The Living Mountain: A Cairngorms Journey Secret Knowledge

The Cairngorm Mountains in the Northeast of Scotland

are Britain's Arctic.

Born of fire,

carved by ice,

shaped by wind, water and snow,

they are among the wildest landscapes of our archipelago.

These are the mountains I know best and I've known longest.

I first walked here as a boy

more than 30 years ago with my grandparents,

who lived on the northeast slopes of the range.

I've since crossed the range on foot and ski many times.

I thought I knew these peaks and glens really well,

until, in my late twenties, I picked up a copy of this book

The Living Mountain, by a woman called Nan Shepherd.

It was written during the Second World War

and amazingly, it lay in a drawer for more than three decades

before at last being published in 1977.

Over the years, I've read and reread Nan's magical book.

It has changed the way I see not only these mountains

but all mountainous landscape.

More and more people

are now finding their way to Nan Shepherd's words.

But why does her little book, written 70 years ago,

speak so powerfully to tens of thousands of people today?

I believe that in The Living Mountain, Shepherd wrote

one of the most brilliant works of modern landscape literature.

A beautiful hymn

to what she called "living all the way through".

Braeriach.

Ben Macdui.

Cairn Toul.

These are some of Britain's remotest and highest places.

Places which drew Shepherd to them,

and to which I have also returned again and again.

Like me, Nan fell in love with what she called "the tang of height".

WOMAN RECITES: "Summer on the high plateau

"can be as delectable as honey.

"It can also be a roaring scourge.

"To those who love the place, both are good,

"since both are part of its essential nature.

"And it is to know its essential nature that I am seeking here."

Nan Shepherd was born in the village of Cults

on the outskirts of Aberdeen on the 11th of February, 1893.

And for 87 years, she lived in this same house.

"I've only had one bedroom my whole life," she once said, proudly.

She read avidly as a child and began writing poetry as a teenager.

In 1915, she graduated with the class prize

in English literature from Aberdeen University.

Soon afterwards, she joined the Aberdeen College of Education,

where, for 37 years, she taught teachers how to teach.

It might seem a fairly conventional career

but Nan's free spirit was never far from the surface.

She just was an outstanding sort of character.

Very warm, friendly, laughing,

cuddly and very different from anyone else in Aberdeen.

Quite unique.

She looked different.

She had very wispy, flying-about hair,

and she wrapped it round her ears. You remember in the '20s,

they all had earphones, as they're called,

and that was what she had.

Part of the image, I think, romantic image.

Oh, she was a character all right.

Between 1920 and 1933, Shepherd published three brilliant novels...

..all set in small rural communities of Northeast Scotland.

Shepherd always had an appetite for life, for movement.

Describing herself as a toddler on her mother's knee, she writes,

"I swear those limbs move as you look at them."

As she grew older, Shepherd began to exercise those restless limbs

in the foothills of the eastern Cairngorms,

which rose up around 50 miles from her house.

Formed over 400 million years ago,

the Cairngorms are older than both the Alps and the Himalayas.

Shepherd spent years exploring this landscape on foot...

..slowly learning its intricacies and secrets.

Nan's passion for the mountains became strongly spiritual.

She was no flag-planter, no peak-bagger.

She was compelled by the mysteries of mountains.

She was fascinated by what happens to mind and matter at height.

As she put it in a letter to a friend in 1940...

"To apprehend things, walking on a hill, seeing the light change,

"the mist, the dark,

"being aware,

"using the whole of one's body to instruct the spirit,

"it dissolves one's being.

"I am no longer myself but a part of a life beyond myself."

The result of that "dissolving"

was her slim masterpiece -

The Living Mountain.

Over the years, I've read hundreds of books

about mountains and mountaineering.

Most were written by men,

most were driven by the goal of the summit

and spoke the language of conquest and victory.

Nan's book stopped me short.

It was different.

It was quiet, wise,

humble, sensuous.

It was a meditation, not a manifesto.

It was a pilgrimage and not an attack.

Reading Nan for the first time, two especially beautiful ideas emerged.

The first is her notion that we walk not UP mountains but INTO them,

and therefore that we explore ourselves as we explore them.

The second was her abandonment of the summit

as the organising principle of a mountain.

Nan was more interested in keeping company with the hills -

in coming to know them,

in wandering over them, peering into them and lying down on them.

"So there I lie on the plateau.

"Under me the central core of fire

"from which was thrust this grumbling,

"grinding mass of plutonic rock.

"Over me blue air and between the fire of the rock

"and the fire of the sun,

"scree, soil and water...

"wind, rain and snow...

"..the total mountain.

"Slowly I have found my way in."

Into and out of these mountains Shepherd went in all seasons,

by day, dawn, dusk and night.

Sometimes alone and sometimes with friends or students.

As she wandered these hills

or stravaiged them, to use the Scots verb,

she started to explore them in language as well as in person.

Poems about the peaks came first.

And then, slowly, prose,

written through the years of the Second World War.

By the summer of 1945 she had completed a version of the book,

celebrating what she called the "total mountain".

Shepherd sent the manuscript to her friend,

and fellow novelist, Neil Gunn.

