The Living World: Nan Shepherd and Environmental Thought 1350153370, 9781350153370

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The Living World

Environmental Cultures Series Series Editors Greg Garrard, University of British Columbia, Canada Richard Kerridge, Bath Spa University Editorial Board Frances Bellarsi, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium Mandy Bloomfield, Plymouth University, UK Lily Chen, Shanghai Normal University, China Christa Grewe-Volpp, University of Mannheim, Germany Stephanie LeMenager, University of Oregon, USA Timothy Morton, Rice University, USA Pablo Mukherjee, University of Warwick, UK Bloomsbury’s Environmental Cultures series makes available to students and scholars at all levels the latest cutting-edge research on the diverse ways in which culture has responded to the age of environmental crisis. Publishing ambitious and innovative literary ecocriticism that crosses disciplines, national boundaries, and media, books in the series explore and test the challenges of ecocriticism to conventional forms of cultural study. Titles Available Bodies of Water, Astrida Neimanis Cities and Wetlands, Rod Giblett Civil Rights and the Environment in African-American Literature, 1895-1941, John Claborn Climate Change Scepticism, Greg Garrard, George Handley, Axel Goodbody, Stephanie Posthumus Climate Crisis and the 21st-Century British Novel, Astrid Bracke Colonialism, Culture, Whales, Graham Huggan Ecocriticism and Italy, Serenella Iovino Fuel, Heidi C. M. Scott Literature as Cultural Ecology, Hubert Zapf

Nerd Ecology, Anthony Lioi The New Nature Writing, Jos Smith The New Poetics of Climate Change, Matthew Griffiths This Contentious Storm, Jennifer Mae Hamilton Climate Change Scepticism, Greg Garrard, Axel Goodbody, George B. Handley and Stephanie Posthumus Ecospectrality, Laura White Teaching Environmental Writing, Isabel Galleymore Radical Animism, Jemma Deer Cognitive Ecopoetics, Sharon Lattig Digital Vision and the Ecological Aesthetic (1968–2018), Lisa FitzGerald Forthcoming Titles Environmental Cultures in Soviet East Europe, Anna Barcz Weathering Shakespeare, Evelyn O’Malley Imagining the Plains of Latin America, Axel Pérez Trujillo Diniz Ecocriticism and Turkey, Meliz Ergin

The Living World Nan Shepherd and Environmental Thought Samantha Walton

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Samantha Walton, 2020 Samantha Walton has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. xi–xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Paul Burgess/Burge Agency Cover image © Shutterstock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any thirdparty websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-5322-6 ePDF: 978-1-3501-5337-0 eBook: 978-1-3501-5338-7 Series: Environmental Cultures Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Acknowledgements

xi

Introduction: A way in A life Shepherd as nature writer Theosophy and Buddhism Romanticism Writing mountains Scottish Literary Renaissance Outline

1 3 8 11 13 17 21 26

1 Place and planet Shepherd as place writer Ecocriticism and the ‘fundamentals’ Scottish literature and place Place in Shepherd’s writing Against place Authenticity and tourism Beyond dwelling

29

2 Ecology Ecology and science Ecology in Scotland Shepherd and ecology Ecological art Ecological thought Shepherd and ecological thought Ecological structure

59

3 Environmentalism Profit versus preservation A cautious synthesis Humanity in ecology

83

31 33 35 38 44 48 51

60 62 65 69 70 73 77

85 89 90

Contents

x

The threatened mountain Environmental ethics 4

5

95 98

Deep time The forms of modern geology Geology as structuring principle Shepherd as reader of deep time Deep time as ‘opening’ or ‘abyss’? Shepherd’s geopoetics The limits of astonishment Ways of seeing plants The age of Anthropocene Anthropocene imaginaries Shepherd and the Anthropocene

107

Vital matter Neovitalism Shepherd’s vitalism Vital humanity: The Weatherhouse New materialism Shepherd and new materialism The life of water

141

108 112 117 120 122 125 127 133 134 137

141 146 149 155 158 160

6 Being Alternative selves Shepherd’s phenomenology Against individualism Selfhood in Shepherd’s writing Oneness with the world The limits of oneness

167

Conclusion

195

Bibliography Index

199

168 171 175 180 184 187

211

For Aileen Christianson, who first told me, ‘you must read Nan Shepherd.’

Acknowledgements This book would not have been possible without the generous support and assistance of many people and institutions. I began writing it in the wake of my PhD, completed at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Aileen Christianson. Part-way through my studies, Aileen suggested I read a novel by an author called Nan Shepherd. I was already aware of another northeast-based writer of the Scottish Literary Renaissance, Willa Muir, thanks to Aileen’s excellent book on her life and writing, but Shepherd was altogether new to me. I picked up a tattered collection which contained her three novels and The Living Mountain from Armchair Books easily enough. What I discovered was joyful, revelatory, giving me the first impetus to divert my research plans and write the first academic study of Nan Shepherd. It’s only now, in retrospect, that I can appreciate this chain of events in the context of the history of Shepherd’s writing and its appreciation in Scotland, and beyond. The Grampian Quartet was in Armchair Books most likely because a former student had sold or donated it. The student, I expect, owned the book because they’d studied it at university. They had studied it at university because scholars like Aileen at Edinburgh, and Professor Alison Lumsden at Aberdeen, had long insisted on the importance of placing Shepherd on their undergraduate curriculum. The editor Roderick Watson and the publisher Canongate had made her books available to serve that need. In consequence, this book is dedicated to the scholars and editors who kept Shepherd’s writing in print and alive during the long, quiet years before her recent reappraisal, and in particular to Aileen, whose her friendship, humour and guidance I miss dearly. While in Edinburgh, I had the great good fortune to be awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities in 2013. In the despairing post-viva scramble for work that now characterizes the postdoctoral experience in the UK, IASH provides a uniquely supportive environment for early career academics to catch their breath, reflect on the future, collaborate and conspire with other ECRs and begin the tentative work of carving out a plan for new research. I wouldn’t have begun this project without their support, or been able to continue it without a further Environmental Humanities Visiting

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Research Fellowship in 2016. My deepest thanks go to my fellow scholars and IASH staff – in particular Professor Jolyon Mitchell, Donald Ferguson and Anthea Taylor. Special thanks are also due to my postdoctoral mentor at IASH, Professor David Farrier, who has supported my work from the start and inspired thrilling and important new lines of thinking about geological imaginaries and the Anthropocene. Archival research into Shepherd’s papers was conducted at the University of Aberdeen with the support of their Special Collections Centre Visiting Scholar Award in 2015–16. Librarians there, in particular Siobhán Convery, Michelle Gait and Mary Sabiston, gave me vital assistance in navigating collections, and I am grateful to scholars at the School of Scottish and Irish Studies at the University of Aberdeen for inviting me back in February 2020 to discuss the outcome of that research – a return which felt very much like a homecoming for the project. I’ve had the great good fortune to access Shepherd’s papers at the National Library of Scotland, and I must thank the librarians there for their help in accessing resources and providing such a welcoming environment for writing and research. Over the last few years, I have been invited to give talks on Shepherd at a number of institutions and cultural spaces. Conversation with scholars, students and audiences has shaped my ideas and suggested new lines of inquiry, which have been gratefully fed back into this book. Thanks are due to academics at the universities of Aberdeen, Bristol, Edinburgh Napier, Essex, Liverpool John Moores, Oxford Brookes and Plymouth; to Holly Corfield Carr for allowing me to read in intimate detail at Spike Island; to Simone Kenyon for leading us Into the Mountain at Tramway; and to Chris Howard and Emma Peace for inviting me to get excited (and very cold) talking about Shepherd on Winterwatch. Special thanks are also due to Sue Harper and Henry Iddon, Mountain Festival organizers at Braemar and Kendal, who’ve helped frame Shepherd’s work in relation to traditions of mountain writing (significantly transformed traditions of mountain writing in the process). At Braemar, I was lucky enough to meet former students of Shepherd and take a walk up Morrone to the cottage where she used to stay, and to Ceilidh with fellow Shepherd enthusiasts – all experiences that confirmed the importance of writing about Shepherd and gave me heart during the slow process of manuscript revisions. To Erlend Clouston, deepest thanks for inviting me round for tea, sharing your memories and giving me a tour of Shepherd’s library. To Professor David Borthwick, thanks for your thoughtful, positive, hugely constructive feedback on

Acknowledgements

xiii

the manuscript, which came at a critical stage in which I needed encouragement. Dr Anna Pilz at the Rachel Carson Center, Dr Katy Hastie at Gutter Magazine and my partner Jo Walton have all given feedback of the most incredible generosity, care and detail, while my editors at Bloomsbury – Professor Greg Garrard and Richard Kerridge – gave the encouragement and essential go-ahead to release this book into the living world.

Introduction A way in

Nan Shepherd was a leading writer of the Scottish Literary Renaissance, an interwar modernist movement which rejected sentimental stereotypes of Scottish rural life and embraced international avant-garde aesthetics. Her writing is defined by fascination with rural communities, the realities of women’s lives, and the allure and mystery of the living world. Poised between two world wars, she lived and wrote during an era of unprecedented change. She and her generation would come of age in a society offering new freedoms for women and, in the sciences, radical new understandings of life. But it was also a time of devastating conflict, generating terrifying new violence against humanity and nature. Writing from her location on the edges of Aberdeen, she responded to these changes by focusing on the impact of war in her native Deeside and situating her local experience in the context of wider global realities. Ecological, political, innovative and lyrical, her writing was celebrated nationally and internationally in her day. After the publication of her second novel, she was feted in the press as a writer of ‘genius’, with reviews appearing in Scottish, English and American journals (Review 1930). However, like many women writers of her generation, Shepherd’s work fell out of print from the mid-twentieth century. But since the re-publication of The Living Mountain in 2011, she has enjoyed a popular and academic revival. Her novels and poetry have gone back into print, with stylish new covers and glowing introductions. A new prize for nature writing has been created in her name, and across Scotland and further afield, artists, writers, performers and academics have found new meaning in her work, applying insights from her writing to issues as diverse as land reform, mobility and accessibility in nature, new feminist geographies, and the environmental crisis. This book participates in that revival, offering the first critical study of Shepherd’s writing, paying particular attention to The Living Mountain and ecological themes in her poetry, novels and personal archive. Informed by ecocriticism, it connects Shepherd’s work with the scientific, political and

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philosophical culture of the 1930s and 1940s, and looks at the ecological aspects of Shepherd’s writing in light of core approaches in modern environmental thought. In her prose meditation on the Cairngorms, The Living Mountain, and at key moments in her three novels and poetry, Shepherd explores ways of relating to others and to the complex, interconnected ecology of nature which predate many of the core themes and concerns of contemporary science, environmental cultural studies and philosophy. This book asks, how can Shepherd’s innovative approach to writing the natural world be understood in light of the environmental humanities? How might her innovative and prescient nature writing speak to our own understanding of environmental ethics and ecological interconnectedness, and inform their future development? And finally, how might literature help us to reimagine humanity’s place on earth in the age of Anthropocene? Shepherd is long overdue recognition as a significant ecological thinker and writer. This book will do this, and more. Exploring her contribution to modern environmental thought, it suggests how her work might offer new ways of relating to human and more-than-human communities and reimagining humanity’s place on earth in the context of the Anthropocene and the environmental and climate crisis. Renewed interest in Shepherd’s writing has meant that many different kinds of readers – both academic and non-academic – now want to better understand her writing. This book has been written as much for fans of Nan Shepherd as those who are interested in environmental thought but don’t know anything about Shepherd. Each chapter will introduce a new theme or approach in ecocriticism and explore it in relation to Shepherd’s poetry and prose. The task of explaining what ecocriticism actually is will take place in those chapters. However, by way of a brief introduction, ecocriticism is an environmentally conscious form of literary scholarship which emerged in the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1980s. As crises from global warming to toxic waste and deforestation became more obvious and pressing, literary scholars asked what could be achieved through scholarly work: How could fresh analysis of classic works of nature writing – from the English Romantics to the American Transcendentalists – help readers and activists better articulate their frustrations about environmental damage? What could study of all kinds of literature – including the not explicitly environmentalist – reveal about the ways industrial societies have abused the natural world? Since its origins, ecocriticism has expanded from a discipline concerned with the representative capacities of language and the writing of place to an interdisciplinary account of human–nature interdependencies and interrelations.

Introduction

3

Contemporary ecocriticism is increasingly intersectional in its politics and interdisciplinary in its practice, engaging with the discoveries of the life sciences and amplifying scientific evidence about the severity of the environmental crisis. Ecocriticism – and the newer field of environmental humanities, in which it now sits – is also concerned with the philosophical, political and practical challenges raised by anthropogenic ecological change. These challenges have an inherently cultural dimension: involving narrative and storytelling, meanings and values, fears and hopes. For this reason, they can’t only be addressed by scientists but must incorporate the distinctive perspectives of the humanities, meaning the study of culture and what it means to be human. At the same time, traditional themes explored in the humanities must be approached quite differently under conditions of ecological breakdown. The meaning of human qualities, like responsibility and agency, is transformed by a deeper understanding of humanity’s impact on and co-dependence with nature. For example, how responsible is any one person for climate change or acts of slow violence, like water pollution or the build-up of plastic waste? What does it mean to be an individual, in the context of a complex ecosystem where flows of matter and fluid constantly permeate the boundaries of the body, making us not just vulnerable to, but continuous with, ‘our’ so-called environment? Exploring ecocriticism in relation to Shepherd’s writing therefore serves a dual purpose. It will explore and, hopefully, illuminate some of ecocriticism’s more subtle and demanding theories in conversation with a writer who was asking similar questions in her own time. And it will place Shepherd firmly in the canon of innovative, critical and ethical nature writing, establishing her not simply a writer of place or an environmental writer (concerned with relations between humanity and nature) but an ecological writer, who blends philosophy, science, sensory experience and experimental literary technique to break down boundaries between people and place, body and environment, self and world.

A life This book is not a biography. It uses an ecocritical lens to read Shepherd and draws from historical sources to situate Shepherd’s writing in its cultural context. However, an insight into formative experiences in Shepherd’s life and intellectual development will help make sense of the aesthetic approaches she developed in her work in response to literary modernism, ecological science and a lifelong relationship with the hills.

