The Living Mountain (Canons): A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland: 6

Product Information

An attractive reprint by The Folio Society based on teh Canongate 2014 edition with minor amendments.

And a connection like that, I'd say is an example of purest living, an existence of love and respect to nature. In the Canongate edition, The Living Mountain is only just over a hundred pages long, and yet within that short space Shepherd creates a richly detailed portrait of a place that was so important to her throughout her life – the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland. Then: "Sparks fly round one's feet as the nails strike rock, and sometimes, if one disturbs black ooze in passing, there leap in it minute pricks of phosphorescent light. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. Written in the 1940s but unpublished until 1977, Nan Shepherd’s intense, poetic exploration of the Cairngorms is now recognized as a classic.

It is something snatched from non-being, that shadow which creeps in on us continuously and can be held off by continuous creative act. Nan' Shepherd’s incredible ode to the Cairngorm mountain range is the perfect book to curl up with after a day spent out rambling, or on a slow Sunday morning with a mug of coffee. The first great English detective novel, Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone is presented in a Folio Society limited edition of 750 numbered copies.

The manuscript was completed in 1944, she showed it to a friend, who although loving it wondered whether it might not need a map and some photographs.This is part of the horror of walking in mist on the plateau, for suddenly through a gap one sees solid ground that seems three steps away, but lies in sober fact beyond a 2000 foot chasm. Such moments come in mist, or snow, or a summer’s night (when it is too cool for the clouds of insects to be abroad), or a September dawn. What both works show us is that a powerful part of the global cultural zeitgeist revolves around environmental concerns.

This is a short but powerful and effective story in that it is able to convey so much and set one’s mind thinking on a range of issues (which—and I say this only from reviews I’ve read, since I’m yet to get to the book—the author has explored earlier in his nonfic— The Nutmeg’s Curse), in its few pages. The Cairngorms are a mountain range roughly in the middle of Scotland, it is can be a breathtaking beautiful part of the world, but in bad weather can be harsh, unforgiving and unrelenting. First Edition thus, with frontispiece, plates and map; pictorial boards, backstrip lettered in silver, a near fine copy in publisher's board slip-case. She had a great economy and compression in the way she wrote, drawing out the essence of each of her very varied experiences of these mountains in a paragraph or two. The story opens with the narrator and his online bookclub friend Maansi, two people who only interact on books and know little else of each other, discussing possible themes for the next year’s reading.This contains some of the most beautiful prose I’ve read in a long time but is not going to please everyone. We feel the chill of the gales, the crisp delicacy of crunching new snow beneath our boots, the verdant scent of damp moss and marvel at the resplendent abundance of the flora and fauna in so harsh an environment.

Of course, these songs are not about those places, but they became forever linked with them in my imagination. It reminded me very much of Gregory Bateson and his intuition about everything being pervaded by 'mind'.Written towards the end of World War Two, the manuscript for 'The Living Mountain' was tucked away for almost 30 years before it was published to critical acclaim in 1977. Her intense love of the Cairngorm Mountains shows with the wonderfully visual prose she puts in the pages. Data that can be obtained through this is limited to the URL of the pages that have been visited and the limited information a browser might pass on, such as its IP address. But now and then comes an hour when the silence is all but absolute, and listening to it one slips out of time.