By George Hill

I never thought that I would need to read a book to spend time in nature. Of course, there is a certain joy in reading for specific knowledge: of flora and fauna, studying maps for new routes, or to be regaled with the faraway adventures of others. But I never thought that I should read a book to understand simply how to be in the outdoors.

I have never been so pleased to be wrong.

I know I am not alone in savouring the escapism of the outdoors. Revelling in the unthinking pleasures of exertion, exploration, and achievement; freed from the conscious mental toll of daily life. I know that many of us love nature for its healing ability to disconnect us from the physical and mental strain of lives which feel increasingly urbanised, isolated, and dislocated from a more instinctive state of being. However, this way of approaching the outdoors can undermine our own experience, as well as our ability to understand, connect with, and find belonging in nature. Perhaps due to our social dislocation from the environment, it can feel as though we have lost our sense of belonging in the lands we call home. Too often, we are lost in ourselves, rather than the environment. We focus solely on the challenge of pitting ourselves against the incline and the elements, absorbed in our own toil and achievements, not to mention the lure of Munro-bagging, summit-chasing, and Strava medals - altogether inducing a more egocentric approach to the outdoors.

Of course, it would be a mistake to imply that climbers, hikers, and other adventurers do not love the hills. As one myself, I know that their toils and exertion, the treasured time away and weeks spent yearning to return, are a deep and meaningful expression of their love of wild places. Instead, the risk lies in the ways of experiencing these activities; the temptation to centre the self rather than being grounded in the environment. To gamify, trivialise, and place a barrier between ourselves and nature, wrongly framing the natural world as a series of obstacles to be challenged and overcome, or a foe to be confronted and defeated. Common talk of ‘conquering’, ‘overcoming’, or ‘victory’ over the mountains is just one example of a mindset that leads to a more self-centred - and ultimately less fulfilling - relationship with nature. One which fails to do justice to the beauty and power of these experiences, and instead fosters a relationship where nature is used or neglected, rather than recognised, protected, and restored.

Whilst easily seductive, this is the perspective I found so pleasingly challenged by Nan Shepherd’s classic ‘The Living Mountain’, which I read between visits to the same Cairngorms through which Shepherd so evocatively and tenderly guides her reader. Shepherd’s poetic exploration of the Cairngorms flows through her own discovery of the hills and valleys, tracing the contours of a place she knew so deeply and intimately, describing in rich detail the organisms, landscapes, and forces which shape them. Whilst Shepherd never explicitly prescribes or extolls a certain way of being in the hills, her writing organically models the necessity of a different philosophy and approach to being in nature; one conveyed so authentically through a lifetime of conscious experience as to leave no doubt in its virtue.

What Shepherd models is a change for the sake of both the mountains and the reader - a disposition to help us become less dislocated and insular, to shape our experiences by making us more understanding, empathetic, and connected to the landscape and its life - and even to challenge the very boundaries of that life itself. Almost without conscious effort, what Shepherd models in The Living Mountain has a transformative power: to make us effective advocates and guardians for spaces which are ever more under threat; to give us ways of experiencing and communicating the joy of places which should need no defending or justifying; and ultimately, as I found, to intensify the meaning and beauty we find in them. Not in observing or admiring them as something exterior, but more deeply locating and reconnecting our innate ties with them, and our place among them.

Here is an attempt to weave together Shepherd’s words with my own experiences in the Cairngorms, before and after reading them for the first time – a revisitation which allowed me to clearly feel the impact of Shepherd’s writing, unlocking an unexpected and profound sense of belonging among the hills. Moreover, beginning to consider how, through embodied experience, knowledge, and love for the landscape, they are an unparalleled foundation both for enriching our personal relationships with nature, as well as enhancing our political strategies to protect it.

Crucially, it is not that nature needs our understanding to have value. In fact, it is an unequivocal tenet of Shepherd’s message that nature’s value is deep, intrinsic, and enduring. With or without the recognition or appreciation of humans, nature has inherent value and rights which should be recognised. The right to flourish and replenish, for rivers to flow cleanly and healthily, for forests to thrive, and soils to regenerate through natural cycles. This is the recognition that all life on earth, including human life, is an equal part of nature and, as such, it does not exist to serve our extractive ends. Through her writing, Shepherd unconsciously models a philosophy of being which can help both those who already love nature to embody a more authentic and meaningful connection, as well as helping those who are dislocated, separated, and unknown to nature, to find the moments Shepherd describes, where “something moves between me and it,” and “place and a mind may interpenetrate til the nature of both is altered.”

