Landmarks

by Robert Macfarlane

  For Merleau-Ponty, post-Cartesian philosophy had cleaved a false divide between the body and the mind. Throughout his career he argued for the foundational role that sensory perception plays in our understanding of the world as well as in our reception of it. He argued that knowledge is ‘felt’: that our bodies think and know in ways that precede cognition. Consciousness, the human body and the phenomenal world are therefore inextricably intertwined. The body ‘incarnates’ our subjectivity and we are thus, Merleau-Ponty proposed, ‘embedded’ in the ‘flesh’ of the world. He described this embodied experience as ‘knowledge in the hands’; our body ‘grips’ the world for us and is ‘our general medium for having a world’. And the material world itself is therefore not the unchanging object presented by the natural sciences, but instead endlessly relational. We are co-natural with the world and it with us – but we only ever see it partially.

  You will already be able to hear the affinities between Merleau-Ponty’s thought and Shepherd’s, as well as between their dictions. On the mountain, she writes, moments occur at which ‘something moves between me and it. Place and mind may interpenetrate until the nature of both are altered. I cannot tell what this movement is except by recounting it.’ ‘The body is not … negligible, but paramount,’ she elsewhere declares, in a passage that could have come straight from Phenomenology of Perception. ‘Flesh is not annihilated but fulfilled. One is not bodiless, but essential body’:

  The hands have an infinity of pleasure in them. The feel of things, textures, surfaces, rough things like cones and bark, smooth things like stalks and feathers and pebbles rounded by water, the teasing of gossamers … the scratchiness of lichen, the warmth of the sun, the sting of hail, the blunt blow of tumbling water, the flow of wind – nothing that I can touch or that touches me but has its own identity for the hand as much as for the eye.

  Shepherd’s belief in bodily thinking gives The Living Mountain a contemporary relevance. We are increasingly separated from contact with nature. We have come to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world – its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits – as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb. We are literally ‘losing touch’, becoming disembodied, more than in any historical period before ours. Shepherd saw this process starting over sixty years ago, and her book is both a mourning and a warning. ‘This is the innocence we have lost,’ she says, ‘living in one sense at a time to live all the way through.’ Her book is a hymn to ‘living all the way through’: to touching, tasting, smelling and hearing the world. If you manage this, then you might walk ‘out of the body and into the mountain’, such that you become, briefly, ‘a stone … the soil of the earth’. And at that point then, well, then ‘one has been in’. ‘That is all,’ writes Shepherd, and that ‘all’ should be heard not diminutively, apologetically, but expansively, vastly.

  Like Martha Ironside, the heroine of her first novel, The Quarry Wood, Shepherd ‘coveted knowledge and willingly suffered privations in the pursuit of learning’, and among those privations were the hardships of hill-walking (the toil, the cold, the rain), for to Shepherd walking was inextricable from ‘learning’. Her relationship with the massif was lifelong. She kept walking ‘into’ the Cairngorms until infirmity made it impossible.

  In her final months, harrowed by old age, she was confined to a nursing home near Banchory. She began to suffer illusions, confusions, ‘mis-spellings’. She hallucinated that the whole ward had been moved out to a wood in Drumoak: ‘I can see the wood – I played in it as a child.’ She began to see Grampian place-names blazoned in ‘large capital letters’ in a glowing arc across the ‘dark and silent’ room in which she slept. Even in this troubled state, Shepherd was still thinking hard about the nature of perception and about how to represent perception in language. ‘It took old age to show me that time is a mode of experiencing,’ she wrote then to her friend, the Scottish artist Barbara Balmer, ‘but how to convey such inwardness?’ Reading true literature, she reflected, ‘it’s as though you are standing experiencing and suddenly the work is there, bursting out of its own ripeness … life has exploded, sticky and rich and smelling oh so good. And … that makes the ordinary world magical – that reverberates/illuminates.’ This ‘illumination’ of the ordinary world was, of course, what Shepherd’s own work achieved, though it would never have occurred to her to acknowledge her immense talent as a writer.

