Landmarks (6 page)

To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields – these are as much as a man can fully experience.

Shepherd came to know the Cairngorms ‘deeply’ rather than ‘widely’, and they are to her what Selborne was to Gilbert White, the Sierra Nevada were to John Muir, and the Aran Islands are to Tim Robinson. They were her inland-island, her personal parish, the area of territory that she loved, walked and studied over time such that concentration within its perimeters led to knowledge cubed rather than knowledge curbed. What, Shepherd once wondered to Gunn, if one could find a way to ‘
irradiate the common
’. That, she concluded, ‘should make something universal’. This irradiation of the ‘common’ into the ‘universal’ is what she achieved in
The Living Mountain
.

Most works of mountaineering literature have been written by men, and most male mountaineers are focused on the summit: a mountain expedition being qualified by the success or failure of ascent. But to aim for the highest point is not the only way to climb a mountain, nor is a narrative of siege and assault the only way to
write about one. Shepherd’s book is best thought of not as a work of mountaineering literature but of mountain literature. Early on, she confesses that as a young woman she had been prone to a
‘lust
’ for ‘the tang of height’, and had approached the Cairngorms egocentrically, appraising them for their ‘effect upon me’.
The Living Mountain
relates how, over time, she learnt to go into the hills aimlessly,
‘merely to be with the mountain
as one visits a friend, with no intention but to be with him’.
‘I am on the plateau again
, having gone round it like a dog in circles to see if it is a good place,’ she begins one section, chattily; ‘I think it is, and I am to stay up here for a while.’ Circumambulation has replaced peak-fever; plateau has substituted for peak. She no longer has any interest in discovering a pinnacle point from which she might become the looker-down who sees all with a god-like eye. Thus the brilliant image of the book’s opening page (which has for ever changed the way I perceive the Cairngorms), where she proposes regarding the massif not as a series of distinct zeniths, but instead as an entity:
‘The plateau is the true summit
of these mountains; they must be seen as a single mountain, and the individual tops … no more than eddies on the plateau surface.’

As a walker, then, Shepherd practises a kind of unpious pilgrimage. She tramps around, over, across and into the mountain, rather than charging up it. There is an implicit humility to her repeated acts of traverse, which stands as a corrective to the self-exaltation of the mountaineer’s hunger for an utmost point.

~

The Cairngorms were my first mountain range, and they are still the hills I know best. My grandparents lived in a converted forestry cottage on a rare limestone upsurge on the north-eastern slopes of the
massif, and the field of rough pasture which they owned ran down to the banks of the River Avon. From a young age, I visited them with my family, usually in the summers. On a wall of the house hung a framed Ordnance Survey map of the whole massif, on which we would finger-trace walks done and walks planned. My grandfather was a diplomat and mountaineer who had spent his life climbing around the world, and it was he and his Cairngorm world which cast the spell of height upon me as a child. His yard-long wooden-hafted ice-axe and his old iron crampons seemed to my young imagination like the props of wizardry. I was shown black-and-white photographs of the peaks he had climbed in the Alps and the Himalayas, and it was miraculous to me that such structures could be ascended by humans. Mountaineering seemed to me then, as Shepherd puts it,
‘a legendary task, which heroes, not men, accomplished’
.

For me, as for Shepherd, childhood exposure to the Cairngorms
‘thirled me for life to the mountain’
. I have since crossed the massif on foot and ski many times, and my maps of the region are spidery with the marks of tracks followed and routes attempted. I have seen dozens of blue-white snow hares, big as dogs, popping up from behind peat hags over the back of Glas Maol, I have followed flocks of snow buntings as they gust over the Braeriach plateau, and I once spent hours sheltering in a snow-hole above the Northern Corries while a blizzard blew itself furiously out.

So I knew the Cairngorms long before I knew
The Living Mountain
. I first read it in 2003, and was changed. I had thought I knew the Cairngorms well, but Shepherd showed me my complacency. Her writing taught me to
see
these familiar hills, rather than just to look at them.