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Nan Shepherd was born in 1893 and died in 1981. Although she travelled widely, she lived her whole life in Cults, a village by the River Dee on the outskirts of Aberdeen, which is recognizable as the setting of Martha’s home in her first novel, The Quarry Wood (1928). She took a degree in English Literature at Aberdeen University, graduating with her MA in 1915. After her degree, she went on to lecture in English Literature at Aberdeen Training Centre, the city’s teacher training college, not on pedagogy but on literature itself. Lectures with Shepherd addressed works by English and Scottish authors including Thomas Hardy, Helen Cruickshank, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Charles Murray and Rupert Brooke, the last of whom, her students were convinced, was Shepherd’s secret lover (Peacock 95). This was only wishful thinking on their part, but much in the spirit of their romantic perception of her. Shepherd’s former student Sheila Gill describes her as a rather ethereal figure with wispy hair unsuccessfully fashioned into a bun and framing an interesting face with twinkling eyes and a smile to match. That same face could cause a lecture theatre of young women to reach for their handkerchiefs. Clad in many layers of flowing garments and long beads she glided about the college frequently wearing walking or climbing boots. She was before her time. She pre-dated Doc Martens! (Gill)

Shepherd was an unconventional figure by training college standards, refusing to assess students by an overall grade (still a radical idea in modern pedagogy) and lecturing without notes or plan (‘Women Citizens’). In 1930, she described her work as the ‘heaven-appointed task of trying to prevent a few of the students who pass through our institution from conforming altogether to the approved pattern’ (1930). Teaching was one of the few professions open to young, educated women during the interwar years, especially to those from rural working families who advanced through Scotland’s scholarship system. Shepherd herself had been among the earliest, though not the first, generation of women to enter the university as students, and her rejection of stifling social conventions, religious hypocrisy and women’s traditional familial roles is evident in her approach to mentoring students, as well as her writing. This book introduces Shepherd as an ecological writer, but looking at her life and the time in which she wrote, it’s perhaps better to approach her first as a feminist. Her novels all centre the experiences of women in rural communities, contributing to an early twentieth-century movement to write with a new boldness and honesty about sexuality, self-development, and the frustrations and private joys of women’s lives. The Quarry Wood (1928) focuses

Introduction

5

on the experiences of Martha, a young girl from a poor rural household who achieves a scholarship to study at Shepherd’s alma mater, the University of Aberdeen. Martha struggles between the domestic demands of her messy, rustic and loving home and the bold intellectual and romantic awakening of the university, navigating challenging female friendships and the love of emotionally manipulative young men as she goes. This essential coming-of-age story is written with tenderness and generosity, even towards the student Luke who falls for Martha as an idealized intellectual ‘soulmate’, while carrying on a flesh-and-blood relationship with Martha’s adopted sister, Dussie. Strikingly, the novel ends with a contented Martha who has abandoned Luke, nurtured a comradely friendship with Dussie and dedicated herself to an independent life, albeit one pursued in a lively community of friends, neighbours and animals. Her next novel, The Weatherhouse (1930), is darker in theme and tone, focusing on a rural community during the First World War. The family of women who live at the Weatherhouse – the awkwardly shaped building at the novel’s heart – stand for different outlooks on life: pragmatic, idealistic, esoteric or full of ecstasy and wonder. Conveying one of the central lessons of Shepherd’s writing – that things look very different, depending on where you’re standing when you look at them – the novel explores a minor disruption in community life from a myriad of angles. In characters like distracted Ellen Falconer, ironic Lang Leeb and hopeful Lindsay Lorimer, Shepherd gives insight into how richly textured women’s experiences are, and how various. Finally, A Pass in the Grampians (1933) returns to farming communities to explore the obstacles and opportunities facing young Jenny Kilgour. A farmer’s daughter, she is beguiled by a neighbour who returns to the community fresh from her successes as a singer in London. Dorabel Cassidy (once plain Bella Cassie) arrives with glamour, whizzing along country roads by car with a plan to build a gaudy new house on the moor. While much of the community is in uproar, Jenny is in love. They are both hungry for life and urgent for change and action. And so, at the novel’s end, Jenny leaves her home, seeking ‘a beginning, not an end, to anticipation’ (PG 116). When the novels were first published, critics noted Shepherd’s fellowship with many other highly praised women writers from England and the United States. A 1928 review in the New York Times compared The Quarry Wood to work by American writers like Willa Cather and Ellen Glasgow, as well as the English visionary writer Mary Webb and modernist Virginia Woolf (Taylor). Like Cather and Webb, Shepherd turned a microscope on intense emotion elicited by nature; like Glasgow and Woolf, she was interested in consciousness,

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perception and the mystery of the self, experiencing and reacting to the world in ways that transgress realist notions of character and integrated identity. As impressive as these international comparisons are, they do rather obscure the fact that there was also a strong tradition of feminist fiction in Scotland. Mary and Jane Helen Findlater’s Crossriggs (1908) and Margaret Oliphant’s Hester (1883) and Kirsteen (1890) tell stories of women’s struggles for self-determination outside of marriage, offering travel, art, politics and work as alternatives to dull and loveless marriages or chaste spinsterhood. During the interwar years, Shepherd’s contemporaries Catherine Carswell (1879–1946), Willa Muir (1890– 1970) and Naomi Mitchison (1897–1999) combatted taboos and wrote with a fresh honesty about women’s professional, political and personal lives and desires. Open the Door!’s young heroine, the artist Joanna Bannerman, displays a keen and unabashed sexuality in her pursuit of male lovers. Naomi Mitchison’s We Have Been Warned (1935) was censored by publishers because of its frank depiction of abortion and unabashed defence of contraception. In Imagined Corners (1935), Willa Muir allowed her characters Lizzie and Elise to ride off by train to start a new, presumably romantic life together in the Mediterranean. Representations of same-sex relations, open marriage and adultery as themes in interwar fiction reflect the fact that women were enjoying new freedoms outside the confines of heterosexual marriage, in spite of the great social cost of breaking the mould. Other contemporary writers like Lorna Moon in Doorways in Drumorty (1926) and Violet Jacob in her short story ‘Thievie’ (1922) contributed bitter, often brutal portrayals of the realities of rural poverty and gender oppression (Moon; Jacob). Along with Shepherd, these writers told multilayered stories about women’s lives in Scotland’s towns, crofts and villages, contributing a distinctive strand of nonidealistic rural modernism to interwar women’s fiction (Walton). After 1933, Shepherd stopped publishing novels and devoted herself to editing, scholarship and the work that would result in The Living Mountain. She was an active participant in Scottish PEN, formed in 1927 to promote internationalism in literature and cultural exchange. She corresponded with key figures in Scotland’s Literary Renaissance, including Marion Angus, Agnes Mure Mackenzie, Neil Gunn, Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Murray Grieve) and Jessie Kesson. She edited the Aberdeen University Review between 1956 and 1963 and lectured to university audiences and public societies on subjects as diverse as Shakespeare, ballads, the poetry of Robert Burns and Utopian literature (‘Burns Suppers’; ‘Miss Nan Shepherd on Ballads’; ‘Utopias in Novels’). All of this work was conducted on the fringes of the academy. Although women could undertake master’s degrees, they were rarely admitted to the faculty, so Shepherd

Introduction

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spent much of her life on the university’s peripheries, editing and contributing to the Review and attending functions, but not speaking in their lecture theatres. Only in 1964 was Shepherd awarded an honorary LLD. These activities dominated her time between the publication of her last novel (A Pass in the Grampians, 1933) and the publication of The Living Mountain (1977). As the story goes, she wrote the book in the late 1940s but left it in a drawer following an unfavourable review from a publisher and some faint praise from her friend Neil Gunn. The neglect and marginalization of Shepherd’s work over the next halfcentury follow a familiar pattern. The novels fell out of print from the late 1930s to the 1990s, and during her lifetime her reputation had dwindled so completely that her friend and mentee, the writer Jessie Kesson, did not realize that Shepherd was a published novelist until long after they had first met (Kesson). Within Scottish literary culture and academia, male writers like MacDiarmid and Grassic Gibbon were elevated to national hero status, while Shepherd and her female peers were obscured and marginalized. Mammoth critical surveys like Scottish Literature – which covers writing from the 1400s to the early 2000s – contain only two chapters dedicated to women writers, while six single or double author chapters are dedicated to the men of the Scottish Renaissance alone (Dunnigan et al.). In 1980, the artist Alexander Moffat painted a now-famous group portrait, Poets’ Pub. Eight literary heavyweights huddle close together, while in the background a bare-breasted woman stands in pastiche of Eugène Delacroix’s figure of Liberty Leading the People (1830) with the Lion Rampant of Scotland held aloft. Painted in celebration of the country that had produced such writers as Sorley Maclean, Edwin Morgen and George Mackay Brown, it doubles as a painful emblem of women writers’ exclusion from the modern canon of Scottish literature. Only the figure of an anonymous lone woman, her hands resting in her elbows, her body slumped over a high bar table, disturbs the jubilant self-satisfaction of the scene. After Shepherd’s death in 1981, however, a flurry of academic interest led to some fine scholarship exploring the feminist, philosophical and geographical qualities of her writing. Gillian Carter, Aileen Christianson and Alison Lumsden all contributed significant critical work, while the scholar and editor Roderick Watson collected her work and returned it to print. Her novels and The Living Mountain were collected in a chunky edition called The Grampian Quartet (1996) and published by Canongate, in an imprint designed specifically for keeping older novels available for the benefit of students and scholars. The Quarry Wood went on to the Literature curriculum at the University of Aberdeen (where it has stayed to this day). A quote from The Quarry Wood was carved on a stone paving slab in Makar’s Court, Edinburgh, as part of a project to celebrate Scottish writing

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which began in 1998. This revival was, however, largely an academic affair. Her works were not picked up by commercial publishers interested in publishing neglected women writers, like Virago and Persephone Press, and so remained a favourite for scholars, students and those ‘in the know’. In the last decade, renewed interest in Shepherd’s writing has brought her to the attention of a new generation of Scottish, British and international readers, while her appearance on the Royal Bank of Scotland five-pound note in 2016 cemented her position as a modern Scottish icon (‘Novelist and Poet’). This rise to fame rests mostly on The Living Mountain, now back in print and the subject of BBC radio and television documentaries presented by the nature writer Robert Macfarlane. Reading the 2011 edition of that book, with its new introduction and stunning, minimalist cover, you might be mistaken for thinking Shepherd was a buried treasure, reclaimed from the dust by a curious and fortunate scholar whose passion for rediscovering lost literature is as indefatigable as his quests to travel to wild and forgotten places. But what is less often mentioned is The Living Mountain was reprinted as recently as 2008. Nothing substantial changed in the manuscript between 2008 and 2011. So why was it not until 2011 that the book ‘stuck’? Shepherd’s writing has certainly struck a chord with readers interested in lost women icons, particularly those transgressing into traditionally ‘masculine’ genres and pursuits. Her success also owes much to a carefully orchestrated engagement with trends in ‘new nature writing’, fomenting at a moment when readers, writers and scholars were seeking new ways to understand, change and develop relations with places, species and local and global ecosystems. A short work of non-fiction, written for a largely hypothetical audience in the 1940s, it has taken on a new significance in an age of ecological crisis. With its striking perspectives on place, animals and plants and its tender account of a mountain that is ‘living’, the book tells a very different story than is found in much nature writing. Reflecting on what and why this is, is this book’s purpose. Posing these questions will do more than rehabilitate Shepherd as an innovative nature writer; it will explore the role that ecological literature like Shepherd’s might play in transforming cultural responses to environmental degradation and climate change

Shepherd as nature writer New nature writing provides a key context for The Living Mountain’s success. What, then, are the distinctive features of this genre, and why should its authors

Introduction

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and readers find fellowship with Shepherd? The term ‘new nature writing’ was coined in 2008 in a Granta journal special edition. ‘As our conception and experience of nature changes, so too does the way we write about it,’ the editorial explains, setting the tone for an edition which includes essays and poetry on postindustrial landscapes, military territories and species on the brink of extinction (‘The New Nature Writing’). ‘Nature’, as these examples show, is not a pristine haven for innocent reflection, but contested, exploited and suffering. It is not a ‘world apart’ from humanity, but the world itself, including diverse species and ecological processes as they are shaped by social, political and industrial forces. The genre may have been defined in the late noughties, but its origins can be traced back to 1973, with the publication of Richard Mabey’s The Unofficial Countryside and Raymond Williams’s landmark cultural study The Country and the City (both 1973). Williams’s critical exploration of the long history of the town/countryside relationship spurred new interest in the ideological underpinnings of pastoral writing and working histories of the land, ‘challenging a particular form of wealthy, metropolitan nostalgia that idealized rural life in ways that disavowed the reality of struggle for ordinary people’ (Smith 4). It was happy coincidence, then, that in the same year Mabey offered an alternative in The Unofficial Countryside. Rejecting such simplistic and idealizing tropes, his book nonetheless reveals how care for place and more-than-human lives continues to thrive in the modern world, in spite of homogenization of place and careless over-development. Subsequent nature writers of the 1990s and 2000s (including Roger Deakin, Kathleen Jamie and Mark Cocker) contributed ‘new’ nature books that interweave memoir and natural history, and are informed to some extent by environmentalism (Moran). In the same years, the Kyoto Protocol and President Bush’s rejection of it (1992 and 2005, respectively) and the Paris Climate Change Agreement (2015) brought awareness of climate change into public discourse. New nature writing often registers awareness of environmental catastrophe, at the same time as it tries to reorient attitudes to place and humanity’s place in nature. Jos Smith suggests that much new nature writing participates in a ‘lyric activism’, which ‘foregrounds a connection between the aesthetics of place writing and the cultural activities of local grassroots projects of conservation and heritage’ (Smith 205). Kathleen Jamie’s Findings, for example, in its description of forays to remote Hebridean islands littered with ocean plastic disturbs cultural preconceptions about the purity of ‘wild’ places. However, other critics argue that the reality of climate catastrophe demands more explicit messaging. In a 2015 article in the New Statesman, Mark Cocker weighed in against the lyric excesses of the genre

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and criticized nature writers for writing twee accounts of landscapes and human histories, rather than passionately defending collapsing ecologies. ‘[N]ature and culture have been replaced by landscape and literature,’ he claimed, as books like Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (2012) overlay accounts of walks and travel with literary, folk and language history, clothing places in beautiful language. This may satisfy the genre’s underlying ethos of ‘re-enchantment’ by reviving lost love of land in the hope that more environmentally conscious behaviour may be encouraged. But are these hopes enough, or do nature writers need to be more critical and less beguiling in their writing as the state of nature worsens? As Shepherd has been inducted into the canon of new nature writing, the question of her engagement with social, political, cultural and ecological realities becomes more pressing. This book activates the radical and ecocritical qualities of her writing, reading Shepherd in a way that ‘stays with the trouble’, in the words of Donna Haraway. Though Macfarlane claims that Shepherd understood how ‘landscape has long offered us ways of figuring ourselves to ourselves’, she was also aware that nature was something beyond the human, with its own inner workings and life (Macfarlane 2012: 193). By tracing the philosophical and ontological underpinnings of her writing, I will show why her findings correspond with many of the more radical and critical propositions of modern environmental thought. This will help establish Shepherd as an ecological writer, and distinguish her from the more ‘tame’ nature writing that Cocker highlights, which is really a tradition of writing about landscape and place. Of course, Shepherd knew the places she wrote about intimately. From her base above the River Dee – which runs to the sea from the Cairngorms, via Braemar, Cults and Aberdeen – Shepherd had lifelong access to the hills. She began walking in the Cairngorms in the 1920s, and they would provide inspiration for her poetry and prose for the next thirty years. In her letters, she describes the trips – the ‘blessed mountain week[s]’ – she took outside of teaching terms, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends and all-women student teams (Shepherd 1931b). She would stay in the Tomintoul Croft halfway up Morrone above Braemar, in a bothy above the Lairig Ghru, with Maggie Gruer on the Aviemore side, pitch a tent on the hills, or sleep in the open (Donald 20–2). It was to the Cairngorms that she devoted her sole collection of poetry, In the Cairngorms (1934), and in The Living Mountain (written 1940s, published 1977), she reflects on the absorbing process of getting to know the mountain range. But her writing is more than a register of direct impressions of the hills. It is shaped by the distinctive intellectual approaches that influenced her, forms of knowledge derived from the sciences, philosophy and literature.

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In a 1931 interview, it is reported that Shepherd did not walk to talk about current fiction, as ‘[s]he prefers to read philosophy’ (Cynthia). The interviewer was not helpful enough to ask what she was reading, and it is impossible to exhaustively track Shepherd’s influences. We know that, as a teacher, she lectured on Thomas Hardy, Rupert Brooke, Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt, and an eclectic account of her influences can be found in the commonplace books she kept between 1911 and 1950. They reveal eclectic interests, from Darwinism to Romanticism, theosophy, mysticism, Buddhism, and the philosophy of Simone Weil. Most of the poems she copied are late Victorian and Edwardian and use formal metre: Rudyard Kipling, A. E. Housman, Edward Fitzgerald’s translations of Omar Khayyam, and numerous poems on faith and motherhood are all represented. However, more formally experimental writing by Emily Dickinson and T. S. Eliot also makes an appearance. Religious themes dominate, especially in the early years. Although she was raised in the Free Church, in the late 1920s she lost her faith, adopting instead a pantheistic spiritual and philosophical attitude that incorporated elements of theosophy, Buddhism and Romanticism (Peacock 61). These combined traditions help produce the distinctive understanding of self and nature relations found in Shepherd’s work, as shall be seen.