  Shepherd was, the novelist Jessie Kesson recalled, ‘reticent about herself’. She possessed a ‘grace of the soul’ that expressed itself in part as discretion. But she was also a person of passions. She lived with zeal, right to the end. Speaking of the poet Charles Murray – the man to whom Shepherd is thought to have become closest – Shepherd attributed the ‘striking power’ of his poetry to the fact that ‘he said yes to life’. So did she, and the huge ‘power’ of her writing is also born of this affirmative ardour. Kesson, at one time a student of Shepherd’s, asked her if she believed in an afterlife. ‘I hope it is true for those who have had a lean life,’ she replied. ‘For myself – this has been so good, so fulfilling.’

  ~

  The more I read The Living Mountain, the more it gives to me. I have read it perhaps a dozen times now, and each time I re-approach it as Shepherd re-approaches the mountain: not expecting to exhaust it of its meaning, rather to be surprised by its fresh yields. New ways of seeing emerge, or at least I find myself shown how to look again from different angles. This book is tutelary, but it is not the expression of any system or programme, spiritual or religious. It advances no manifesto, offers no message or take-home moral. As on the mountain, so in the book: the knowledge it offers arrives from unexpected directions and quarters, and seemingly without end. It is a book that grows with the knowing.

  In the last days of September, ten years after first reading Shepherd, I returned to the Cairngorms. I wanted to spend days and nights in the hills without fixed destinations. Too often I had been hurried across them by weather and logistics, unable to linger and pry. Shepherd called herself ‘a peerer into corners’, and I took this as my mandate to wander and be distracted.

  With two friends I walked in from the north, through the dwarf pines of the Rothiemurchus Forest, under a blue sky and a daytime moon, and into the Lairig Ghru. It was hot work for autumn. The sun was slant but bright. Mare’s-tail clouds furled 30,000 feet above us. A mile into the Ghru, I saw a golden eagle catch a thermal near Lurcher’s Crag, rising coil over coil in slow symmetry. It was only the second eagle I had ever seen in the Cairngorms, and it set my heart hammering. Up the long shoulder of Sron na Lairige we toiled, over the tops of Braeriach and at last onto the plateau proper: a huge upland of tundra and boulder at an altitude of around 4,000 feet. I heard a barking and saw to my north-east a flight of a hundred or so geese arrowing through the Lairig Ghru in a ragged V. Because I had height, I looked down onto their flexing backs rather than up at their steady bellies as they passed.

  We made camp far across the plateau, near to the source of the Dee – the highest origin of any British river. I pitched my tent by a stream, looking south-east over the Lairig Ghru towards the battleship flanks of Carn a’Mhaim. Butterflies danced. There were no midges. I had some real coffee with me for the morning brew. I was very happy indeed.

  Later that afternoon we dropped 600 feet north off the plateau in search of Loch Coire an Lochain, the ‘loch of the corrie of the loch’, which Shepherd prized as one of the range’s ‘recesses’, or hidden places. She had also visited it on a late-September day, and marvelled at the chilly clarity of its water, and its secrecy as a site. ‘It cannot be seen until one stands almost on its lip,’ she wrote. At the hour we reached it, a curved shadow had fallen across the corrie which, when doubled by the surface of the water, perfectly mimicked the form of a raven’s beak. We swam in the loch, which was steel-blue and speckled on its surface with millions of golden grains of dust or pollen. The water was gin-clear and bitingly co
ld.

  Sunset was close as we climbed back up to the plateau, so we waited for it on a westerly slope. As the sun lowered and reddened, cloud wisps blew up from the valley and refracted its light to form a dazzling parhelion: concentric halos of orange, green and pink that circled the sun. Once the sun had gone a pale mist sprang up from the plateau, and we waded knee-deep in its milk back to camp, from where we watched a yellow moon rise above the Braeriach tors. After dark had fallen I walked to the edge of the plateau, where the young Dee crashed down 1,000 feet into the great inward fissure of the Garbh Coire.