To feel belonging in this way is foundational to advocate for, and expand our recognition of more-than-human life. Shepherd poses, “simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being.” This can feel like quite an affronting statement. We are so accustomed - I would argue, victim - to a language and culture which stresses the appearance of realism and pragmatism above all, and ridicules that which is idealistic, novel, or dare I say, spiritual. A rigid imposition of black-and-white, subject-object cleavage, which forces us to ignore what we may feel and know to be true, in place of forms of knowledge which feel ‘adult’ or ‘real’.

However, to deconstruct and re-make our understanding of what is ‘living’ is itself a concrete, radical action which can redefine how we ascribe value or relate to other forms of life, and have huge cascading implications for the future of nature. Shepherd is prophetic in this sense; to be writing 80 years ago, and seeing the mountain as an interdependent web of life - “[a]ll are aspects of one entity, the living mountain. The disintegrating rock, the nurturing rain, the quickening sun, the seed, the root, the bird - all are one.” Shepherd’s personal philosophy, explored through The Living Mountain, is one which still guides the vanguard of ecological thought today.

This was something I felt so tangibly upon returning to the Cairngorms, with Shepherd’s words imprinted freshly in my mind. The trip was interpenetrated and filtered through the ways she knew so deeply the contours of these hills - with a deeply rigorous ecological understanding, rooted in such a boundless love and seamless connection with the landscape, so as to seem to be hewn straight from it. This foundation is the essential prerequisite of nature guardianship that is so often overlooked. To be effective, of course, you must be fiercely and minutely informed on scientific and ecological realities, as Shepherd was, but this must be underpinned by the preeminent, neglected truth of being deeply and authentically connected with nature, and to understand yourself as a part of it. Shepherd reflected, upon rediscovering her manuscript thirty years after her initial writing, “the tale of my traffic with a mountain is as valid today as it was then. That it was a traffic of love is sufficiently clear; but love pursued with fervour is one of the roads to knowledge.” Channelling this notion, and despite being infinitely more estranged from the landscape than Shepherd was, I found that with her words fresh in my mind, moments which had previously felt perilous or foreboding instead sparked a sense of profound connectedness - rekindling something which had been hibernating deep within me.

On the second day of our trip, after trekking up the Linn of Dee and camping by Bob Scott’s bothy, we headed towards a snow-capped Ben Macdui. Halfway up the slopes, when clouds rolled through the valley and raced past us summit-ward, and buffeting waves of wind and snow started breaking against us as they so often do here, we were swiftly blanketed under a whiteout. The Cairngorms are a place where it is easy to feel under-siege from the elements, and for good reason. We were up high, on the exposed plateau - where “gales crash … with the boom of angry seas: one can hear the air shattering itself upon rock.” It would be wrong to be complacent in such a landscape - one dotted with tragic reminders of the fatal risks you take to visit unprepared. Those who know these hills best, like Shepherd, are quick to highlight the folly of thinking you can ever fully know the mountain - that you could ever hope to predict or master the elements.

But rather than shutting out the power of the hills, or otherwise confronting them as though ready for battle, Shepherd’s words call us to explore a change in our interpretation of this power. Rather than to feel at the mercy of a cruel and foreign environment, which we must endure or conquer, the Living Mountain invites its reader to open their eyes and be present. To relish that strange point at which, somehow, “this infinitesimal cross-section of sound from the energies that have been at work for aeons in the universe, exhilarates rather than destroys.” Thinking of this, even as the dense curtains of snow and white closed out the world, I was able to feel rooted by a sense of calm and understanding. Noticing how the tendrils of wind, by which these peaks are “savaged”, had carved out intricate cornices of ice against the crag, and tracing my fingers over the beauty that emerged from the vortex. Finding a dense carpet of lichen, bursting with green and purple, rooted to the few rocks still peeking above the snow. Seeing a covey of small, feathered ptarmigans hopping across the scree - 3000 feet in the air, at home in the storm - and feeling a flush of warmth embrace my own body. Finding that moment of peace, even on this exposed shoulder of granite, I came to know what Shepherd meant by “[e]ach of the senses is a way in to what the mountain has to give.”