Theosophy and Buddhism Shepherd’s early understanding of nature was influenced by the Irish Renaissance poet and Theosophist George William Russell (‘AE’) (Peacock 111). In 1913, or thereabouts, she went so far as to copy six poems by ‘AE’ into her Gleanings book in their entirety: ‘Epigram’, ‘Place of Rest’, ‘Desire’, ‘Frolic’, ‘Immortality’, ‘Dana: The Mother of Gods’ (Shepherd 1907–c. 1947). Theosophy was a late nineteenthcentury spiritualist movement emerging from diverse traditions of alchemy, Kabbalah, Buddhism, Freemasonry and Neoplatonism. Established by Helen Blavatsky in 1875, the Theosophical Society and its membership sketched out an esoteric faith, united by belief in the oneness of life. Consciousness and matter interacted, so they claimed, and the inner life of humanity (the individual soul) was mirrored by the divine unity of the ‘Universal Oversoul’ (Ellwood 19–22). A neo-pagan spiritualism, theosophy encapsulated the eclecticism and vagaries of Western appropriations of ancient and Eastern philosophies. In a rejection of Victorian materialism and industrialism, its followers were searching for a mysterious, secret realm underlying matter. ‘Is there a centre within us through

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which all threads of the universe are drawn, a spiritual atom which mirrors the spiritual infinitudes even as the eye is a mirror of the external heavens?’ asked Russell, voicing language and ideas which Shepherd would pursue in much of her early poetry (Russell 106). Theosophy inspired Shepherd in the 1910s and 1920s, and many of her poems only make sense when read in dialogue with it. In ‘Embodiment’, Shepherd explores the Theosophical belief in the unity of things through the metaphor of light: There is no substance but light. The visible worlds Are light Undergoing a process of creation The world has been created in a vision that ‘a god thought out in light’, and humanity is made of the same substance as the rocks and mountains. Theosophists saw in each atom ‘a spark of the one Life and Divine unity’, in physical nature and the human alike (Peacock 110). Forms were impermanent, near-permeable entities, enlivened and conjoined by the same spirit: ‘A little breaking of the barriers and being would mingle with being,’ as Russell tried to explain (1918: 54). Humanity is also made out of the same spirit and light as the Divine, meaning that we are a part of both nature and divinity. Countering the mundane determinism that many saw in Darwin’s theory of evolution, people were believed to be able to take a creative part in their own development and evolution: and so ‘Having in us the principle of making, / We create ourselves in a form / Imagined in no god’s mind,’ Shepherd wrote in her poem ‘Embodiment’ (IC 39). Later, in her adoption of neo-vitalist thinking, she would adapt these ideas and run with them, away from the spiritual and into the material realm. But this is the subject of a later discussion. Shepherd’s understanding of nature was also shaped by her understanding of Buddhism, as allusions to the practice of meditation and the neo-Vedic tradition of Yoga in The Living Mountain attest. She first encountered Buddhist thought in the work of the traveller and interpreter of Japanese philosophy, Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904). Shepherd read his Gleanings in Buddha Fields (1897) at some point after 1911, when she began keeping her own medley books, fittingly titled Gleanings. Hearn’s book was a medley of traveller’s anecdotes, witty stories, scholarly essays and religious musings, though the chapter that seems to have most stood out for Shepherd focuses on Nirvana. Shepherd copied from this

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chapter extensively, filling up four whole pages of her notebook. According to Hearn, in Buddhist thought, acts and thoughts are forces instigating themselves into material and mental phenomena – into what we call objective and subjective appearances. The very earth we tread upon – the mountains and forests, the rivers and seas, the world and its moon, the visible universe in short, is the integration of acts and thoughts, is Karma, or, at least, Being conditioned by Karma. (Hearn: 124–5)

Shepherd never adopted Buddhism outright, but the notion that nature possesses mind-like qualities informs much of her writing, while the desire to become integrated into the physical world, to penetrate the life of things – both physically and spiritually – runs through The Living Mountain. Chance experiences of oneness affect a transformation in the self, with ethical and ecological consequences. The unity of things, according to Hearn, was not spiritual, in the Western sense: it was physical, a quality of matter and spontaneous sentience which connects humanity to all other entities in existence. It also connects all organisms across the millions of years of species development and countless cycles of incarnation revealed through evolutionary and geological sciences (Hearn 130). The doubt and despair that many nineteenth-century writers faced contemplating evolution and species extinction were just the false reaction of the Egoistic Self, according to Hearn. In contrast to the evolutionary account of identity, Buddhist self was not the ‘compound of countless ages’, defined by aeons of evolutionary development, but a particle of a divine and immortal present, collapsing distinctions between past and present, time and space, and living and dead (Hearn 131–2).

Romanticism Closer to home, Shepherd was influenced by the long-Romantic tradition in British and North American literature. She read deeply in the poetry of Robert Burns, whose lyrics on animal suffering and the land-folk relations espouse Scottish common sense philosophy and political Radicalism, advocating for a fellowship of humanity with more-than-human others (Leask). Shorter lyrics by  Shepherd, like ‘Singing Burn’, show the influence of Burns in their use of Scots  diminutive and intimate, direct address: ‘O burnie with the glass-white shiver,  / Singing over stone’ (p. 1). Similarly, ‘Loch Avon’ advises the loch to

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‘Tell nane yer depth and nane shall I’ (p. 2), in a tone of conspiratorial respect which will ring bells anyone familiar with ‘To a Mouse’ (1785). Many passages in The Living Mountain share this charmed but essentially egalitarian tone in their description of birds, deer and even insects. As Burns apologies to the mouse, ‘poor, earth-born companion, / An’ fellow-mortal!,’ for his plough’s work in disturbing his nest, so Shepherd politely creeps away from the birds, who ‘scold like fishwives’, at her approach (LM 56). English Romanticism was also, inevitably, an influence. From this tradition derives the conviction – now widely culturally diffused – that nature is restorative and educational. In the Lyrical Ballads and the ‘Preface’ (1798/1800), William Wordsworth outlined his thesis that nature shapes the human mind and influences emotion, proving a sympathetic resonance between humanity and the physical world. Beneath physical forms, he discerned a transcendental ‘life of things’ revealed to the ‘eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony, and the deep power of joy’ (Wordsworth 2008: 132). Romantic celebration of specific kinds of scenery, organized into the aesthetic categories of the sublime, picturesque and beautiful, also definitively shaped the aesthetics of nature writing that Shepherd inherited. Notably, she frequently undercuts and evades such categories in her writing of the mountain. She was, of course, concerned with the imaginative, creative and affective relationship between nature and the human, but as Louisa Gairn points out, she was far from a belated Romantic. Instead of seeking the ‘egotistical sublime’ – the overarching view that one seeks to achieve a pinnacle of feeling and vision – Shepherd was ‘continually searching for modes of observation and expression which evolve away from the conventional Romantic response to natural environments’ (Gairn 2008: 126). And, significantly, what Shepherd called the ‘Wordsworthian’ premise that some people are more sensitized to experience ‘moments of enlightenment’ in response to natural forms and sensations, is lightly mocked (Shepherd undated). An alternative tradition can be traced in the writing of Dorothy Wordsworth. In 1941, the first comprehensive edition of Dorothy’s journals was published. Providing a counter narrative of the places she visited with William, they include precise descriptions of natural scenery, a ‘wry personification’ of animal life, and a detailed and sensitive understanding of the lives and material circumstances of people living in rural communities, including the Scottish Highlands (Ballenca: 204). Resonances with Dorothy’s depictions of light, perspective and chance encounters suggest that Shepherd read and responded creatively to the journals. Lying on the grass, Wordsworth describes how she unexpectedly witnessed ‘the glittering silver line on the backs of sheep, owing to their situation with respect

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to the sun, which made them look beautiful, but with something of strangeness, like animals of another kind, belonging to a more splendid world’ (Wordsworth 1941: 140). The ‘illusory similitudes’, described by Wordsworth, ‘make the world seem less tangible, fleshly and mortal’, something which taps into the ‘life of things’, but is markedly less self-conscious than the search for Romantic aspects, be they sublime or picturesque (Brownstein: 58). Dorothy’s precise and visionary descriptions of the distorting effects of light, and the strange ulterior qualities of things they reveal, are paralleled in Shepherd’s writing. She devotes a whole chapter of The Living Mountain to ‘Air and Light’, as ‘the world is made new’ under the penetrating sunshine of the mountains. A birch tree with the sun falling on it is described by Dorothy as ‘tree in shape with stem and branches, but it was like a Spirit of water’ (Wordsworth 1941: 82). Under water, Shepherd glimpses ‘a tree hung with light – a minimal tree, but exquisite, its branches delicate with globes of light that sparkle’, a miniature enchantment (LM 45). Singular glimpses of natural phenomena, the beautifying quality of light and conscious attempts to alter perception were explored in the work of another of Shepherd’s influences, the American transcendental writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. His 1836 essay, Nature, is one of the more significant statements about human–nature relations in transcendentalist thought. Natural objects, Emerson claimed, are primed to bring us delight, affect physical well-being and inspire reverence ‘when the mind is open to their influence’. However, most people ‘have a very superficial seeing’. In infancy, the inward and outward senses are ‘truly adjusted to each other’, but only those who have retained that childish nature will experience the ‘wild delight’ that ‘runs through’ the body in nature (p. 4). Nature is deeply affective, producing exhilaration, joy and delight in all kinds of scenes and sensations: ‘for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of mind’ (p. 5). The sorcery leads him to question if there is an occult correspondence between humanity and nature, and yet he concedes that ‘the power to produce this delight does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both’ (p. 6). The eye participates in the creation of natural beauty and the alteration of mood by its ability to harmonize scenery: it is ‘the best of all artists. By the mutual action of its structure and of the laws of light, perspective is produced,’ which integrates physical objects and makes a scene ‘round and symmetrical’ (Emerson: 9). The poet, then, is imagined as a special being capable of translating this visible natural beauty into language and unravelling the relationship between the part and the whole. They witness and translate the Central Unity revealed by the correspondences between things: ‘The river, as it flows, resembles the

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air that flows over it; the air resembles the light that traverses it with still more subtle currents; the light resembles the heat which rides with it through Space.’ Lying under the ‘garment of nature’, the ‘Universal Spirit’ pervades everything and is revealed through the creative imagination and our perception of beauty (Emerson p. 30). There are obvious parallels between Emerson’s belief in correspondence between things, revealed through the careful gaze of the poet, and Shepherd’s writing in The Living Mountain. The experience of the mountain is something that grows over time, as detail adds to detail, until ‘one can read at last the word that has been from the beginning’ (LM 106). She shares, too, his fascination with the affective qualities of nature. Walks produce the feeling of all-body well-being, while mood is elevated by scent and sensation, producing joy, adoration and delight. The eye provides entry into the physical world, like all the senses, each of which is a ‘way in to what the mountain has to give’ (LM 97). Like Emerson, she is concerned with how perspective shifts as one walks and shifts position: ‘The least change in our position gives the whole world a pictorial air,’ Emerson notes, while movement produces new thoughts and new understandings of place (Emerson 35). As perspective alters, so Shepherd notes, ‘one is surprised by a new vision of a familiar range’ (p. 20). Walking steeply down Gael Charn in the Monadhliaths, she gains a new vision of the Cairngorms from afar, as mountains seem to rise and fall: one watches the high panorama opposite settle into itself as one descends. It enchants me like a juggler’s trick. . . . A simple diagram explains the ‘trick’, but no diagram can explain the serene sublimity these high panoramas convey to the human mind. (LM 19)

The moving picture, created by eye and place in a living dance, affects mood and elevates the spirit. Shepherd, however, deviates from Emerson in her interpretation of the picture. His observer discovers a stability in looking at the shifting spectacle of nature. While the world, to Emerson, is a spectacle, the human is ‘stable’, looking out at nature from a fixed position in consciousness (Emerson 35–6). Shepherd, instead, realizes how provisional her own position, her way of looking at things, really is. This is a discovery she will return to throughout The Living Mountain. Rather than achieving an objective perspective, the human is revealed to be a moving part of a dynamic whole. From Emerson, too, she took the trick of turning upside down to look at the world anew: ‘Turn the eyes upside down, by looking at the landscape through your legs, and how agreeable is the picture, though you have seen it any time these twenty years!,’ he

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exclaims (Emerson 35). For Shepherd, turning upside down reveals a new world, implicating the viewer in the creative act of making beauty and a scene: ‘Details are no longer part of a grouping in a picture of which I am the focal point, the focal point is everywhere,’ Shepherd realizes. The ‘looking-through-the-legs’ passage invites many readings. It evokes Emerson, of course, and also practices of gesture and bodily repositioning like yoga – indeed, Emerson’s collaborator and fellow transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau claimed to be the first American to adopt the ancient Indian practice (Michelis 81). Later in this book, I will have reason to return to this passage again. Here, though, it is worth noting how much it deviates from Emerson’s thesis of spirit. Nature is not just a phenomenon, as Emerson proposed, and does not only exist as and when it is experienced by humanity and enlivened with emotion. Although Shepherd agreed with Emerson to the extent that ‘man’s experience of them enlarges rock, flower and bird’ (LM 108), still, humanity’s experience does not define or create natural lives and forms. Matter is substance, not a pure phenomenon. The existence of the body assures this. In Nature’s most famous passage, Emerson describes how Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am a part or parcel of God. (Emerson 5)

Egotism vanishes, and so does the body, turning the spectator into a point of pure perspective, transcendent from the physical world. For Shepherd, by contrast, awareness of unity and correspondence only comes through matter: walking hour after hour, one may ‘walk the flesh transparent’, but ‘[t]he body is not made negligible, but paramount. Flesh is not annihilated but fulfilled. One is not bodiless, but essential body’ (LM 106).

Writing mountains Shepherd’s reading in Buddhism, Romanticism and theosophy informed her philosophical understanding of the relation between nature and the mind. But the presence of mountaineering literature and travel writing in her scattered library suggests Shepherd was also intrigued by the formal problem of writing the hills. Robert Lock Graham Irving’s The Mountain Way (1938), found in her library, provided one model of approach (Clouston). Irving was a writer

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and mountaineer, a member of the Alpine Club and proponent of the then controversial practice of climbing without a guide. He published a practical memoir, The Romance of Mountaineering, in 1935, in which he criticized the competitiveness of climbing culture and urged those attempting high peaks to do so for their own personal fulfilment, not publicity (4; 190). Certainly, Shepherd shares Irving’s conviction that ‘[t]o climb a peak has not been to conquer it, but to be admitted to intimacy’ (Irving 1935: 4); or, in Shepherd’s words: ‘to pit oneself merely against other players, and to make a race of it, is to reduce to the level of a game what is essentially an experience’ (LM 4). In Irving’s The Mountain Way, the qualitative nature of mountaineering is further explored through a far ranging series of excerpts from Genesis, the Psalms, Petrarch, John Bunyan, Goethe, Byron, William Wordsworth, Ruskin, John Muir and Nietzsche, as well as contemporary accounts of expeditions including Climbing Days (1935) by pioneering female mountaineer, Dorothy Pilley, and Vivienne de Watteville’s Speak to the Earth (1935), a Thoreau-inspired memoir of touring in Africa. Although the contributors are predominantly male, the collection reflects rich and varied historical and cultural traditions of looking at mountains. It resists the hackneyed story of mountaineering as a form of conquest, in order to explore the reasons people love mountains and the many meanings that have been projected onto them, while ‘all the time the Alps are looking down unmoved’ (Irving 1939: xx). Irving’s account of European mountain-consciousness adds layers to the conventional story of mountaineering’s rise, which sheds light on Shepherd’s approach in The Living Mountain. Before the Romantics celebrated high peaks, writers generally expressed disgust for mountains or saw them as refugees from a fate slightly worse (Irving 1939: xx). Travelling through Scotland in 1773, Samuel Johnson snubbed the Highlands as ‘matter incapable of form or usefulness: dismissed by nature from her care . . . quickened only with one sullen power of useless vegetation’ (Johnson 34–5). But with the popularity of James Macpherson’s Ossian adaptation in 1760 and the rise of European Romanticism, from 1800 Scotland’s mountains and glens came to be appreciated by intellectuals and tourists for their sublime and picturesque qualities. With this influx of Worthsworthian pilgrims came the competitive hikers, climbers and sportsmen. In conflict, and sometimes in collaboration, these groups stood for two aesthetic ideals of the hills: as temple or obstacle course, a test for human domination (Smout 31). When the Scottish Mountaineering Club was founded in 1889, it used the editorial of its first journal edition to celebrate the mountaineers’ ‘love of scenery . . . untainted by the work of man, just as it came fresh from the

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Creator’s hand’ (‘The President’s Address’ 3). By contrast, the Scottish Ski Club, formed in 1907, perfectly expressed the discourse of nature domination which emerged as skiers took to the hills: I glory in the victory over self and Nature . . . the greatest of all joys of skiing is the sense of limitless speed, the unfettered rush through the air at breakneck speed. . . . Man is alone, gloriously alone against the inanimate universe. . . . He alone is man, for whose enjoyment and use Nature exists. (Scottish Ski Club 207)

In the late Victorian and Edwardian era, the invention of more precise devices to measure heights, speed and distance, as well as a public fascination with these records, all helped reduce the mountains to inanimate, dumb material, perfectly formed for men to enjoy and test themselves against. Irving even suggests that mountaineering appeased appetites for conflict no longer indulged by warfare: ‘when a period of peace allowed men, especially in Britain, to look for adventures in other ways than in war on land or sea, mountains began to offer a use of leisure in which body and spirit were refreshed and stimulated together.’ Men come to the mountains to satisfy ‘the desire for dominance’: ‘the motive power behind the gospel of force which is replacing Christianity among so many of the young people of Europe’ (Irving 1939: xx). When Shepherd came to write The Living Mountain, she was contending with many contradictory ways of seeing and using mountains. On the book’s first page, she introduces the Cairngorms as a mass of granite thrust up through the schists and gneiss that form the lower surrounding hills, planed down by the ice cap, and split, shattered and scooped by frost, glaciers, and the strength of running water. (LM 1)