Gunn admired the precision of Nan's vision but was sceptical

about the possibilities of getting it published.

So it sat gathering dust until, four years before her death,

Shepherd at last decided to publish it.

Like the Cairngorm granite at its heart,

The Living Mountain is a medley of different substances.

Each chapter mixes field notes, lyrical memoir,

natural history, oral history,

and Zennish meditation on the nature of landscape and consciousness.

It's divided into 12 chapters,

bound together by rhymes of thought and image...

..each of which examines a different aspect of Cairngorm life.

Water.

Air and Light.

The Plateau.

Frost and Snow.

Man.

Being.

Nan needed to find a way to write about fugitive experiences.

About extreme beauty, about fear, about solitude, about deep time.

And she did so by devising a style that was astonishingly supple.

It's witty here, it's lyrical there,

it's at ease with the theological as well as the geological.

Shepherd helped me mature as a mountaineer.

"Beginners", she wrote with a hint of fond scorn,

"want the startling view,

"the horrid pinnacle - sips of beer and tea instead of milk."

Well, Nan made me into a milk drinker.

Like her fellow Scot John Muir,

she believed that "going out was really going in", as Muir put it.

She learned to come to the Cairngorms in search of tininess

as well as vastness.

In search of soul as well as soil.

Shepherd was a brilliant seer.

She noticed everything.

Tiny details fascinated her.

Wherever she looked,

she perceived subtlety at work in these huge hills.

"There are the pine roots that are twisted and intertwined

"like a cage of snakes.

"The loch currents which weave thousands

"of floating pine needles into complex spheres...

"..structures so intricately bound

"that they can be lifted out of the water and kept for years."

I love this approach.

You've got this rising path

and then you are into this great granite gap, glacier gouged.

And whenever I pass through here,

I feel the telltale tingle between my shoulder blades

which signals the fact I'm passing through a portal

or a gateway into another kind of country altogether.

WIND HOWLS

Well, I'm well over 3,000ft now and the wind is picking up,

I'm gaining height,

my spirit is lifting and the temperature is dropping.

And so is life.

Everything is just smaller up here.

It's tough at this height.

Nan knew how gruelling these mountains could be...

..the suffering they demanded of the body.

At times, she takes a Presbyterian pleasure in difficulty.

"And one toils into the hill.

"Black scatter of rock...

"pieces as large as a house.

"Pieces edged like a grater.

"A bit of tough going."

Well, the weather is volatile today,

there's a big south-easterly

pushing mist and cloud up out of the Lairig Ghru,

big vertical buffets of it that are then coming across the plateau.

There's ice in the puddles and I can't see very much at all.

Up here, you feel pretty lost in the flatness

but I am just going to push on

and see where we get to on the plateau.

Well, the most amazing thing has just happened.

As you can see, the wind that was bringing the mist in

has whipped it away and revealed this mountain magic trick of a view.

You've got the battleship flanks of Carn a' Mhaim gleaming,

the meanders of the Dee,

like a silver snake heading off to the south,

snow buntings coming over

and the wind ripping up chunks of snow from the corries

and flinging them over. It's absolutely breathtaking up here.

At first glance, this looks like a lunar landscape -

barren and stripped of life.

But about half a mile that way is one of the most vital places I know.

Somewhere that a river springs from deep inside the mountain itself.

Shepherd believed water to be one of the four elemental mysteries

of the Cairngorm landscape.

She called it "that strong white stuff".

And she wrote of "its flash and gleam,

"its music, its pliancy and grace".

Water is all over the Cairngorms in lochs and lochans,

burns and waterfalls.

And two of Scotland's great rivers have their origins up here -

the Avon and the Dee.

"Water.

"It wells from the rock and flows away.

"For unnumbered years it is welled from the rock and flowed away.

"It does nothing, absolutely nothing, but be itself."

Shepherd believed that truly to comprehend the power of a river,

you had to visit its source.

Well, here I am at the Wells of Dee.

Except the Wells of Dee isn't one place, it's a thousand places

where the water just surges up out of the mountain.

And it gathers in volume and it gathers in pace,

and eventually it reaches the corrie rim

and it crashes down as the young Dee a thousand feet into Garbh Choire.

And when you get to a source of a river,

a strange strong place like this,

there's nothing to do but drink a bit of it.

Well, that tastes of mountain.

"No-one knows the mountain completely who has not slept on it,"

wrote Nan.

I've spent many nights sleeping out on the Cairngorms.

And each night is different, each one remarkable.

I've pitched my tent just at the lowest point of Sron na Lairig

and the Lairig Ghru itself is funnelling quite a gale

through on to me but I'm happy to be out here.

The sky above is pretty clear,

I suspect I may see some stars tonight.

I remember something Nan wrote about the wind when you sleep out,

like the boom of crashing seas. Well, I've got that right here.

"These moments of quiescent perceptiveness before sleep

"are the most rewarding of the day.

"As one slips over into sleep,

"the mind grows limpid...

"the body melts,

"perception alone remains."

GURGLING BIRD CALLS

Well, it was a pretty cold night

but this is a very, very special place to wake up

and I am a happy man.

