherd’s death in 1981, a new readership found its way to The Living Mountain, a manuscript Shepherd had conceived as an escape from the horrors of war but which now afforded shelter in a different climate. ‘In that disturbed and uncertain world,’ she wrote in the foreword, ‘it was my secret place of ease.’ It’s easy to see the contemporary resonance, but I don’t altogether trust this return to the 1940s and to some prehuman essence of nature: light and form, naked birches, elemental forces, feyness of body and spirit, gaunt corries, the churr of ptarmigan, white cumuli low on the horizon. Our yearning for a world innocent of carbon knowledge feels like a distraction from declining snow cover and biodiversity loss in the present, from stressed Cairngorm habitats that are too warm or too cool, too wet or too dry. I find myself unsure of the wistfulness and retrospection that Shepherd’s name now evokes.

I’m not really in a position to complain about Shepherd being pressed into service, having made my own ruthless deployment of The Living Mountain. On a Saturday morning in 1984 I took the bus into town, flush with paper-round money, which I usually spent on cassettes for my Sony Walkman. On that Saturday I bought Bob Dylan’s Planet Waves, discounted at £3.49 (an eccentric choice when my peers were listening to Simple Minds or Big Country). At eleven years old, I found having money to spend liberating, but I had to contend with my mother’s disapproval at the way I spent it. In those days, I felt her judgment was worth appeasing or diverting. In Bargain Books on Union Street, a mountain of remaindered Nan Shepherds rose vast and silent. A copy cost twenty pence, or maybe it was fifty, but it wasn’t much for a votive offering. When I got home, the conversation played out as I expected.

‘What did you get?’

‘A tape, and a book.’

‘Och, you’ll fairly get through the money that way,’ she said, eyeing the cassette. First the sting, then the antidote. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘that’s Nan Shepherd.’