Geology and natural history are Shepherd’s first words on the physical reality of the mountains, but as she quickly warns, such knowledge will not do: ‘Their physiognomy is in the geography books – so many square miles of area, so many lochs, so many summits of over 4000 feet – but this is a pallid simulacrum of their reality, which like every reality that matters ultimately to human beings, is a reality of the mind.’ Outlining the problems of conventional ways of seeing and knowing the world, Shepherd proposes that a different form of encounter will be attempted. She seeks to ‘know the essential nature’ of the mountain: ‘To know, that is, with the knowledge that is a process of living’ (LM 1). Recording sensory, embodied, emotional, perceptual and imaginative encounters as they amass and are reflected on over many years of walking in all weathers and lights, will be The Living Mountain’s purpose, and so the lens through which

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the mountain is recorded shifts from the objective – or ostensibly objective – realm of maps and measurements, to the subjective. Resisting abstraction, she attempts to experience the natural world both directly and sensuously without instrumentalizing it or reducing it to parts and units. Incomplete and situated though they are, acts of sensual and imaginative encounter enable her to grasp at the interconnectedness of the mountain, finally coming to the awareness that the mountain itself is living. I will have cause to return to this term – ‘living’ – more than once. Small wonder: it is part of the title of Shepherd’s own book, and its significance is signalled in this one’s too. Investigation into Shepherd’s interests in ecology, geology and neovitalism will reveal exactly what it means to describe a mountain as alive. But the term also alludes to another masterpiece of mountain writing: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’. In this poem, written at the height of Romantic mountain appreciation, Shelley explores his dual wonder and horror at the Alpine peaks. Looking at the sublime and awful scene, he struggles to reconcile his sense that humanity projects its own meanings onto natural forms, with the contradictory impression that nature is a force too powerful for the mind to grasp and hold. As the ‘everlasting universe of things / Flows through the mind’, it releases and spurs innate qualities in the human, some glittering, some ‘reflecting gloom’. Then, looking at the ravages of shattered pines and heaps of ice, he has an apocalyptic vision of a kind of universal entropy, as all the works of man and nature tend towards obliteration. On the high peaks, where the rocks, drawn down From yon remotest waste, have overthrown The limits of the dead and living world, Never to be reclaimed. (Shelley 123)

There’s ambiguity in the word ‘overthrown’. Have the rocks simply tumbled down the cliff, or conquered the limits of life and death, moving beyond them into some eternal, immaterial other realm? Have they caused an earthquake that has shattered the boundary altogether, creating a death-in-life, a life-in-death? What is interesting about this passage, as it connects to Shepherd, is the description of the world – or a part of it – as ‘living’, and distinguishable from the part of it that is dead. This is the boundary that is either shattered or overcome by the rocks that move with a disturbing, ulterior agency before the eye, tormenting the imagination. As subsequent chapters will show, Shepherd is also interested in how the forms of nature flow ‘through the mind’, and in how we hold ‘an unremitting

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interchange / With the clear universe of things around’ (Shelley 123). But hers is not a world that observes stark boundaries between life and death, or in which the sublime peaks arrest us with a power that is overwhelming to all but the wise and good. Hers is a universe of livingness, infused with generosity, where the forces of both creation and destruction tend nonetheless towards life. This is part of what it means to call her an ecological writer. Livingness means entanglement and the circulation of all elements, organisms, matter and processes in a natural system. The stark and sublime sight of the high mountain peaks isn’t a threat to the human, and the forces of destruction there aren’t capable of producing evil. The mountain is simply alive in itself, fulfilling its own nature, and participating in a natural system – a living world – which is also our own.

Scottish Literary Renaissance A final influence on Shepherd’s writing of nature came from the Scottish Literary Renaissance. A regional modernist movement, it incorporated influences from international art and literature, based on the conviction that cultural regeneration through aesthetic experimentation was a social and political force for change. Since the Acts of Union in 1707, British rule had had a far-reaching impact on Scottish literature and culture. After the final defeat of the Jacobite Rebellion in 1745, clan loyalties had been dismantled. The forced movement of people during the Highland and Lowland Clearances had produced a depopulated landscape and a diaspora around coastal communities in Scotland and as far afield as in Canada and Australia. Although nineteenth-century authors like Walter Scott had constructed romantic narratives of the Highlands and Borders, defined by tartan and clashing broadswords, Scots and Gaelic languages had been marginalized by the enforced bureaucratic, cultural and political ascendency of English. The Scottish Literary Renaissance was therefore largely committed to Scots and Gaelic revival as a means of recovering lost cultural practices and countering the cultural colonialism of the English tradition. Scottish modernism was particularly vital in the 1920s and 1930s, though the case for a major overhaul of Scottish arts and civic life had been made much earlier. Between 1895 and 1896, the geographer, scientist and town planner Patrick Geddes edited The Evergreen, a journal in which artistic perspectives were brought into engagement with new ecological science. It was in an article in The Evergreen that Geddes first demanded a Scots ‘Renascence’. Describing a dreich Edinburgh scene of wailing winds, groaning pipes and lamenting bards,

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Geddes confronted a culture on the wane: ‘What then – save “Finis Scotiae!” – can remain for us to say?,’ he concluded (Geddes 17). Geddes had a point. He was writing just before the major flourishing of the Glasgow School art movement, led by Margaret MacDonald and Charles Rennie Mackintosh and influenced by Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts Movement. However, the innovation and internationalism nurtured in the arts had so far not been matched in literature. During the 1890s, Scottish literature had been largely defined by two major literary movements: the Celtic Twilight, which was influenced by the Irish revivalism of William Butler Yeats, and represented in Scotland by Fiona MacCleod (William Sharp); and the nostalgic fables of the so-called Kailyard – meaning ‘cabbage patch’. These sentimental novels delighted publishers and urban (often English) readers from the 1880s to the 1920s. Focused on the artless morality and faith of the Scottish peasantry and the escapades of crabbit farmers and canny Ministers, so-called Kailyard novels told fatalistic stories of the decline of small-town communities on the cusp of agricultural, industrial and transport revolutions in the mid-nineteenth century. Together, the Celtic Twilight and Kailyard forms seemed to thrill at Scotland’s decline in the face of a ruthless, mechanized modernity for which its people, landscape and culture were simply not fit. And yet, in this disheartening ‘Winter’ of culture, Geddes saw the possibility of renewal. He was deeply committed to civic participation, education and sensitive urban design geared towards social improvement, founded on his belief that places embodied cultural values, and values were built into the fabric of place. Literature was a vital agent in this living cultural ecology, an idea which spreads to writers of the Literary Renaissance. As Louisa Gairn puts it, ‘Scottish writers in particular have been sensitive to the perceived erosion of links between language, traditional culture and the natural world’ (2008: 10). Culture, to Geddes, was not a synthetic or constructed entity, but moved in natural cycles of decay, renewal and seasonal growth, in the context of a land whose soil was always fertile. As a founding spirit of the movement, Geddes established a national basis for a literary culture that was implicated in a change in the material, psychological and ecological conditions of society. The call to arms for a Scottish Renaissance would be answered by writers in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1922, the essayist, poet and political organizer, Christopher Murray Grieve launched The Scottish Chapbook, a modernist little magazine dedicated to promoting revival. In his editorials, he called on writers to look to the precedents set by Scots language poets like William

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Dunbar (c.1461–1520), Burns (1759–96) and Marion Angus (1865–1946), and in the Chapbook’s pages he published new works by writers including Angus, Violet Jacob, Edwin Muir and ‘Hugh M’Diarmid’, Grieve’s own anonymous pseudonym, which would later (as MacDiarmid) become his official nom de plume. Many other writers – Shepherd included – reacted in their own ways to the flourishing of new Scottish literature: countering stereotypes of Scottish rural life, translating international avant-garde writers, and reinvigorating local permutations of Scots. Prior to MacDiarmid’s call to arms, the cosmopolitan modernist T. S. Eliot and the Orcadian poet Edwin Muir had written scathing articles doubting whether literature in Scots could ever achieve a ‘universal’ standing because of the local and anachronistic weaknesses of the vernacular (Eliot; Muir 2004). MacDiarmid responded by calling on modern poets to unearth and release the meaning stored in Scots words, both in order to tap into a common store of environmental understanding and to reconnect with the minds and imaginations of the lost generations who originated and spoke the language. Words like ‘watergaw’ (rainbow) and ‘yow-trummle’ (from yowe, ‘a cold spell in early summer about the time of sheep-shearing’ (DSL)) described, in MacDiarmid’s words, ‘natural occurrences and phenomena of all kinds which have apparently never been noted by the English mind. No words for them exist in English’ (Grieve 2004: 28). Shepherd did not use synthetic Scots, though much of the dialogue of her novels and some poems are written in her north-eastern vernacular. She was sympathetic to MacDiarmid’s purpose though, but not because of language’s capacity to freeze and reveal localized relations to place. In her detailed 1938 review of his poetry, she defended his use of recovered words, neologisms and a ‘private’ language, impenetrable to many readers (English speakers in particular, but many Scots too). Words and phrases may be ‘sicklied o’er, made sentimental through an excess of sentiment’, she notes though ‘as slow time revolves, the past soaks out of the older words and we can use them again’ (Shepherd 1939: 54–5). The poet, Shepherd insists, should have the same license as the scientist in coining new language to describe newly observed phenomena and experiences, and in restoring old words which have been cleansed of their sentimental associations through long neglect. As well as generating new literary work, the Renaissance was concerned with a reflection on the past and the hybridization of forms. Poets like Marion Angus revived the ballad form; Willa Muir, with her husband Edwin, translated Franz Kafka into English for the first time (Christianson 2007b: 123–38), and

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MacDiarmid translated poetry by Russian Symbolists Alexander Blok and Zinaida Gippius into Scots (MacDiarmid 2008: ll.241–52 and ll.353–68). The metaphysical, sexual and psychoanalytic themes of continental modernism were also represented in Scots Renaissance writing, as was Woolf ’s dictum that ‘everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss’ (Woolf 12). While not being orthodoxly Freudian in their analysis, Shepherd’s novels asked psychological questions about perception, consciousness and identity, dramatizing characters’ strivings towards autonomy, while recognizing that character and motivation are complex qualities, often unknowable both to the observer and to individuals themselves. At the same time as Scottish literature became more porous to international influences, critics became concerned with the problem of building a distinctively Scottish canon. In 1919, G. Gregory Smith introduced a new critical framework for categorizing and analysing Scotland’s literary heritage. In Scottish Literature: Character and Influence, Smith proposed that a distinctive ‘Caledonian antisyzygy’ could be traced in Scottish writing. ‘Syzygy’ is a term that derives from astronomy and describes moments when celestial bodies come into linear arrangement (e.g. in a solar or lunar eclipse). Antisyzygy was coined to determine the extreme polarity which Smith found in Scotland’s culture: Highland and Lowland; Catholic West and Presbyterian East; urban and rural; Gaelic and Scots; British and Scottish. These multiple and overlapping energies seemed to pull Scottish writing, and the so-called Scottish psyche, in contrary directions. The literature, as Smith put it, ‘is remarkably varied’ and ‘becomes, under the stress of foreign influence, almost a zigzag of contradictions’ (Smith 1919: 4). MacDiarmid took up and popularized Smith’s idea of Caledonian antisyzygy, asserting that the modern Scots genius would be a thrawn entity, holding but not extinguishing the extreme dichotomies of Scottish character: ‘I’ll ha’e nae hauf-way hoose, but aye be whaur / Extremes meet,’ he claimed, attesting to the influence of Smith as well as the extreme and contradictory natures he found in works by international writers he admired, including Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche (MacDiarmid 2008: 63, ll.141–2). Polarity and thrawnness, in consequence, become structuring principles of the movement. Shepherd also explored this dichotomy, asking how she might fit within the poles. So much of her work addresses contradictions – between rural and intellectual culture, idealism and materialism, and spirit and substance – but it would be remiss to call her thrawn. Instead, a 1930 letter suggests a new way of understanding her literary output, and how she placed herself in the

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Scottish literary canon. It occurs when she is reflecting on her desire to write a comparative study of Burns and MacDiarmid: They represent two such opposite sides of the Scottish genius. . . . [Burns] who glories in every manifestation of the actual, relishing common life with a divine gusto – and [MacDiarmid,] who strikes upward out of the mess and stultifying inertia of the herd, sword-sharp and flashing, to the cold shining heights of the intellect and the spirit. You know, I recognise both things in myself, at a lower power – a keen relish of the coarse salty vulgar life about me – and at the same time an intolerable intolerance of it – the mood out of which I write my poetry. If one could combine the two? Irradiate the common? That should make something universal.

Shepherd pastiches the Nietzschean view of the artist-intellectual elevated above mass culture, and yet she recognizes these tendencies in herself. At the same time as she wrote the letter, she was wrangling with anxieties about publishing her poetry (they would later appear in In the Cairngorms in 1934). She feared she was writing ‘a cold inhuman kind of poetry – about stones and mountains and light’, which might prove to be ‘caulder than mou’ could thole’ (1930). It is indeed, a spare, stony collection, experimenting with perspective and betraying the influence of Angus and MacDiarmid, the Imagism of HD and the Romanticism of Shelley. Was she writing poetry concerned with abstractions that only intellectuals could appreciate? If so, she was disturbed by the attraction that such cold, elitist verse held. Burns’s work offered an alternative possibility, more democratic and involved in the grit and flesh of life. However, moving between the two poles offered something distinctive: the possibility of making a genuinely ‘universal’ literature. Revelation and intellect would be implicated in the commonplace, the salt of life irradiated with divinity, and the binary opposition at the heart of Scottish modernism overcome. Across her poetry and prose, this statement of intent is made again and again. In The Quarry Wood, the heroine Martha goes to university to get her hands on brilliant, abstract knowledge, but by the novel’s close she has come to realize that the messy and frustrating practice of living is also a site of valuable knowledge achieved through experience (Lumsden 2007). This ability to move between, and even interweave, the intimacy and empiricism of life every day with the seemingly transcendent vision of a depersonalized, spiritualized intellect, also defines The Living Mountain; as Carla Sassi suggests, Shepherd produces a kind of ‘intimate knowledge’ which is ‘at the same time affective and intellectual, practical and abstract’ (Sassi 73). Resisting stark binaries of matter and spirit,

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reason and emotion, she intermingles these polar planes, producing a new kind of a Caledonian antisyzygy where extremes meet, greet and find themselves implicated in one another.

Outline For Shepherd, the mountain was a loved place, an ecological whole, a vast geologic entity and living landscape. These angles of approach were developed over a lifetime of presence, but informed by long literary, philosophical and scientific traditions of writing nature. In each chapter of this book, influences of more direct relevance are discussed in greater detail. Chapter 1 considers the meaning of ‘place’ in The Living Mountain and Shepherd’s first and final novels. It explores the publication history of The Living Mountain and its representation as ‘a literature of place’, drawing on theories of ‘dwelling’. It asks, how useful is ‘place’ as a framework for reading The Living Mountain, and how might focus on Shepherd as a place-writer disguise more cosmopolitan, even planetary, interests in her writing? Looking at the book’s moment of composition – the early 1940s and the years following the Second World War – will help account for why Shepherd was concerned with exploring personal commitments to the local in the context of an interconnected and expansive world. On the high plateau, Shepherd comes into contact with local life, and also the processes and patterns that shape and constitute them. As the value of culturing a ‘sense of planet’ is now being debated in environmental thought, this chapter looks at how global interconnectedness is perceived both imaginatively and viscerally, from the situated viewpoint of the woman on the plateau. As well as being global in scale, Shepherd’s vision of the ‘total mountain’ offers a distinctive vision of ecological interconnectedness. Chapter 2, ‘Ecology’, explores how inter and post-war understandings of ecology informed Shepherd’s writing, with particular attention to the work of Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson. How does an ecological sensibility influence Shepherd’s aesthetics and ethics, and what distinctive contributions might Shepherd make to current ecological thought? Through discussion of Shepherd’s theory of knowledge – her awareness that human perspective is always situated and partial – this chapter explores her status as an ecological thinker, acutely sensitive to the ethical, political and existential implications of our entanglement.