There's cloud filling the valley down below like snow,

you've got this stunning under lighting up the Larig Ghru.

All around me, behind me, actually 360 degrees,

I can hear ptarmigan, just...

They're chirring and they're zithering and they're gurgling.

To me, it's one of the sounds of the Cairngorms.

My plan today is to search for

one of the Cairngorms' least visited

and most bewitching places.

En route, I pass close to the edge of Braeriach's mightiest cliffs,

above Garbh Choire.

And it was here that Nan somehow,

while peering over the corrie rim,

managed to fall asleep.

"The sun came out and warmed us

"and the pattern of movement and sound made us drowsy.

"Then abruptly I awoke and found myself staring down

"black walls of rock to a bottom incredibly remote.

"I had looked into the abyss."

I don't sleep very well at the best of times

but there's nowhere I'm less likely to fall asleep

then looking over an edge like this.

But I can see why Nan wanted to put her head over

because it is incredible.

You've got these black walls just rearing up at you,

rime ice building up on them, and then down below,

1,000ft away in the belly of the corrie,

you've just got rocks and boulders from millennia down there,

some of them as big as cars.

And you've got the clouds moving over the green, way down there.

It is amazing!

Although Shepherd spent years walking INTO the Cairngorms,

she understood that she would never know them completely.

The capacity of the mountain to keep its secrets

and to spring surprises always intrigued her.

And one of those secrets was a tiny body of water,

tucked under a ring of cliffs,

3,000ft above sea level and miles from the nearest road.

Loch Coire an Lochain - the loch of the corrie of the little loch.

Nan writes about how hard this lochan is to find

and I'm understanding that now.

I've decided to use water as my guide, though.

So I've followed this stream down this boulder staircase

and I've just got my first glimpse of the lochan

and I'm going to follow this ridge right down to its edge.

"Climb as often as you will,

"Loch Coire an Lochain remains incredible.

"Without knowing one would not guess its presence

"and certainly not its size.

"To be so open and yet so secret..."

The last time I was here, I skied across this loch

from that point there across this bay - it was frozen solid.

The time before that, I swam.

It was 21 degrees and the sun was beating down.

And this time, I've come along the corrie rim

and I've looked down and seen the wind rushing over

and pressing down on the water

and spreading incredible patterns all over it.

This is a place of countless moods.

Nan wrote so memorably of these mountains -

the shifting combination of rock and air, light and creatures and humans,

that together make up the Cairngorms.

And to know the total mountain, Nan thought,

required not just the brain but all the body's senses.

And so it is that she writes with extraordinary relish

about the taste, and the smell, and the sound of the Cairngorms,

but also about that most intimate and subtle of senses - touch.

"The whole skin has this delightful sensitivity.

"It feels the sun,

"it feels the wind...

"and it feels water closing on it as one slips under."

There's a fizz to Nan's writing about the body,

an unmistakable eroticism at work.

It's another example of Nan's refusal

to conform to expectation or convention.

She was writing at a time and in a culture

where candour about physical pleasure

was regarded with real suspicion,

especially from a woman.

Until recently, Nan remained relatively little known...

..her book passed around between hillwalkers and mountain-lovers.

To my mind, no-one has written as well as Shepherd

about what it feels like to BE in the mountains.

JEAN ROGER: You can see why Nan lost herself in it.

Mountains do have a sort of life of their own,

a spirit of their own.

You felt she was sort of part of the mountains.

She absorbed the spirit.

The Living Mountain was the last book Nan Shepherd ever wrote.

She died in 1981

and it would be years before her work

came back out of the shadows.

It always happens, doesn't it?

You're quite well known, you die, you're forgotten

and then suddenly they pick you up again.

And I'm delighted she's getting...

Oh, I hope she knows.

She's maybe up on the mountain somewhere watching.

That'd be nice.

"In the mountains," Nan writes, "the body may be said to think."

It's Shepherd's belief in this "bodily thinking"

that gives The Living Mountain its contemporary relevance.

Smartphones, screen time, social media.

More and more of us have less and less contact with the natural world.

We have come increasingly to forget that our minds are shaped

by the bodily experience of being in the world.

By its spaces, sounds, forms, textures.

We are, literally, losing touch.

Shepherd saw this loss beginning in her lifetime

and her book both mourns it and warns against it.

And walking, for Shepherd,

was the best way to "live all the way through".

The beat of the placed and lifted foot, the fall of light,

the sound of the wind.

Out on the move in the hills for hour after hour.

As she wrote, "You walk the flesh transparent."

"It is a journey into being.

"For as I penetrate more deeply into the mountain's life,

"I penetrate also into my own.

"I am not out of myself but in myself.

"To know Being, this is the final grace accorded from the mountain."

ACOUSTIC GUITAR PLAYS

# Send the mountain in a trance

# Singing springs rejoice and dance

# Whispering mists cloak the hinds

# Mind and body shining bright. #

ACOUSTIC GUITAR BREAK

50 years ago, they became superstars in astronomy,

leaders in their fields.

They represent the most productive period astronomy has ever had.

And now, they're taking an anniversary trip.

Hello, everyone, I'm Jimmy Carr.