  The air that night was so mild there was no need for a tent. I woke soaked in dew and shrouded in cloud that had rolled up out of the Lairig Ghru. We were in a white world. Visibility was twenty yards at most. Blinded of sight, for a full hour, in a way I have never done before, I sat and simply listened to the mountain. Ptarmigans zithered and churred to one another, dotterels kewed, and water moved: chuckled, burred, glugged, shattered. ‘The sound of all this moving water is as integral to the mountain as pollen to the flower,’ Shepherd reflected beautifully:

  One hears it without listening as one breathes without thinking. But to a listening ear the sound disintegrates into many different notes – the slow slap of a loch, the high clear trill of a rivulet, the roar of spate. On one short stretch of burn the ear may distinguish a dozen different notes at once.

  That morning we searched in the mist for the Wells of Dee, the springs that mark the river’s true birthplace. We began at the plateau rim, and from there we followed it back uphill, always taking the larger branch where the stream forked. At last we reached a point where the water rose from within the rock itself. Shepherd had also made this ‘journey to the source’, and confronted matter in its purest form:

  Water, that strong white stuff, one of the four elemental mysteries, can here be seen at its origins. Like all profound mysteries, it is so simple that it frightens me. It wells from the rock, and flows away. For unnumbered years it has welled from the rock, and flowed away.

  This proof of the mountain’s mindlessness was to Shepherd both thrilling and terrifying. The Cairngorms exceeded human comprehension: what she called the ‘total mountain’ could never totally be known. Yet if approached without expectation, the massif offered remarkable glimpses into its ‘being’.

  Walking under Shepherd’s influence, led by her language, I had enjoyed an astonishing time of gifts. The eagle, the geese, the blue-gold loch, the parhelion, the mists, the springs, those few days in the hills had compressed into them a year’s worth of marvels – and each had its precedent in The Living Mountain. The fortuity of it all was acute, approaching the eerie. It was as if we had walked into the pages of Nan’s book, though of course her book had emerged out of the Cairngorms themselves, so we were merely completing that circuit of word and world.

  Glossary II

  Uplands

  Hills, Fells and Peaks

  abri shelter used by mountaineers, typically an overhanging rock mountaineering

  alpenglow light of the setting or rising sun seen illuminating high mountains or the underside of clouds mountaineering

  amar hill with precipices Gaelic

  arête sharp ascending ridge of a mountain mountaineering

  banc hill; bank or breast of a hill Welsh

  bans, vans high place Cornish

  barr summit Irish

  batch hillock West Country

  beacon conspicuous hill with long sightlines from its summit (suitable for a beacon-fire) southern England, Wales

  beinn usually the highest peak in an area; visually dominant summit Gaelic

  biod pinnacle; pointed knoll Gaelic

  bioran peak of medium height, usually sharp and rugged Gaelic

  bothy hut or shelter maintained in remote country Scots

  brent brow of a hill Northamptonshire

  bron hillside, slope Welsh

  byurg rocky hill Shetland

  cadair mound or hill shaped like a seat (as place-name element); fort, defensive settlement Welsh

  caisteal peak of medium height, usually without corries (literally ‘castle’, ‘fort’) Gaelic

  càirn, càrn substantial, complex peak, with corries, shoulders and ridges Gaelic

  chockstone stone wedged in a vertical cleft or chimney of rock, impeding progress mountaineering

  choss rock that is unsuitable for climbing due to its instability or friability mountaineering

  cleit peak usually with a rounded base and a craggy summit Gaelic

  cnap small but very rugged peak, often an outlying summit of a beinn or càirn Gaelic

  cnoc hill, usually though not always smaller than a sliabh Irish

  cnwc hillock, knoll Welsh

  coire high, hanging, glacier-scooped hollow on a mountainside, often cliff-girt (anglicized to corrie) Gaelic