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Although Shepherd’s work predates the modern environmental movement, her environmental attitudes and concerns are often surprisingly prescient. Chapter 3, ‘Environment’, places her work in a canon of proto-environmentalist literature and situates her in relation to environmental ethics, derived from the work of Aldo Leopold. Equipped with ecological understanding, Shepherd expands ethical obligations beyond the family and the human community, sensing in non-hubristic wonder the complex interdependence of the living world, and the difficulty of making environmental pronouncements in a world in which we are always situated. In Chapter 4, I explore another way of being situated: in deep time. Awareness of deep time demands thinking in vastly different scales about agency, responsibility, impact and the ecological longevity of human cultures. This is all the more pressing in our current age of Anthropocene, in which humanity has been named as an agent of change on a geologic scale. Shepherd’s work invites a reading attentive to the current epochal shift in human-planetary understanding and interactivity. How, though, was deep time understood in Shepherd’s own moment, and how does The Living Mountain accommodate geologic temporality while remaining intimate, present, sensuous and subjectively grounded? Sense, intimacy and embodiment are also themes of Chapter 5, ‘Vital Matter’. While she was studying at the University of Aberdeen, Shepherd became fascinated by the neovitalist bio-philosophy of J. Arthur Thomson. In contemporary ecocriticism, a new materialist movement sharing the same biophilosophical origins is now committed to exposing the vitality of matter, and its ethical and political implications. This chapter explores Shepherd’s philosophy of ‘life’ and ‘livingness’, looking at both The Living Mountain and her second novel, The Weatherhouse. In the latter, awareness of the vitality of matter sparks reassessment of her characters’ ethical obligations to the world (human, animal and material) and the community, raising challenging and timely questions about agency and what it means to be an ‘individual’ in an ecologically interconnected, living world. Finally, Chapter 6 focuses on ‘Being’. In The Living Mountain, Shepherd repeatedly describes experiences of transformative ‘self-dissolution’ in encounters with the living world. Informed by interwar trends in modernist writing and philosophy, this chapter examines Shepherd’s notions of intersubjective responsibility and ‘Being’. It compares Shepherd’s representations of subjecthood with those found in ecological selfhood and phenomenology, in order to propose new models of ecological selfhood inspired by Shepherd’s thought.

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These chapter discussions will be obviously focused on a central theme. That said, ideas from one chapter often seep into and inform another. Although the academic tendency is to sort and arrange, I have tried to make peace with these entanglements. After all, it is an approach suggested by The Living Mountain itself. Although it is a slim text of just over 100 pages, it is notoriously difficult to categorize and ingeniously interwoven. Accordingly, within this book there are many passages from The Living Mountain which I have had to return to again and again. From a new angle, they look quite different. I have found that synthesizing my reading of them is far less interesting than showing all the angles as they become visible, as a Cubist painting. As Shepherd suggests, ‘our habitual vision of things is not necessarily right: it is only one of an infinite number’ (LM 101). Adopting a new perspective is a necessary act of self-transformation and discovery, resulting in ‘truths’ which are always provisional and liable to change. Over the course of this book, I aim to follow her lead, offering introductions to Shepherd’s life and influences, followed by thematic readings which reveal new aspects of her work, without claiming a total view. I have called this book The Living World in part to evoke the title of Shepherd’s innovative masterpiece of nature writing, and as importantly to establish livingness as fundamental to Shepherd’s understanding of human and non-human nature. Life, for Shepherd, is the generative and essential force that obliterates the boundaries between culturally constructed categories of nature and culture. Across her writing, life animates characters, plants, animals, the slow movement of rocks and the running of water. Life is a tricky and contradictory quality to pin down. When Shepherd writes of life, she evokes the universal energy of chi intrinsic to Chinese philosophy, and also the breath of ‘spirit’ derived from Judeo-Christian tradition. Life is not, however, a purely immaterial entity. It is immersed in matter, and inseparable from it, a prolific and infectious agency moving between beings and entities like water, soil and light with an other-thanhuman intelligence and agency. Through the different lenses this book adopts, the different positions and ‘ways in’ to her writing, I hope to reveal this life anew and create new pathways through her work, for ecocritics and anyone who loves and is entranced by Shepherd’s writing.

1

Place and planet

The Living Mountain is in many ways an extraordinary title. Unlike many classical works of nature writing, it says nothing about the place it represents. Compared to Dorothy Wordsworth’s Alfoxden and Grasmere Journals (1798–1803), John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra (1911) or Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (1948), Shepherd’s title is all the more furtively nonspecific. The book might be a fantasy, allegory or work of philosophical literature, like Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924) or C. Day Lewis’s The Magnetic Mountain (1933), both published a few years earlier. The cover of the 1977 edition – the first edition – reveals little. A purple graphite sketch by the illustrator Ian Munro, it depicts a low mountain range in the distance, while the foreground is dominated by a shaded area which suggests a scarp falling away from a central plateau. For those familiar with the Cairngorms, it may suggest any number of perspectives from Glas Moal to the Lairig Ghru. At the same time, it could show any escarpment in low mountain regions from Mongolia to California. Above it, the title The Living Mountain hangs stark and alone. It is only on the inside title page that the subtitle, ‘A Celebration of The Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland’, is printed, along with a simple map outlining some major peaks and places (p. vii). Recent reissues of The Living Mountain have corrected any uncertainty about where this text is placed. In 1996, scholar and editor Roderick Watson collected Shepherd’s four prose works for the first time in a volume entitled The Grampian Quartet. As well as announcing the location of these books in the Grampians – the lower portion of the Highlands running from Aberdeenshire to Lochaber – the cover is adorned with a golden-toned watercolour. The more abstract, perspective-distorting qualities of the original have been replaced with a conventional, golden, faintly nostalgic representation of the hills. In 2008, Canongate reissued The Living Mountain, now with the subtitle marked boldly in its marketing and brochure. In a departure from the previous

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two editions, this one’s cover image of a brooding grey sky and inquisitive stags roaming across a rocky landscape of green and purple heather tethered it firmly to a Balmoralized tourist ideal of Scotland. These key symbols of the Highlands conspicuously root the work in its location, attracting Scottish readers interested in a revived local classic, and enticing international audiences hungry for all things ‘Scottish’. The edition also contains a glossary of Scots words, copied from The Grampian Quartet. For a non-native reader of the novels – which use considerable dialect – this glossary is invaluable. However, The Living Mountain is written almost exclusively in English, with only a handful of Scots words (‘brook’ – soot; ‘rug’ – pull; ‘shalts’ – ponies; and ‘rossity reets’ – kindling). The glossary’s wholly unnecessary placement in The Living Mountain might be an editorial oversight, or an attempt to plump up the volume. Either way, it gives a Scottish tang to the edition, evoking a sense of place through words, albeit ones which are absent from the text itself. But it wasn’t with the 2008 edition that The Living Mountain became a bestseller. In 2011, the book found its way to readers again, now with a fresh introduction and two striking new covers. One edition, printed on a snow white card, shows a slim young deer standing alone on a bleached moorland. The other, also printed on white, shows a pair of antlers holding an eerie green sphere. While the 2008 edition with its ‘Monarch of the Glen’ appearance evoked the thrills of the hunt, the isolated foal is an impossibly vulnerable figure, the implausible quarry of shotgun-wielding hunters. Similarly, the antlers resist the iconography of death emblematic of the décor of a hundred Highland hotels. The green circle motif – a common feature of the ‘Canongate Canons’ series, of which The Living Mountain, was a part – has become particularly significant on the new cover. It undercuts old associations of the antlers, instead of accentuating decay, growth, renewal and the deer’s relations with the holistic ecology of the mountain. What can a potted history of The Living Mountain’s design history reveal about Shepherd’s environmental thought and the theme of this chapter – place? Only that the way the book is read, and the way its author is placed, influences whether and how it is read: conferring value, meaning and shaping the understanding of both the text and the place it relates to as well. Many current readers of Shepherd’s prose and poetry may never have visited the Cairngorms. Some may make the journey there, inspired by her writing. Others will know the place intimately, like the readers who can pick up a copy in hiking shops in Braemar or Aviemore where, on my most recent visits, I spotted the golden spine of The Living Mountain glittering between hiking guides and local history books. Whatever a reader’s knowledge of the place, in Shepherd’s new moment

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of revival it is clear that she is being put forth as an authentic Cairngorms voice, capable of speaking of the place with intimate knowledge and the lived authority of experience. But what does it mean to be a writer of place, and what is the value of placebased writing? These are the questions this chapter will unpick, looking first to Shepherd’s legacy, then to ecocritical accounts of the place as a locus for ethical attachment and a ‘way in’ to caring about nature and environment. The idea that place-knowledge and feeling for place is a vital foundation for environmental action has long held sway in environmental thought and philosophy. A close look at two of Shepherd’s novels will show how place-knowledge is celebrated in these texts. Turning then to The Living Mountain, we find a book which celebrates the value of intimate knowledge and captures the distinctive understandings of the mountain held by the people who lived and worked there. However, The Living Mountain does not conform to the simple model of a place-narrative. As Shepherd wrote, ‘the thing to be known grows with the knowing’ (LM 108), and the more intimate knowledge of a place is gathered, the more strange and impossible to capture and know the place itself becomes.

Shepherd as place writer As the title of The Grampian Quartet suggests, Shepherd’s novels, poetry and prose are all set in one region: Aberdeen and its suburbs, the crofting communities of the Mearns, and the Cairngorm mountain range. These are places Shepherd lived, worked and walked, layering experiences over a lifetime in ways that obviously shaped her writing. Her prose reflects the social and environmental idiosyncrasies of Scotland’s north-east, describing local agricultural practices, sharing folk beliefs and tales, celebrating dialect and recording place names: the ‘ancient Gaelic names that show how old is man’s association with scaur and corrie’, as she puts it in The Living Mountain, from ‘the Loch of the Thin Man’s Son, the Coire of the Cobbler, the Dairymaid’s Meadow’ to ‘the Lurcher’s Crag’ (LM 77). These tales, practices and names reveal long histories of human inhabitation and place-making. Forgotten histories, vernacular geographies and local ecological understandings all populate her writing as vital and persisting ways of orienting ourselves in the land. It is hardly surprising, then, that since her work’s revival in the 1990s, Shepherd has been marked and marketed as a writer of place. In Ecology and Modern Scottish Literature, Louise Gairn describes how she combines ‘intuitive

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feelings of being “at home” in the wild landscape with a phenomenological viewpoint which relies on close, reverent attention’ to detail (2008: 124). Gillian Carter also reflects on how The Living Mountain in particular is written from the perspective of a ‘native dweller’. Carter describes Shepherd’s approach as a kind of ‘domestic geography’ and explains that Domestic geography describes a way of engaging with a landscape that is part of daily life for a native dweller rather than a traveller, tourist or scientist passing through a region. It alludes to a repeated engagement with a single landscape that is an important part of an author’s everyday space. (Carter 2001: 27–8)

Carter describes Shepherd as a native, though she also observes a contrary pull in The Living Mountain, as Shepherd constantly changes her perspective on the mountain, repositioning herself to imagine the needs of other people with distinct claims to the hills. As Shepherd was writing, the Cairngorms were being claimed and contested by multiple groups. Some wanted to develop the land for profit, others to protect it for its natural beauty. In these debates, the question of who was a valid ‘insider’ was particularly fraught. Lairds, sportsmen, landowners and crofters united to present an ‘insider’ Highland front, while ‘outsiders’ – walkers, heritage groups and conservationists – sought to preserve the magnificence of supposedly wild and uncultivated land (Smout 47). Shepherd’s perspective on these issues, Carter notes, is cautiously phrased and is open to the different claims and demands on the land being made by different groups. But, crucially, Carter proposes that this generous perspective is made possible precisely because Shepherd is so rooted in the place. Only an intimate, with a homely, daily knowledge of a place can know it deeply enough to understand its many qualities and needs. In his 2011 introduction to The Living Mountain, Robert Macfarlane also commends Shepherd for being ‘parochial’. He’s not being intentionally insulting: he explains that he is using the term in the expansive sense suggested by the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh. Unlike ‘provincialism’, Macfarlane explains, ‘[p]arochialism is universal’. It is only by being parochial that we become acquainted with the specifics: what Kavanagh calls ‘the fundamentals’. Knowing the local intimately offers a ‘depth’, if not a width, of knowledge. This scale of knowing, which is often achieved best in writing of place, is thought to be more appropriate to the limited scale of human experience than sweeping, cosmopolitan narratives of travel and exploration (Kavanagh 281–3; Macfarlane 2011: xv). The Cairngorms are considerably more sprawling than the ‘field’ and ‘gap in a hedge’ that Kavanagh himself suggested was ‘as much

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as a man can fully experience’ (Macfarlane 2011: xv). Still, they’re enough to devote a collection of poems and a nature journal to. Accordingly, in Shepherd’s close and long attention to the lives of plants, insects, minerals and water, we find a writer who seems to share Kavanagh’s obsession with place and the fundamentals.

Ecocriticism and the ‘fundamentals’ A focus on the fundamentals has not only been cherished in writing of place but has also long been celebrated in environmental criticism and philosophy. In his introduction to the field, Ecocriticism, Greg Garrard devotes a chapter to placebased writing under the title of ‘Dwelling’. As he explains, environmentalist activism and thinking have frequently foregrounded the importance of firsthand experience of a place as the foundation of meaningful and ethical action. ‘Dwelling’, as Garrard explains, ‘is not a transient state; rather, it implies the long-term imbrication of humans in a landscape of memory, ancestry and death, of ritual, life and work’ (Garrard 108). Originating in the classical Georgic tradition of agricultural writing, it was revived in the mid-twentieth and late twentieth century by writers and theorists concerned with humanity’s place on earth in an era of unprecedented environmental damage. Promoting a politics of ‘re-inhabitation’ – getting to know the place you live deeply, and so ‘dwelling’ there ‘authentically’ – this late twentieth-century movement proposed that to be fully human, to live on this earth consciously and purposefully, we must live in an intimate relationship with the long timescales and the intimate placeknowledge of dwelling. The fascination with dwelling must be seen as emerging from the particular dislocations of modernity. The agricultural and industrial revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought about dramatic changes to landscapes and people-place relations, uprooting populations, transforming landscapes beyond recognition and fuelling the flows of capital, culture and communities across the world. Global capitalism – and the colonialism, indigenous land-grabs and transatlantic trade in enslaved people from which it grew – exploded relations between people, place and traditional environmental knowledge. The mass movement of rural populations to cities and distant nations for work, initiated in the mid-nineteenth century, further dislocated people from nature, creating populations emotionally and mentally distanced from the waters, wildlife and weather of their new homes.

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In response to this long, complex – and here incredibly simplified – history, nature writers and ecocritics often see their role as rebuilding a sense of place and homeliness in nature. Practices of ‘reinhabitation’ and ‘dwelling’ offer to revive and share place-based knowledge, in the hope of rebuilding a human–nature connection powerful enough to counter the devastating environmental cost of modernity. As the American nature writer Wendell Berry asserts, ‘without a complex knowledge of one’s place, and without the faithfulness to one’s place on which such knowledge depends, it is inevitable that the place will be used carelessly, and eventually destroyed’ (Berry 68–9). Ursula Heise has termed this place-love the ‘ethics of proximity’. It holds that people are more likely to know and care about places that are close to them, meaning of course that places far afield are less likely to be the subject of ethical concern. Support for this position comes from many quarters; Yi Fu Tuan’s theory of ‘topophilia’, for instance, describes how place-attachments emanate from the phenomenological experience of daily life, as any places larger than those that meet humanity’s ‘biologic needs and sense-bound capacities’ are too large to claim ‘the kind of affection that arises of experience and intimate knowledge’ (Tuan 100–1). The ethics of proximity also suggests that people are closest to nature in places they know well. Mitchell Thomashow, for example, advocates for a ‘place-based perceptual ecology’ because ‘people are best equipped to observe what happens around them’ and likely to be ‘most in touch with the natural world’ in their ‘home places’ (Thomashow 5). The nature/culture divide – seen to be at the heart of so many of our modern environmental problems – is meant to be weakest when people are ‘embedded’ in local ecosystems and physically, imaginatively and culturally rooted. The theory of ‘dwelling’ that underpins much place-theorizing was developed by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). For Heidegger, humanity’s nature, our being-in-the-world, is assured through the building of home from the materials of the immediate locale. In authentic dwelling, people are rooted in place and co-create place through overlaid experiences of time, cultural memory, spirituality and mortality (Heidegger 2011a). Dwelling is a constant statement of becoming, a creative activity which takes place over long periods of inhabitation, in contrast to modernity’s tendency towards fast urban development and migration (Heidegger 2011b). Inspired by Heidegger, many late twentieth-century scholars concerned with environmental issues saw their role as celebrating and reviving literature which conveys a strong sense of place, as a means of re-establishing homely bonds (Garrard 123). In his essay ‘Poetry and Biodiversity’ Jonathan Bate connects ecological knowledge – from the Greek

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oikos, meaning home – with writing that teaches us how to find a ‘dwelling’ in the earth: To become ‘dwellers in the land’ . . . to come to know the earth, fully and honestly, the crucial and perhaps only all-encompassing task is to understand the place, the immediate, specific place, where we live. (Bate 1998: 57)

Similarly, Carter’s reading of Shepherd’s writing as ‘domestic geography’ was informed by the ideas of place-philosopher Barry Lopez, who claimed that the land needs ‘intimates with indispensable, concrete knowledge’ to act as its advocates in the face of exploitation (Lopez 137). These intimates are ‘men and women more or less sworn to a place, who abide there, who have a feel for the soil and history, for the turn of leaves and night sounds’ (Lopez 133). According to this logic, the value of Shepherd’s work lies in its ability to capture a feeling for soil and history, to dwell with and in the land. But is dwelling an unproblematic good? How can we read Shepherd’s representation of place in her own time and now?