The Living Mountain
is thick with the kinds of acute perception that come only from staying up ‘for a while’.
‘Birch needs rain
to release its odour,’ Shepherd notes. ‘It is a scent with body to it, fruity like old brandy, and on a wet warm day one can be as good as drunk with it.’
I had never before noticed the ‘odour’ of birches, but now cannot be in a stand of birch trees on a rainy summer’s day without smelling its Courvoisier whiff. Elsewhere Shepherd remarks and records
‘the coil over coil
’ of a golden eagle’s ascent on a thermal, ‘the minute scarlet cups of lichen’, a white hare crossing sunlit snow with its accompanying ‘odd ludicrous leggy shadow-skeleton’. She has a sharp eye for the inadvertent acts of land art authored by nature:
‘Beech bud-sheaths
, blown in tide-mark lines along the edge of the roads, give a glow of brightness to the dusty roads of May.’ She spends an October night in air that is
‘bland as silk
’, and while half asleep on the plutonic granite of the plateau feels herself become stone-like, ‘rooted far down in their immobility’, metamorphosed by the igneous rocks into a newly mineral self.

Shepherd is a fierce see-er, then, and like many fierce see-ers, she is also a part-time mystic, for whom intense empiricism is the first step to immanence.
‘I knew when I had looked
for a long time,’ she writes, ‘that I had hardly begun to see.’ Her descriptions often move beyond the material. Up on the mountain, after hours of walking and watching:

the eye sees what it didn’t
see before, or sees in a new way what it had already seen. So the ear, the other senses. These moments come unpredictably, yet governed, it would seem, by a law whose working is dimly understood.

Shepherd – like Neil Gunn, and like the Scottish explorer-essayist W. H. Murray – was influenced by her reading in Buddhism and the Tao. Shards of Eastern philosophy glitter in the prose of all
three writers, like mica flecks in granite. Reading their work now, with its fusion of Highland landscape and Buddhist metaphysics, remains astonishing: like encountering a Noh play performed in a kailyard, or chrysanthemums flourishing in a corrie.

~

Late one March I left my home in Cambridge and travelled north to the Cairngorms. In the south of England, blackthorn was foaming in the hedges, tulips and hyacinths were popping in suburban flower-beds, and spring was reaching full riot. Arriving in the Cairngorms, I found I had travelled back into high winter. Avalanches were still rumbling the lee slopes, Loch Avon was frozen over, and blizzards were cruising the plateau. Over three days, with four friends, I crossed the massif from Glenshee in the south-east to Loch Morlich in the north-west. Up on the wide summit plateau of Ben a’ Bhuird, I found myself in the purest white-out conditions I have ever experienced. Those who have travelled in high mountains or to the poles are likely to be familiar with the white-out: the point at which snow, cloud and blizzard combine such that the world dissolves into a single pallor. Scale and distance become impossible to discern. There are no shadows or waymarks. Space is depthless. Even gravity’s hold feels loosened: slope and fall-lines can only be inferred by the tilt of blood in the skull. It felt, for that astonishing hour up on Ben a’ Bhuird, as if we were all flying in white space.

The mountain world, like the desert world, is filled with mirages: tricks of light and perspective, parhelia, fogbows, Brocken spectres, white-outs – illusions brought on by snow, mist, cloud or distance. These optical special effects fascinated Shepherd. In winter, she sees a
‘snow skeleton, attached to nothing’
, which turns out to be the
black rocks of a cliff high above, whose apparent levitation is due to the imperceptibility of the snow banks below it. At midsummer, she looks through lucid air for hundreds of miles and spies an imaginary peak, a Hy Brasil of the high tops:
‘I could have sworn I saw
a shape, distinct and blue, very clear and small, further off than any hill the chart recorded. The chart was against me, my companions were against me, I never saw it again.’

One winter morning in the Cairngorms, following the cloud base up from Loch Etchachan to the top of Ben Macdui, I looked upwards and – through a break in the clouds – saw the white summit ridge of an impossibly high mountain, Himalayan in altitude, rising many thousands of feet above me, though I was within an hour of the top of Macdui. My friend David saw it too, and we regarded it together in wonderment and faint fear. ‘We seem to be lost in the foothills of another range entirely,’ David said. I still cannot account for the sight of that unreal peak. I remember that vision of impossible distance also because, a few hours later, after we had reached the summit of Macdui and begun the descent to the north, we passed into mobile-phone reception and I learnt that someone very close to me had very suddenly died.