  cragfast unable to advance or retreat on a steep climb; stuck, usually requiring rescue mountaineering

  creachann grassless, stony hilltop Gaelic

  creagan knoll Gaelic

  croit humpbacked hill or group of hills Gaelic

  cruach rugged peak with pinnacled tops, sometimes resembling a rick or stack (‘cruach’) in outline Irish

  dod, dodd rounded summit, either a separate hill, or more frequently a lower summit or distinct shoulder of a higher hill northern England, southern Scotland

  droim ridge or ‘back’ of hills Irish

  drum small, rectangular hillock; a field sloping on all sides Galloway

  dūn low hill with a fairly level and extensive summit, providing a good settlement site in open country Old English

  gala, olva lookout point Cornish

  gob beak or projecting point of mountain Gaelic

  grianan knoll or hillock that is often sunny Gaelic

  gualainn shoulder of a hill Gaelic

  hōh projecting or heel-like ridge Old English

  hope hill Cotswolds

  kame comb or ridge of hills Shetland

  knob round-topped hill Kent

  landraising waste disposal site which is above the height of the surrounding land official

  maol bare and rugged peak, usually of middling height Gaelic

  meall high and rounded summit, often heathery Gaelic

  mena hill, high point Cornish

  moel of a hilltop or mountain summit: treeless, rounded (literally ‘bald’) Welsh

  mynydd mountain, hill Welsh

  nab summit of a hill Sussex

  pap mountain or hill whose shape is thought to resemble that of a woman’s breast Irish English, Scots

  pinch short, steep hill Kent

  rajel scree Cornish

  rake steep path or track up a fell- or crag-side, often leading to the summit Cumbria

  ruighe grassy place on a hillside Gaelic

  saidse sound of a falling body Gaelic

  sgòr, sgùrr sharp and steep-sloped summit, often rising to a craggy top Gaelic

  skord deep indentation in the top of a hill at right angles to its ridge Shetland

  slaag low part of the skyline of a hill Shetland

  sliabh single mountain; range of mountains Irish

  soo’s back sharp long ridge (literally ‘sow’s back’) Scots

  spidean sharp summit or top, often rising above a corrie Gaelic

  sròn shoulder of land rising from a valley towards the higher reaches of a peak Gaelic

  stob high, rugged peak, often with numerous corries Gaelic

  strone hill that terminates a range; the end of a ridge Scots

  stùc sharp subsidiary peak, often conical in form Gaelic

  tap, top summit Scots, especially Aberdeenshire

  tom hill or hillock, normally free of rocks and of relatively gentle elevation Gaelic

  toot isolated hill suitable for observation, lookout hill western England

  tòrr craggy-topped hillock Gaelic

  tulach green place on a hillside Gaelic

  Ice and Snow
<
br />   aquabob icicle Kent

  billow snowdrift East Anglia

  bleb bubble of air in ice north-east Ireland, northern England

  blee high, exposed Northamptonshire

  blenk light snow, resembling the ‘blinks’ or ashes that fly out of a chimney Exmoor

  blin’ drift drifting snow Scots

  blunt heavy fall of snow East Anglia

  clinkerbell, cockerbell, conkerbell, icicle Dorset

  clock-ice ice cracked and crazed by fissures, usually brought about by the pressure of walkers or skaters Northamptonshire

  dagger, dagglet, daggler, icicle Hampshire

  feetings footprints of creatures as they appear in the snow Suffolk

  feevl snow falling in large flakes Shetland

  fievel thin layer of snow Shetland

  firn old, consolidated snow, often left over from the previous season mountaineering

  flaucht snowflake Scots

  fleeches large snowflakes Exmoor

  flukra snow falling in large, scale-like flakes Shetland

  frazil loose, needle-like ice crystals that form into a churning slush in turbulent super-cooled water, for example in a river on a very cold night hydrological