Scottish literature and place First, authenticity and place-based knowledge have a special place in Scottish literature. As the Scottish Literary Renaissance broke away from older traditions and spoke to new trends in international modernism, the question of what role place-based knowledge would have in this new movement was particularly poignant. On the one hand, Scottish literature had long been defined by its localism – that is, by its capacity to represent authentically ‘Scottish’ qualities to an international readership. On the other hand, and at the same time, as modernist writers tried to move away from the provincial realism of the nineteenth century, Scottish modernists became fascinated by what distinctive qualities Scotland had to bring to a movement which was uniquely concerned with reflecting on modern experience. As they posed these questions, Scottish writers were practically obliged to engage with nature, farming communities and the countryside. Industrialization and urban migration came later to Scotland than the rest of the UK, and although Glasgow emerged as a worldwide centre of shipbuilding in the late nineteenth century, Scotland was a predominantly rural nation, with nearly half of Scots living in settlements of less than 5,000 people into the early twentieth century, in lowland villages and the northern crofting and fishing communities (Irvine

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ix–xiv, x–xi). In out-of-the-way places, ways of living remained remarkably traditional. Indeed, in the late 1930s, the poet Edwin Muir reflected on the catastrophic shock he experienced moving from Orkney to Glasgow in 1901: I was born before the Industrial Revolution, and am now about two hundred years old. But I have skipped a hundred and fifty of them. I was really born in 1737, and till I was fourteen no time accidents happened to me. Then in 1751, I set out from Orkney for Glasgow. When I arrived I found that it was not 1751, but 1901, and that a hundred and fifty years had been burned up in my two day’s journey. (Muir 2000: 289)

The difference in the pattern and spread of modernity meant that literature set in Scotland – an important distinction from Scottish literature per se – addressed modernization later, and from a more rural perspective. Many Scottish writers addressed the shock of the new as it insinuated itself in the countryside, rather than in the crowds, anonymity and technologies of the city, meaning that from the fin de siècle to the 1950s, the burden of representing ‘Scotland’ in literature mostly fell on texts that focused on rural life. For modernist innovators, this posed something of a problem. Scottish literature already had a long tradition of focusing on rural life, and one most modernists wanted to distance themselves from altogether. This was, of course, the Kailyard tradition, which held sway from the early 1880s to the turn of the century. The term itself had been coined as an insult; meaning ‘cabbage patch’ (Cook 1999: 1054) it was first used by a book reviewer tired of sentimental novels about quaint and ‘humble Scotch life’ (Spectator 610). Still, the books found publishers, readers and reviewers south of the border, and as far away as the United States, places where readers might be most partial to an ‘authentic’ slice of the Scottish countryside. It helped that these books were usually set in around 1840, before new technologies and urban migration transformed country life. Kailyard novels therefore had a baked-in nostalgia, appealing to those who mourned the disruption – and in no small part, the loss of the fabric of place – caused by modernity. The pattern of the Kailyard novel was fairly simple. Ian Maclaren’s Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush (1894), for example, involves a lively cast of earthy, canny and wholesome villagers whose exploits are described in touching comic episodes. But although these simple lives are celebrated, they are also constitutionally unsuited to modernity. Children who leave their simple rural homes to study or work in cities return diseased and broken or don’t return at all. Abandoned towns and cottages crumble and decay. Although the miserable endings of many

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Kailyard novels implied that traditional and beloved Scottish rural life was over by the end of the nineteenth century (if it had ever existed at all), the genre as a whole celebrated these places and the kinds of community relations and agricultural practices captured in a frozen past (Nash 87). By the time Shepherd began to write, the Kailyard was on the wane, replaced by novels more critical of idealized representations of rural Scotland. In 1901, George Douglas Brown had made a decisive strike against the Kailyard in his satirical novel, The House with the Green Shutters (1901/2005). In place of harmless local gossip and charming ignorance, Brown’s countryside is an antipastoral backwater of insularity, greed and familial abuse. As the modernist movement took hold, writers produced more parodic, nuanced and formally experimental works, committed to revealing the multilayered complexities of life in rural communities. Modernist literary aesthetics – including a focus on subjectivity and consciousness, multiple perspectives, formal innovation, fragmentation and cultural hybridity – which have been inextricably linked with urban experience, were applied by Scottish writers in depictions of rural communities and small-town scenes. The field, moor, village and croft are the location of many of Scotland’s modernist masterpieces, and in consequence, sites of modernity in their own right. At the same time, the writing of ‘place’ became the marker of a new kind of authenticity. MacDiarmid, as already discussed, made a case for rediscovering lost Scots words and expressions as a means of repurposing the past and revealing the local genius of the Scottish environmental imagination. His synthetic Scots was an inherently modernist project: creating a hybrid language capable of speaking to contemporary circumstances, in a way that outsiders could not and should not be able to understand. Some editions of Scottish Scene or the Intelligent Man’s Guide to Albyn (1934), co-authored with Lewis Grassic Gibbon, even included a map determining which regions of the nation were ‘Scotland Proper’ and which were hopelessly Anglophile. The ‘authenticity’ of Scottish modernism would be tethered to these ‘proper’ regions: the rural Highlands, islands and coastal regions of the north (McCulloch xi). MacDiarmid moved himself first to Montrose – a fishing town between Dundee and Aberdeen – and then to Shetland, placing himself firmly in ‘Scotland proper’. But as Robert Crawford suggests, relative isolation didn’t hamper his career, but made him ‘more attractive, daring and exemplary than other figures who, for all their anxious provincial provenance, gravitated effortlessly toward the established centers of power’ (Crawford 33–4). Indeed, as Crawford puts it, MacDiarmid’s ‘intense involvement with the grain of local language, in the life of a small town and a small country’, combined with

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an ‘equally intense engagement with transnational literary currents’ contributed to the ‘exemplary aesthetic of the local-international’ which characterizes his work and became something of an ideal in Scottish modernism (Crawford 33). Grassic Gibbon also excavated the local in his writing. Despite moving to the London satellite town of Welwyn Garden City in the 1930s, he became renowned for visceral writing about the formative relationship between folk and place in north-eastern Scotland. In his 1934 essay, ‘The Land’, he expounded his theory of how land and folk form a ‘dual power’; they are bodily intertwined, as the land is shaped and cared for by the folk, and the folk is sustained by and in bondage to the land (Grassic Gibbon 293). Two years earlier, he had published his elegy to land-folk relations in Sunset Song (1932). Set in the Mearns, it focuses on the impact of the mass fatalities and trauma of the First World War on a crofting community through the central character of Chris Guthrie. Chris turns down the chance of university education in order to marry a local farmer and, symbolically, the land itself. She makes this decision in a moment of epiphany, looking out across the landscape: a queer thought came to her in the drooked fields, that nothing endured at all, nothing but the land she passed across, tossed and turned and perpetually changed below the hands of the crofter folk. . . . Sea and sky and the folk who wrote and fought and were learnéd, teaching and saying and praying, they lasted but as a breath, a mist of fog in the hills, but the land was forever, it moved and changed below you, but was forever, you were close to it and it to you, not at a bleak remove it held you and hurted you. And she had thought to leave it! (Grassic Gibbon 1986: 97)

This is the kind of connection to place and deep knowledge that Grassic Gibbon worried was being lost. Chris, though, lives in spontaneous sympathy and bodily integrity with the land, and because of this love ‘she was bound and held as though they had prisoned her there’ (p. 97).

Place in Shepherd’s writing Like her contemporaries, Shepherd praises the intimate knowledge of place in her writing. Her poetry collection, In the Cairngorms (1934), intersperses philosophical writing about the relationship between mind, body and place with precise natural detail and description. Sights like the bands of shadow cast into the air by the three rocks of Beinn Mheadhoin could only be known by someone

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who has stood at the summit at sunset and watched the strange interplay of light and earth. In Poem IX (Untitled), Shepherd describes this phenomenon as ‘a sign of love to earth’ given by the light (p. 10), and in so many poems in the collection, an ecstatic wonder is documented as each moment of intimacy, revealed through proximity, adds a new layer of knowledge to her experience of the hills. ‘So without sediment / Run the clear burns of my country / Fiercely pure,’ she writes, in ‘Hill Burns’ (p. 8), in a rare blazon of proud place-affection. In ‘Loch Avon’, the impression of this deep water carved between a cleave in the mountains becomes a ringing refrain, cut deep into the imagination: ‘Ye’ll haunt me till the day I dee’ (p. 2). Her novels also dramatize the complexities, anxieties and pleasures of rural life. Her first, The Quarry Wood (1928), focuses on the education of Martha Ironside. The only daughter of a working family in a Deeside village, she wins a scholarship to Aberdeen University. This is, in essence, the basic set-up of the Kailyard novel, though here it is re-imagined with a female protagonist who manages to keep one foot in her local community and one in the city. If learning in the city, from books, represents the kind of abstracted knowledge favoured in universities, then learning from her community and the place in which she is rooted represents the kind of knowledge that is being lost, though it is all the more ‘authentic’ and thus of value. The book sets up a sequence of learning opportunities, as enlightenment is tied to the organic, disordered, often frustrating qualities of people and place. Knowledge is not abstractly acquired, but arrived at through ‘a process of living’. Having achieved selfunderstanding, she settles into the life of a suburban teacher in the place of her birth. Shepherd’s final novel, A Pass in the Grampians (1933), acts as a counterpoint to The Quarry Wood. It focuses on the dilemma facing young Jenny Kilgour, whose family have farmed a strip of land in the Mearns for generations. But life outside the community is calling her, and beyond the pass – metaphorically associated with the Classical pillars of Hercules – a portal into another world: Her life is rooted deep in earth, its ample rhythms are in the movement of her thought. . . . She loves the slow deep satisfactions of the earth, but she has glimpsed now the wild stormy things that stir and pass, once it may be in a lifetime, not subject to the march of the seasons or the regular recurrences of earth. How shall she gather these, how recognize them when they come, how to live not for anticipated certainty – ploughing, seed-time, harrowing and harvest – but for the incredible fugitive approaches of an order whose laws she may not fathom? (PG 115)

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The rhythms of the land don’t just structure her days: they shape her thoughts and mood. These are the cycles that urban communities are supposed to have lost sense of, the disconnection from nature that critics have seen to be at the root of a hundred social ills and the crisis of the environment itself. But there are other forces moving and inciting Jenny: the forces of change coming as steadily as a storm, that threatens – and promises – to disrupt the normal patterns of her life, shattering her old self and making a new self possible. If Jenny is caught between the thrill of an itinerant modernity and the pull of a rooted past, then it is her father, Andrew Kilgour, who represents the forces of persistence tying Jenny to place: For the sheep farmer, seventy years of intercourse had made the moor sit to him more closely than the most supple of garments. He knew every sheep path, each spring, bog, peat hag, each gash torn out by cloudburst and the deep riven tracks of burns in spate. . . . He had made his covenant with the moor; it had bogged him and drenched him, deceived, scorched, numbed him with cold, tested his endurance, memory and skill, until a large part of his nature was so interpenetrated with its nature that apart from it he would have lost reality. (PG 20)

He is the model of the ‘intimate’, with his ‘indispensable, concrete knowledge’ who is ‘more or less sworn to a place’, as Lopez puts it (133, 137). His experience of the moor has shaped his skills, physique and character, leading to an absolute mirroring between its nature and his own. The use of the word ‘covenant’ has, of course, a special meaning in Scottish literature. A legal contract, it alludes to the seventeenth-century Presbyterian rebels who resisted the introduction of Catholic elements to worship and took to the hills and moors to avoid – often unsuccessfully – religious and military persecution. The doubly layered meaning of the covenant Andrew makes with the moor is spiritual as it is legal and physical. ‘Interpenetration’ with this place has shaped his life and imagination so deeply as to make them virtually inseparable. In The Living Mountain, Shepherd encounters many people who, like Andrew, have made their covenant with the mountain. One figure that stands out is the young farmer who has just returned from conflict on the Italian front: I will never forget the light in a boy’s face, new back from the wars and toiling by his father’s side on one of these high bare mountain farms, when I asked: well, and is Italy or Scotland the better? He didn’t even answer the question, not in words, but looked aside at me, hardly pausing in his work, and his face glimmered. (p. 83)

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Displacement and a loss of a sense of ‘home’ was the fundamental rupture that many of the experiments of Anglo-American modernism were supposed to speak to: the dislocation from land, time, community and meaning found in works from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) to Rebecca West’s Return of the Soldier (1918). The boy Shepherd encounters experiences no such rupture: his connection to the mountain is strengthened, rather than frayed, by his excursions in Italy. This is the return of the native, proper: an intimacy and love beyond words, which endure across time and the catastrophe of conflict. Many of the mountain-dwellers she describes fit the mould of ideal ‘native’. Mountain economy ‘moulds their life’ and has shaped and ‘marked’ them (p. 89). There is her friend Big Mary, who is described with rugged splendour as ‘earthy and tempestuous’. As Mary says of herself, ‘I was never one for the housecraft . . . I liked the outdoor work best, and the beasts’ (p. 86). Labour binds Mary to place and offers joy and meaning for her. This is a woman whose skin is ‘runkled and blackened from the brook of her open fire’ (p. 86), and whose hands go soft when, finally in her old age, her step-daughter forces her away from her home. Washed white and confined in the drawing room of her refined village-dwelling family, she confronts Shepherd as a ‘spectacle’ separated from her ‘truer element’ (p. 86). Shepherd’s depiction of Mary participates in the long-Georgic tradition, highlighted by Garrard, of associating rural labour with connectivity to nature and place. Many writers have celebrated the ‘redemptive qualities of a (supposedly) unmediated encounter’ which helps us to ‘respect or get back to nature’ (Ryle and Soper 119). It is both a connective medium to the mysterious stuff of ‘Nature’, and a mode of inhabitation, binding people to place, yielding affective attachments and immersing one, in Heise’s words, in the ‘lived immediacies of the local that constitute the core of one’s authentic identity’ (Heise 42). There’s a detectable note of irony in Heise’s writing – one I’ll return to in a minute. But first, Shepherd contributes to the Georgic tradition when she describes the pleasure of simple acts like drawing water from the well, gathering sticks and lighting a fire, ‘supplying elemental needs’ which are ‘still slow, laborious and personal’ (p. 82). These acts are profoundly satisfying: ‘Whether you give it conscious thought or not, you are touching life, and something within you knows it’ (p. 82). The material basis for existence is produced through this work, and the worker makes contact with mysterious elemental ‘life’: an allusive entity both spiritual and material, which is inextricably bound up with place and nature. However, this raises the question of whether those who labour in a place experience it differently than visitors. Literary conventions suggest they are more

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connected, because of repeated engagement, but Shepherd comes to question whether familiarity may desensitize them to the transformative experiences she reports. Certainly, for the young, the tiring work of subsistence makes detached contemplation of the experience itself impossible: ‘I am aware . . . that by so living I am shutting the door on other activities and interests; I can understand why the young resent it’ (LM 82). In this moment, as in many others, Shepherd displays an intense interest in how working people perceive and value place and how, crucially, it may differ from her own experience. She describes how one woman, ‘brought up on the very precinct of the mountain’, says to her, ‘None of your hills for me, I have seen too much of them all my days’ (LM 83). Familiarity breeds indifference, even contempt for some; but for others, age mollifies an active love that was indulged in childhood: ‘It’s a funeral or a phenomenon if I’m out,’ says one gamekeeper’s wife, but in her youth she ran on the mountains and some of their wildness is still in her speech’ (LM 83). Shepherd concludes that the tendency is not towards indifference: ‘I have not found it true, as some people maintain, that those who live beside the mountains do not love them’ (LM 83). Mountaindwellers ‘respect, whether they share it or not, your passion for the hill’ (LM 83), and some do share it, like the sister of the woman who exhausted her interest in mountains, who ‘spent weeks on end in a small tent on the very plateau’ (LM 83). Still, many of the women she meets have experiences of the mountain shaped by their labour: ‘The women do not gad. The day’s work keeps them busy, in and out and about, but though they do not climb the mountains (indeed how could they have the time or energy?) they do look at them’ (LM 83). The gamekeeper’s wife, mentioned before, has no time to climb after giving up her single woman’s freedom. Of others: ‘You may sit by the kitchen fire through the howling winter dark, while they stamp in from the byre in luggit bonnets battered with snow’ (LM 83). Reclining by the fire, Shepherd is tired by a day’s hike, while the frozen, wind-battered crofter returning from evening milking has not had to concoct leisure activities to exhaust themselves. This realization strikes a note of discord. Although outsiders, like herself, may regret the loss of traditional lifestyles, they do not know the difference that more efficient technologies make to labour time and physical work. Many of the youths she meets love the hills – like the boy returned from Italy – but others are ‘restive’, and ‘resent the primitive conditions of living, despise the slow and ancient ways, and think that praising them is sentimentalising’ (LM 82). This frustration is something celebrations of place and dwelling often fail to take into account. Although women enjoyed new educational and political rights in the

