Walking in the footsteps of Nan Shepherd

Nan Shepherd was born 1893 in Cults, at that time a small Deeside village, now a suburb of Aberdeen. She is best known for her book "The Living Mountain," written in the 1940s but not published until 1977. She had a deep love for the Cairngorms, a connection with the landscape and nature within. She died in 1981 and is commemorated by a stone inscription outside the Writers’ Museum in Edinburgh, it reads; It’s a grand thing to get leave to live. A great saying that is hard to do!

She is now famous all over the world and pictured on our £5 note, a deserved recognition for the poetic writing of Nan Shepherd, especially for “The Living Mountain” which for anyone who loves the Cairngorms is a must read.

Having read the book back home in Australia, Kerry had to come and visit the Cairngorms. We planned four days, three nights camping but with no set route or ambition, just to be in the place.

“Yet often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone out merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with him.”

We started our stravaig from the Linn o’ Dee, going in past Mar Lodge, then over to the Punch Bowl and up Glen Quoich. Our campsite for our first night was near Bob Scott’s Bothy in Glen Lui, a beautiful day and evening.

"The greatest joy is to be so deep in the mountain that you can't hear anything but silence."

"The mountain has left me feeling enriched and diminished at the same time, a simultaneous sense of insignificance and of belonging."

Photos from day two - approaching Hutchison Memorial Hut and sitting by Loch Etchachan. A walk up Glen Derry is always a pleasure.

"A mountain has an inside as well as an outside and it is the inside that is most beautiful and precious in it. We are not bodies and passions and thoughts only, we are also these hollows and hills, this network of water and light, this totality of sky."

Thankfully the weather changed on day 3 to give a full Scottish experience. Chapter four of “The Living Mountain” is Water, we saw plenty of it.

"Yet often, by day or night, on the hillside or by the burn, a sense of something sheer and unmitigated presses so on the flesh that it is as if it were in travail. A hunger is felt for the sheerly lovely."

"Yet, though the mountain does not make men, men are inescapably formed by the mountain."

A bright, cold day on Sgòr Mòr with panoramic views of our journey and the beautiful Cairngorms, finished off a lovely four days in the hills. Later in Braemar, we wandered up to the house where Nan wrote the book (“the hoose doon by”) and, funnily enough, bumped into another Australian couple who were about to check into Downies Cottage, (“the hoose up by”). Thanks again Kerry.

"Yet our own proper stature, our own proper shape as creatures of this planet, lies not in the corpse but in the creation, in the influence we exert on our own being, by this often wayward and very mutable world. We are the mountain."

If you would like wander in the footsteps of Nan Shepherd please get in touch.