Shepherd punningly calls such mountain illusions ‘mis-spellings’: visual ‘errors’ that possess an accidental magic and offer unlooked-for revelation. She delights in these moments, rather than holding them in suspicion or correcting for them:

Such illusions
, depending on how the eye is placed and used, drive home the truth that our habitual vision of things is not necessarily right: it is only one of an infinite number, and to glimpse an unfamiliar one, even for a moment, unmakes us, but steadies us again.

This is brilliantly seen and said. Our vision is never correct but only ever provisional. ‘Illusions’ are themselves means of knowing (a reminder of James Joyce’s aside about errors being the portals of discovery). Importantly, these illusions cannot be summoned into being or ordered on request. They are unpredictable conspiracies of the material and the sensory; like the mountain as a whole, they are
‘impossible to coerce’
. Shepherd doesn’t systematically traverse the Cairngorms, or seek by some psychogeographic ruse to prise them open. The massif is graceful in the Augustinian sense; its gifts cannot be actively sought (mind you, there’s more than a hint of good Deeside Presbyterianism in Shepherd’s preoccupation with ‘toil’:
‘On one toils
, into the hill’ … one enjoys ‘a tough bit of going’ … one ‘toil[s] upwards’).

In an amazing passage about illusions, Shepherd describes looking from a distance at a stone barn on a humid day. The moist air acts as a lens, multiplying and redistributing her sightlines, so that she seems to view all sides of the barn simultaneously. Her own style possesses a similar dispersive quality. While reading
The Living Mountain
your sight feels scattered – as though you have suddenly gained the compound eye of a dragonfly, seeing through a hundred different lenses at once. This multiplex effect is created by Shepherd’s refusal to privilege a single perspective. Her own consciousness is only one among an infinite number of focal points on and in the mountain. Her prose watches now from the point of view of the eagle, now from that of the walker, now from that of the creeping juniper. By means of this accumulation of exact attentions we are brought – in her memorable phrase – to see the earth
‘as the earth must see itself’
.

The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else, and
The Living Mountain
is filled – woven – with images
of weaving and interconnection. There are pine roots that are
‘twisted and intertwined
like a cage of snakes’; the tiny Scots pines high on the hill that are ‘splayed to the mountain and almost roseate in structure’; the duck and drake that, rising together, appear to form a single bird with ‘two enormous wings’; the loch currents which knit thousands of floating pine needles into complex spheres, similar to wren’s nests: structures so intricately bound that ‘they can be lifted out of the water and kept for years, a botanical puzzle to those who have not been told the secret of their formation’ (these pine-needle balls are also, of course, surreptitious emblems of Shepherd’s own tightly knit and tiny work, itself kept for years). Reading through the book, you realize that its twelve sections are bound laterally to each other by rhymes of colour, thought and image, so that they offer not a dozen different facets of the mountain but rather a transverse descriptive weave – the prose equivalent of a dwarf juniper forest.

In one scene Shepherd describes a long winter dusk spent watching two rutting stags, whose antlers have become
‘interlaced
’ during a joust, such that they cannot separate. She watches as they ‘drag … each other backwards and forwards across the ringing frozen floor of a hollow’, and waits for answers: who will win, how will they disentangle? But darkness falls, Shepherd is forced to return indoors, and even a return to the site of the battle the next morning yields neither corpses nor clues. The episode is yet another image of the mountain’s refusal to answer to questions which are explicitly asked of it. That which
‘interlocks
’ is rarely opened here, even by the ‘keyed’ senses of the walker. Deer run in a way that resembles flight, and yet their motion is ‘fixed to the earth and cannot be detached from it’. A fawn lies in a ‘hidden hollow’, so camouflaged that its presence is given away only by the flick of its eyelid. Knowledge is
never figured in
The Living Mountain
as finite: a goal to be reached or a state to be attained. The massif is not a crossword to be cracked, full of encrypted ups and downs. Man
‘patiently adds fact to fact’
, but such epistemological bean-counting will take you only so far. Greater understanding of the mountain’s interrelations serves to finesse the real into a further marvellousness – and reveal other realms of incomprehension.