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interwar years, these rights were unevenly distributed depending on a woman’s class, religion and regional location. Rather than experiencing the land erotic attributed to Chris Guthrie by Grassic Gibbon, many rural workers, and women in particular, felt trapped and stifled by their rural homes. Shepherd’s role as a lecturer gave her a special insight into the backgrounds of young women who had come from all corners of Scotland to study teaching. Shepherd’s former student, Sheila Gill, recounts: ‘Her empathy with girls from the islands gave we mainlanders an understanding of the anxieties, social and emotional, which students from isolated or remote areas had to confront’ (Gill). While MacDiarmid maintained a central position in the Scots Renaissance from Montrose, and later Shetland, women struggled against the obscurity of their places of origin and the conditions in which they worked. For many working women, the only means of leaving home might be marriage, or the socially disastrous act of running away. And for those looking for an education, career or chance to write, leaving was usually a necessity. Many Scottish Renaissance writers explored the desperation of rural women trapped by tradition, lack of education and poverty. Jane Findlater’s ‘The Pictures’ (1921) charts the miserable existence of a young milkmaid, whose failure to visit a touring cinema because of a crisis on the farm captures the hopelessness of existence in even the most picturesque locations. Lorna Moon’s Doorways in Drumorty (1925) is also unflinching in its account of the poverty, physical injury and misogyny experienced by women working seasonal rural jobs. For such women, the enchanting qualities of place are obscured by immediate, immanent and enduring threats to body and mind. But in A Pass in the Grampians, Shepherd offers a way out for Jenny. Like Andrew, she is an intimate of the place and comes close to reproducing his model of stationary, embedded belonging. But the enticements of the city, education and the chance to radically refashion oneself work on Jenny, making her urgent to leave This free clear life will end. She wants it to end – oh God, she wants it to end. She loves it as her very life, she will praise it for ever as the only life worth having, but she must know the other. She must find a thousand answers to a thousand questions. She must get beyond the Pass. (PG 111)

Leaving is not a catastrophe, and neither does it represent an absolute break with ‘reality’. The rural experience of modernity encompasses an experience of self-transformation which is explicitly rooted in a change of location, a break in the rhythms of dwelling. Jenny yearns for experiences of difference, the

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transformative psychological experiences that a change of circumstances and new relations with new places bring: It excites her profoundly to feel that she may be different, that beyond the Pass she may find a new self seeking its nurture in places unauthorized by the tradition of her people. With the perennial expectancy of youth, she foresees her own difference, her unique and eternally intangible self. (PG 112)

Instead of the stark either-or scenario presented to rural youth in the Kailyard, Jenny is able to move fluidly between her rural homes and the city. She is not severed from affective relations with the land or from the knowledge of the particularities of place, and neither does she lose herself entirely. And, as Shepherd puts it in The Living Mountain, those young people who leave the Cairngorms take ‘the skills with them (or some of them do), and discover in the world outside how to graft new skills of many kinds on to their own good brier roots’ (LM 82).

Against place Now that we have seen what it is to pull against place, we can return to some of the underlying problems with ‘dwelling’. While parochialism is celebrated by Macfarlane and Kavanagh as ‘universal’, it can also tend to be exclusionary, celebrating a particular experience of place and a particular kind of ‘native’. In The Living Mountain, Shepherd draws a distinction between locals and incomers in a way that celebrates the one, while distancing the other. It occurs in the account she gives of the changes that have taken place in the forestry industry of the Cairngorms. First, she describes the sites of ancient sawmills, local industries going back many centuries, which slowly picked away at the native forests. But today, she notes, ‘come the motor lorries’, and with them the building of a ‘compact township’ for the duration of work. Shepherd is understandably critical of this high-yield plantation industry. Deforestation creates many environmental problems, negatively affecting water retention and soil erosion and disturbing wildlife. But coupled with this comes an unnecessary critique of workers employed on the site. These incomers are looked on dubiously, as ‘outsiders, not men of the place,’ who ‘fell and lop and cut’. Their work – no doubt poorly paid and seasonal – is described as conducted with careless violence, as if they were in some way responsible for choices made by forest management.

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By contrast, Shepherd elegizes traditional labour as a marker of placeattachment and stewardship: Only the old ways still linger here and there as where a native horse, tended by a man deep-rooted in the place, drags the chained trunks down from inaccessible corners, and is led back for the night to one of the ancient farms on the edge of the moor. (LM 55)

The passage seeps with language expressing the traditional appeal of ‘the old ways’ and the absolute intimacy and indigeneity of this man, who is held up as an emblem of a disappearing way of life. While her reaction against the environmental insensitivity of plantation economics is sound, and small-scale foresters might well know and treat the land better than the aristocrats and businessmen who own it, there is no reason why a celebration of traditional land-use practices must be coupled with the othering of migrant workers. These men – unnamed and unknown – are subject to the flows of capital in the area and take a minute and passing profit from destructive forest management, the winners of which will always be the lairds and landowners. The note of snobbery here is surprising, as it is so uncharacteristic of Shepherd’s general tone and concern. It is useful to highlight, though, as it gives an insight into the underlying conservativism of place-attachment, and revealing that discourses of dwelling are far from rosy. In reaction against this tradition, ecocriticism has moved, in recent years, away from the unproblematic celebration of place-attachment and towards more plural understandings of what it means to know and love a place, and whose perspective counts. This has involved an interrogation of the underlying promise of dwelling, which rests not just on the belief that place-attachment can be restored through conscious acts and imaginative practices, but that a pure and ‘authentic’ relationship to place exists, to begin with. Heise has written of this topic extensively in Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (2008), first providing a survey of ‘ethics of proximity’ discourse, and then moving to critique the underlying assumptions of re-inhabitation. Such ‘re-inhabitation’, Heise speculates, may only ever be a hopeless exercise, intent on restoring a forever lost (or only imagined) relationship with nature by pretending that globalized, digitalized and inherently plural and mobile societies do not exist. Attempts to restore a lost attachment to pre-industrial place, to restore ‘dwelling’, therefore may only serve to reveal how complete the rupture is. For Timothy Morton, ‘[t]he constant assertion that we’re “embedded” in a lifeworld is, paradoxically, a symptom of drastic separation’ (2010: 8). He traces this error to the Romantics, who concocted

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a fantastical Nature at the cusp of modern industrialization. Kate Rigby, likewise, notes how for the Romantics, the ‘rediscovery of place arose from the experience of dislocation’, and accordingly, any modern attempt at re-inhabitation ‘is surely because any unselfconscious connection that we might once have had with a particular dwelling place has been lost’ (Rigby 117). Second, the label of ‘authenticity’ creates problems and ambivalences. Heise doubts whether ‘genuine ethical commitments can only grow out of the lived immediacies of the local that constitute the core of one’s authentic identity’ (p. 42). What is an ‘authentic identity’, after all, and how does it account for the fundamentally human experiences of travel, migration and resettlement? Identity is constructed by multiple forces and agencies beyond the local. The construction of ‘place’ as a pre-existing and homogenous entity to be ‘discovered’ ignores the ways in which places are co-created, subject to change and complicated from within by the plurality and liminality of marginalized voices. When writers have celebrated deep relations with place, they have generally been speaking from an individual perspective which has taken on an essentialized, hegemonic position. For example, Wendell Berry’s ‘homespun’ tales of rural life make an alluring contribution to American Georgic, confirming the land-rights of white farmers through cycles of cultivation, Christian stewardship and conscious dwelling (Garrard 123–5). But who isn’t speaking in these accounts? Whose relations to place have been excluded? As Homi Bhabha writes, narratives of nation and region are often ‘ideological manoeuvres through which “imagined communities” are given essentialist identities’, demarcating the boundaries between a homogenous ‘Traditional’ inside and heterogeneous liminality (Bhabha 213). We might ask whether the drawing of such boundaries does less to protect the ecological characteristics of an area than to exclude certain individuals and groups on pseudo-environmentalist grounds. Looking back to the twentieth-century origins of theories of dwelling reveals the toxic origins of this discourse. Heidegger first proposed ‘dwelling’ as an antidote to modernity in his essay ‘Bauen Wohnen Denken’ (‘Building Dwelling Thinking’). The essay asks what it means to be at home in a place, how building creates locations (or places) by connecting spaces in the world and allows us to dwell in these locations. But in order to distinguish the special activity of dwelling from the act of merely throwing up a structure, he adds the important proviso: ‘Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build.’ To explain this, Heidegger takes the example of a rustic hut in the Black Forest. This is a place that was constructed centuries ago by peasants who entered with ‘simple oneness into things’, with the materials and distinctive qualities of their

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environment. This ‘oneness’ is visible in the structure and organization of the house. Intimacy with wind and weather determined the hut’s prospects and placement, while a long-temporal understanding of what it means to dwell – to stay in place – allowed the builders to incorporate worship and spaces for the living and the dead into its design. Heidegger is quick to state that he doesn’t think we should all return to living in Black Forest huts, but its example reveals to him what it means to be fully ‘human’ in the world and is an answer to the modern scourge of ‘homelessness’: which, to his mind, refers not to literal lack of housing but an existential absence which cannot be met simply by the act of building. So, what exactly is wrong with Heideggerian dwelling? Rooted in the materials and vernacular craft of the local, Heidegger’s ‘place’ is a homogenized identity. ‘[C]onstructed out of an introverted, inward-looking history’, as Doreen Massey puts it, it is a story of being-in-the-world that is ultimately concerned with origin stories and the ‘drawing of boundaries’ – between peoples, places and history (64, 67). In this folksy, homely, stable world, any change easily becomes suspect. Dwelling therefore has as its opposition in the unheimlich, the unhomely, uncanny and strange. Such agencies of alterity must be cast out for equilibrium to be regained. And so, dwelling produces the other and the outsider, the person or persons who are not there in an ‘authentic’ way. The other, it is supposed, does not belong to care and is thus not part of the spirit, culture or community of the place. Evidently, there is a strong correspondence between Heidegger’s ideas about authentic dwelling and the eco-fascism developed by Nazi Blud und Boden theorists like Richard Walther Darré during the Third Reich. Heidegger was himself a member of the Nazi Party, and it is not tangential, but essential, to read his legacy in this awful light. Blud and Bloden ideology tied people to the land in a potent metaphor of blood and soil. The perceived ‘internationalism and urbanism’ of Jews and their ‘supposed lack of allegiance to German soil’ was contrasted with the ‘authenticity’ of idealized German peasantry (Garrard 121): ‘those who held and farmed the land and whose generations of blood, sweat and tears had made the soil part of their being, and their being integral to the soil’ (Bramwell 54). Scholars and writers who have celebrated place-knowledge and dwelling are not, by default, supporters of fascism, or even necessarily fans of Heidegger. However, as Garrard points out, ‘it is significant that environmentally oriented georgic ideology should have been so easily appropriated’ (Garrard 122). Dwelling is not an idea we can dwell with for long, without beginning to wonder who is not invited, and not allowed, to dwell.

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Authenticity and tourism Certainly, Shepherd writes with uncharacteristic snobbery about the migrant workers who come to the Cairngorms to ‘fell and lop and cut’. But thankfully this attitude is not characteristic of her work as a whole. Instead, Shepherd tends to explore multiple perspectives on the Cairngorms, revealing how the mountains look and feel to walkers and workers from different backgrounds and experiences. In The Living Mountain, she meets many who catch ‘the bug of mountain feyness’ and do so ‘indiscriminately’: ‘There are addicts in all classes of this strange pleasure,’ including ‘shopmen and railway clerks and guards and sawmillers’ (LM 84), ‘a gaunt scion of ancient Kings,’ Aberdeen’s oldest college, ‘to a red-headed greaser, an old mole-catcher, and an errand boy from Glasgow’ (p. 85). Far from depicting these figures as intruders, Shepherd finds fellowship and unity of devotion across regional, national, class and gender divisions. One factor contributing to this was the political significance of their presence in the hills. At the same time as Shepherd walked in the Cairngorms, hikers were coming into confrontations with landowners over rights of access. The British countryside was (as it still is) overwhelmingly in the hands of an aristocratic minority, and rights of access had been hard won (Solnit 81– 103). In 1843, the Scottish Rights of Way Society was formed in Edinburgh to protect rights of access being closed by landowners. In 1847, they pitched in to the bitter Glen Tilt dispute between the landlord and sportsman, the Duke of Atholl, and a group of students on a scientific tour led by Professor of Botany John Balfour. Heading out from Braemar, Balfour had taken the students to examine the granite-streaked boulders in which the geologist James Hutton found evidence of the earth’s deep-time history. The skirmish, which nearly ended in violence, and the ensuing legal disputes established a pattern of confrontation between landlords and walkers over the course of the next century (Stephenson 120–3). In the Cairngorms, the Scottish Rights of Way and Recreation Society defended access to Glen Doll and the Lairig Ghru, ‘always in the teeth of lairdly opposition, often with surreptitious support from the local population’ (Smout 30–1). Walker’s rights campaigner Tom Stephenson remembers the situation in the Highlands of the 1920s and 1930s: Rights of way were obstructed or abolished. Inns were closed and such tenants as remained in the deer forests, mainly gamekeepers and other servants of the landowners, were forbidden to provide accommodation for visitors. (p. 127)

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Some would quietly ignore instructions. Stephenson remembers Shepherd’s friend Maggie Gruer (a figure memorialized in The Living Mountain): ‘Though forbidden to provide accommodation, Maggie proudly boasted that she had never turned a rambler away from her door’ (Stephenson 128). A defining feature in these confrontations was the issue of class. Rights of access claims were resisted by landowners as a way of denying access to workingand middle-class leisure tourists on the grounds that they might misuse or abuse the land. This snobbery had deep roots and was a defining feature of late-Romantic conservationism. In 1844, William Wordsworth wrote a series of public letters objecting to the coming of the railway to Kendal and Windermere in his beloved Lake District. Although he claimed he did not want to ‘interfere with the innocent enjoyments of the poor’, he objected on the grounds that ‘vivid perception of romantic scenery is neither inherent in mankind, nor a necessary consequence of a comprehensive education,’ but needs to be acquired gradually (1844a: 150). ‘Uneducated persons’ would do better, he suggests, to cultivate knowledge of their own ‘neighbouring fields’ than to be transferred en masse to romantic sites that ‘afford the greatest pleasure to those who have been in the habit of observing and studying the peculiar character of such scenes’ (Wordsworth 1844a: 152). As well as betraying deep-rooted classism, the exclusionary nature of native-dweller discourse is revealed in his prejudice. If the Romantic walker sees in the rural peasant the possibility of restoring a lost innocence, sociability and embeddedness with nature and place, the industrial worker reflects back their own urban incongruity, the fact of modernity and its alienations and the socio-economic inequalities of the city from which they have attempted to retreat. The place-ethic was therefore weaponized to prove that people are best equipped to know and to appreciate the local, rather than to jump on a train to take in more distant vistas. Wordsworth’s fear that the influx of outsiders might desecrate the lakes has been both emblematic of and arguably instrumental in the exclusion of working-class walkers from wild and rural landscapes. In England, workingclass groups including the Manchester YMCA Rambling Club and Manchester Rambling Club (formed 1907) contested rules that kept them from walking the peak district, democratizing the aristocratic and bourgeois pursuit of leisure walking and agitating for rights of way on private land. This cultural shift and organizational effort created the conditions for the infamous attempt to mass trespass on Kinder Scout in April 1932, led by workers from the industrial cities of Manchester and Sheffield. While access to and engagement with celebrated places has been structured by class and gender norms – with social

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inequalities and prejudices reproduced in constructions of the ‘authentic’ walker – for working-class ramblers, walking was connected to demands for rights of leave from exhausting and exploitative working conditions and a rising class consciousness (Solnit 164–7). Shepherd reflects on these wider politics of the land when she describes an encounter with two ‘railway workers who had come all the way from Manchester to spend their one week’s leave in photographing the Golden Eagle’ (LM 63). In the context of the Kinder Scout mass trespass, the fact these boys issue from Manchester is a tantalizing detail. They hold a camera, guidebook and have read up on the bird’s habitat, showing how middle-class leisure pursuits have been extended through the proliferation of specialist magazines and cheaper technology. Even more intriguing is their profession. While Wordsworth wrote snobbishly that Manchester railway operatives are unlikely to be rewarded by visiting the Lakes, these boys have been all over the Lake District, and now trains have bought them all the way to the mountains of Scotland (Wordsworth 1884b: 158). Shepherd’s writing conveys the novelty of the encounter at the same time as it betrays a tinge of class prejudice. She doesn’t fancy their chances of seeing the elusive bird and gives a somewhat snobby description of their appearances as ‘lanky, pasty and pimply’ (LM 63). However, just as she is advising them to avoid a strenuous climb until sunrise the next day, she is reminded of a patronizing comment she once received from a shepherd in the Galloway hills, in answer to a similar question she had posed (LM 64). This experience seems to jog her memory of what it is to be rejected as an amateurish outsider: in her case, as a long woman; for the boys, as two young working-class men. The tone of the passage shifts at once, and she instead offers insider advice on places to visit while they wait for their climb: ‘I liked those boys,’ she reflects. ‘I hope they saw an eagle’ (LM 64). The boys have a single objective, to photograph the eagle, and this utilitarian end distinguishes them from Shepherd, who is usually content to ‘just be’ with the mountain. However, the encounter shows there are many ways in to knowing a place, for locals and visitors alike. ‘They knew, I found, the books,’ she writes, and ‘had read everything they could find on their subject’ (LM 63). Prosaic acts of careful planning and committed research prepare them in ways no less worthy than Shepherd’s own. As she reflects, ‘Their informed enthusiasm – even if only half informed – was the right way in’ (LM 64). Finding a ‘way in’, if done with care and enthusiasm, is as rewarding and ‘authentic’ a way of approaching the mountain as being from there in the first place.