Nevertheless, I could not help but consider this connection between me and the place. The measured ease with which I could feel strangely solaced, even buoyed, by the power of its presence. I recalled Shepherd’s questioning “why some blocks of stone, hacked into violent and tortured shapes, should so profoundly tranquilise the mind I do not know.” Maybe it is the novelty of feeling this vulnerability, or the awe of immersion in such an actively powerful natural environment - the kind which our footprint has so sought to flatten and tame. It is a welcome reprieve from our everyday egotism that seeks to position us above nature, rather than humbly embrace our place as part of it.

Considering this, Shepherd ventures “perhaps the eye imposes its own vision on what is only a confusion: one has to look creatively to see this mass of rock as more than jag and pinnacle – as beauty.” On first reading, I wondered if Shepherd was confessing that this sense of ‘beauty’ and awe is rather baselessly conjured - the kind of whimsy born of fatigued brains and frozen bodies. But on revisiting the passage, I have come to feel that Shepherd is showing how our minds have the power to shape our perception of nature, for better or worse. What some may consider merely a ‘confusion’ is seen differently, more generously, when “a certain kind of consciousness interacts with the mountain-forms to create this sense of beauty.” I like to consider what this means: that no matter how ingrained our misconceptions around nature, no matter how dislocated we may feel, and how internalised, for many, the idea of nature as an unliving resource - we can make a conceptual shift that has the power to change this.

It felt poignant to consider this explanation knowing it was Shepherd’s own words, living on in her work, which had found and embodied this perspective within me, as I wandered the same beloved hills amongst which she roamed a near-century ago. To use Shepherd’s phrasing, as she recalls sharing her work with a friend, “our minds met in just such experiences as I was striving to describe.” As such, the landscape provides a connection with the power to reach across the temporal rift between Shepherd and her reader. It the power of this connection - the ‘contagious essence’ - which ties generations together through the land, reflecting the intrinsic and enduring virtue of these places, and the universal truth of our place among them - which can help shape our current efforts to share this blossoming of ‘being’ from the ‘unbeing’. Moving from our own minds, to the minds of others, and eventually beyond, back into our communities and shared beliefs.

This ‘contagious essence’ is born from the permanence of these places. The contours of this arctic plateau were last carved by the retreat of an ice-age glacier ten millennia ago. These slopes, year after year, freeze after thaw, and night after day, have stood solid and unmoved. To think of the daily rhythms of life across the plateau, both big and small, unwatched by human eyes. To feel the current of the same rivers which have raged in flood and dried to a trickle, only to flow again. Hills which Shepherd walked almost a hundred years ago, and will be walked by others a hundred more years from now. Like our rivers, trees, and soil, these hills provide a constant thread which bears the marks of time, and allows us to chart our own impact upon them. After hundreds of millennia spent treading lightly upon this earth, our industrial acceleration over the last 300 years has already left deep scars on this place. Years spent encroaching, and enclosing, and logging, and overgrazing, and shooting, and draining, and burning, and polluting. Our actions will continue to define, for better or worse, the future of this world. Shepherd felt clearly the persistence of life on the plateau, seeing how unique and interdependent forms of life cling to its most remote and brutal slopes - “[n]owhere more than here is life proved invincible. Everything is against it, but it pays no heed.” But human impacts are pose a new threat, on a scale which even these resilient corners of life may not survive. The Cairngorms, even since Shepherd’s day, have been changed. On our current path they will be unrecognisable. Condemned, at the mercy of decisions made beyond their horizons.

Reaching a hand across time and space, the giant and ancient power of these hills is to offer the ultimate perspective on our own fallibility. To show what is most important to value and protect. To make man-made fabrications – the worship of capital, the exploitation and destruction of nature, and fuelling all, our suicidal egocentrism – pale in the light of it. I wonder, if our laws were made in such a place, would stubborn minds finally be made to find their enlightenment, to set us on a different course.

Finally, I consider how Shepherd writes of these living mountains as “matter impregnated with mind … a living spirit, a glow in the consciousness that perishes when the glow is dead.” As guardians of nature, seeking to enshrine the intrinsic rights within - it is alive in our understanding. In the face of seemingly impassable structures and obstacles, under all of the weight of opposition and misunderstanding - one thing we can do is to find and preserve this glow. To see the ‘living spirit’ of nature in its light, and help others to find their way towards it. To actively and consciously experience it. To embody our connection and our place in nature. To be out, not in, on, or over, but truly among the hills, as Shepherd was - “to be with the mountain as one visits a friend, with no intention but to be with him.”

About the author - George Hill

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