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After all, Shepherd herself is not that different from the boys. A lecturer based on much of the university term in Aberdeen, she was not a native ‘dweller’, like those ‘forceful and gnarled personalities, bred of the bone of the mountain, from families who have lived nowhere else’ (LM 85). On trips, she walks with them and unrolls her sleeping bag in their homes. In the intervening months, the mountain and its intimates are the subject of reflection and writing, not daily experience. Shepherd herself proves that one does not need to be ‘abide there; to be ‘more or less sworn to a place’ and ‘have a feel for the soil and history’, to quote Lopez (p. 133). She describes her first climb of the Cairngorms as a young girl: ‘From that hour I belonged to the Cairngorms’ (p. 107). There are any number of ‘ways in’ to knowing the mountain, and all have their distinctive worth.

Beyond dwelling If the narrow definition of place and dwelling so far described aren’t the only ‘ways in’, what other ways of knowing the mountain are available? In place of authentic dwelling, Kate Rigby offers the notion that dwelling can also be ‘ecstatic’: To open oneself to the givenness of earth and sky in the abiding strangeness of even the most familiar of places, as well as to tarry or stray in places that are genuinely foreign, places, perhaps, where one is exposed to the elemental and uninhabitable, from which, in our daily living, we are bound to take shelter, is . . . to dwell ‘ecstatically’. (Rigby 138)

Ecstatic dwelling is concerned with otherness and the possibility of selftransformation. It is inherently migratory, recognizing the wonder of movement and change and one’s openness to new influences. It is also compatible with stillness, with staying put, though in ecstatic dwelling such stability doesn’t become static because of the inherent strangeness of all places. Just as, for Shepherd, ‘the thing to be known grows with the knowing’, so in ecstatic dwelling, even the most familiar of places grows and shifts the closer we look. The very existence of The Living Mountain and the fact that Shepherd wanders as a ‘vagabond’ demonstrate that one can find a way into place, whatever one’s background. And what she finds in the Cairngorms is not a static world, but an infinitely changing and interconnected one. On the high plateau, Shepherd comes into contact with local life, and also global, even cosmic processes. The plateau is blasted with winds from ‘Iceland, from Norway, from America, from

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the Pyrenees’ (LM 49). The ‘small, unassuming dotterel’ charms with its simple, ‘almost domestic’ movements, ‘[y]et in Autumn this humble bird flies straight to Africa’ (LM 65). As much as Shepherd is concerned with the ways in which specific histories, forces, lives and personalities have shaped and produced the place, place is still implicated and involved in the wider world: its past and present conflicts, its history and its circulation of lives and matter. Rather than forming a boundary, the mountain provides a passage into global consciousness. As Carla Sassi notes, Shepherd’s mountains partake in a ‘planetary dimension’ producing a ‘borderless landscape’ which insists on Scotland’s refusal ‘to be confined within clearly defined geopolitical borders’. Departing from notions of ‘fixed and inherited identity’, Shepherd’s writing negotiates the complex territory between the ‘imagined community’ of the nation and the ‘place-based (local) knowledge, which substantiates individual identity’ (Sassi 77). This is not a total abandonment of a sense of place, then, but a tendency to see place-based identities as nested in larger contexts, and interactive with them. The example Sassi takes is from The Quarry Wood. Looking up in wonder at the northern lights, the farmer Geordie Ironside repeats the lesson he remembers learning years ago: ‘Scotland is bounded on the south by England, on the east by the rising sun, on the north by the Arory-Bory-Alice, and on the west by eternity’ (QW 20; italics in original). Scotland is fixed imaginatively, politically, geographically and ecologically by these points, each of which brings awareness of the world beyond the region, of which the region is also a part. Geordie’s colloquial name for the lights, ‘Arory-Bory-Alice’ (the name of a neighbour’s daughter helps him remember it) shows how global environmental processes can be translated and understood through local experience (QW 19). The lights also have local impacts, expanding the horizons of those who view them and subtly altering their perceptions of place. The lights make young Martha feel ‘as enormous as the sky’ and ‘so out of size and knowledge of herself that she wanted to touch something ordinary’ (QW 18). This is a moment that sets in motion years of self-development, in which she questions her own place in the world and her attachment to local and loved places and people, as well as the allegorical horizons of ‘eternity’. Heise does not abandon attachment to place entirely either, but proposes it be reconciled with the consciousness of distant places and processes: Rather than focusing on the recuperation of a sense of place, environmentalism needs to foster an understanding of how a wide variety of both natural and cultural places and processes are connected and shape each other around the

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world, and how human impact affects and changes this interconnectedness. (p. 21)

Local sensory information is still a prime way in which people make sense of the world, but natural and social processes cut across, connect and transform places in specific ways. Political and cultural differences matter, and the ‘interconnectedness’ of phenomena will only be meaningful when the processes and systems are recognized as constantly changing the meaning and make-up of places, as well as local, regional and national identities. The impact of a wide variety of ‘natural and cultural places and processes’ is felt in The Living Mountain. Although Shepherd describes the Cairngorms as her ‘secret place of ease’, they bare the impact and legacy of war. The Ordnance Surveyors’ hut – used by mappers in the aftermath of the Jacobite uprisings – and the wrecked Second World War aeroplanes are evidence of their political and economic integration into the modern British state and war-torn Europe (LM 76–7). Recent conflict has left marks on ecology too. Shepherd describes how the flaming red blaeberry leaves are loveliest of all in the Rothiemurchus Forest, where the fir trees were felled in the 1914 War, and round and out of each stump blaeberry grows in upright sprigs: so that in October a multitude of pointed flames seem to burn upwards all over the moor. (LM 54)

In this former deer forest, trees were felled to provide war infrastructure. Attention to the relatively minor impact on the dense blaeberry bushes provides a way into awareness of local–global connections. The description slips into allegory: first, of the destruction of the battlefield, memorably captured in paintings of stripped forests and torn earth by war artists like Paul Nash; and also of the flaming blaeberry leaves rising from the figurative ashes of the conflict (Nash 1918). At the same time, it reveals an intricate and unexpected connectivity between lives and matter, places and processes, embodied in the regenerative qualities of the forest. Past conflicts have also left traces, and Shepherd is torn between celebrating the regenerative capacities of the forest and lamenting the deleterious effect deforestation has on wildlife: The first great cutting of the forest took place during the Napoleonic wars, when home grown timber was urgently required. A century later we have seen the same thing happen. In 1914 and again, and more drastically, in 1940, the later wood has gone the way of the former. It will grow again, but in the meantime the

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To use Rob Nixon’s term, violence is slow and distributed throughout the mountain ecology. By showing how these details manifest at the local level, Shepherd creates an ecological aesthetic capable of envisioning the often invisible traces of other places and processes in familiar landscapes and revealing the underlying legacies of conflict, slow violence and regeneration in local ecosystems. What might such an expanded and estranged sense of place achieve? Might it foster care and concern beyond the ‘ethics of proximity’? What about connections to the planet itself? While the loss of a sense of place is generally considered corrosive to environmental concern, Heise suggests that it might actually imply ‘possibilities for new cultural encounters and a broadening of horizons’. Rather than nurturing ties to place, perhaps environmentalism should try to form ‘ties to territories and systems that are understood to encompass the planet as a whole’ (Heise 10). The yearning for a sense of global affiliation has, as Heise outlines, defined much environmentalist thinking from the 1970s onwards. It was originally sparked by the circulation of the 1972 ‘blue marble’ photograph taken from Apollo 17. Seeing the earth as a fragile blue-green sphere, suspended in the dark depths of space, raised a new kind of environmental consciousness: a shared sense of planetary fragility, which enabled thinking about destruction, harm and interrelation beyond the sensory-perimeters of the local. When Shepherd was writing The Living Mountain, the space race and the revolution in technologies which ‘enabled humans to perceive their own planet as a whole from outer space for the first time’ had not been realized (Heise 20). However, images revealing the curvature of the earth had been taken by the Explorer II balloon in 1935 (at a height of 13.7 miles), and in 1947 these images were vastly improved through NASA experimentation with captured German V-2 rockets at an altitude of 100 miles (NASA). Shepherd was writing, then, on the cusp of techno-scientific apprehension of the global, as ecologists, geologists and writers were attempting to nurture a global imaginary, revealing the ecological interconnections and geological processes that shaped and produced place. Alexander von Humboldt’s notion of Kosmos significantly underpinned prewar thinking about the global and cosmological, in ways that had their influence on Shepherd. Writing in the 1840s and 1850s, Humboldt had described the world as an orderly, beautiful and harmonious whole. Phenomena on earth were not constrained by the earth’s atmospheric limits, but interrelated with the

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celestial bodies too. The human mind was also part of cosmos, as it comes into existence ‘in the relationship created by the act of viewing, an act that composes a perceptual whole’ (Walls 266). Under the influence of Humboldt, Shepherd’s university lecturer J. Arthur Thomson and his collaborator Patrick Geddes also saw the role of the ecologist as the ‘the panoramic visualising’ of the ‘biodrama’ of life ‘as actually now in progress upon the world-stage’ (Thomson 1931a: 43, 47). An ‘untiring spectator’, the ecologist was also by necessity a geographer, geologist and social thinker. This is because although Our human homes and larger hives – be these village or town, city or metropolis – are still fundamentally regional. . . . Each mind as it widens, each life as it enlarges, has before it the open secret of its actual and extending inter-relations throughout the wide world, cosmic, natural, and human alike; and these from the long past as well.

Although the ‘local interest’ of regions are ‘fundamental to each, from infancy onwards’, the process of growth involves an enlarging of imagination and perception to read the ‘open secret’ of our interrelatedness (Thomson 1931a: 45–6). In their collaborative and individual works, Geddes and Thomson tried to unravel these threads to reveal the intricate ways in which lives and processes link at minute and vast levels. In 1892, Geddes designed the Outlook Tower in Edinburgh, a hilltop observatory by the Castle whose purpose was not to separate and elevate observers from the city but to give visitors a view of their ‘relationship to the immediate urban environment, as well as the wider region, nation, and ultimately the world as a whole’ (Gairn 2011: 84). Geddes’s cosmic-regional imagination, the ‘swoop from the universal to the particular and vice-versa,’ hence became a defining theme of Scottish modernism (Gairn 2008: 81). Global connections revealed by ecology demanded a revolution in the ‘perceptual apparatus of poetry’, as Geddes argued, and the culturing of a ‘consciousness’ that is now ‘beginning to be planetary’ (quoted in Gairn 2011: 85). In ‘The Kind of Poetry I Want’ (1943), Hugh MacDiarmid called for Poetry of such an integration as cannot be effected Until a new and conscious organisation of society Generates a new view Of the world as a whole. (MacDiarmid 1993b: 1025)

This was as much an ecological as a political demand, rooted in Marxism and dialectical materialism. Poetry, in MacDiarmid’s vision, was to play a vital role in the transformation of subjectivity and perceptual apparatus. In his poem

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‘The Bonnie Broukit Bairn’, the earth is described as a neglected child, sidelined by showy Mars and Venus, while in ‘The Eemis Stane’, the earth is a wobbling rock suspended in an uncertain universe (both 1925). Both are tender lyrics to a precarious planet envisioned as both organism and whole in the company of celestial bodies. Shepherd, too, was fascinated by the possibility of a global imaginary. In a review of MacDiarmid’s poetry, Shepherd commends how he wrote of the earth ‘in the company of the shining planets,’ succinctly expressing ‘earth’s earthiness, its lovableness’ (Shepherd 1939: 57). However, in her own work, it’s not the earth from space that fascinates her, but the continuity between her experiences and the wider global realities that they allude to. The constraints of human experience mean that encounters with the global must be registered first, and perhaps only ever, at the local level. Representing the relationship between local and global systems is a balancing act between focus on the immediate, and the ‘secondhandedness’ of mediated perceptions (Heise 2008: 150). In the astonishing telescoping perspectives of The Living Mountain, Shepherd moves between intimate touch and the imagined global view. From her base in the Cairngorms, she witnesses atmospheric processes which reveal the operation of global and solar systems, a myriad of surprising and secretive encounters between earth, light and air, mist and the strange colouring of air on the plateau. The aurora borealis is visible too, providing a display of ‘alien lights’ enlivening the region of sky between earth and space (p. 45). This cosmicregional imaginary evades simple place-centrism, but also resists an abstracted understanding of the earth as a smooth, integrated entity, visible from without. Different angles of approach reveal unities and relations otherwise disguised by habitual vision: ‘man’s experience of them enlarges rock and corrie’ (LM 108), she states, echoing Humboldt’s notion that the ordering and beautifying capacity of human intelligence and the creative mind was reciprocally related to the unities seen in nature. Experiments with perception culture a global–local imaginary that is both embodied and ocular. In order to gain a glimpse at the global to which she connects, she must move, reposition herself, and transform her perceptual apparatus. Holding her head upside down and looking at the landscape from between her legs, she realizes that ‘In no other way have I seen of my own unaided sight that the earth is round. As I watch, it arches its back, and each layer of landscape bristles’ (LM 11). Seeing the curve of the earth in this way, even in the expansive horizons of the Cairngorms, is obviously impossible. However, imagining that it is visible yokes place to place, region to region. Rather than achieving that awareness from a

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height – as in Geddes’s Outlook Tower, or at the summit of a Cairngorms peak – Shepherd’s perspective demands the wobbling proximity of the upturned stance, and with it an imaginative identification with the earth: ‘[t]his is how the earth must see itself ’ (p. 11). By occupying, momentarily and imaginatively, the ‘earth perspective’, continuities between the local and the whole become perceptible. Neither the whole nor the part is fully revealed through this process. The local is estranged, while the whole is only insinuated. The imagination of the global spurred by the blue planet image was misleading, after all: based upon distance, it suggested we could ‘take in the entire planet at one glance and perceive it as a shared whole without conflicting histories or cultures’ (Heise 37). Shepherd’s perspective does not erase difference: it reveals the planet’s geological and ecological integrity, while cautioning that our perceptual apparatus is situated, embodied and always partial. This chapter opened with a description of The Living Mountain’s many covers: the symbolically resonant deer, the ‘Monarch of the Glen’ landscape and the pen and ink illustrations showing the rocks and blades of grass up close, with the landscape dropping away in the distance, as pocked and scattered with bare rocks as the surface of the moon. In my opinion, the 1977 cover comes closest to looking like the book reads. It signals the discovery that the book moves towards: that the mountain not the stage setting for a number of discrete and charismatic organisms; a backdrop for an existential and developmental journey; or a cultural landscape for aesthetic appreciation, infused with dominant place-meanings. It is instead a living entity, in which human and non-human lives, natural processes and materials are interacting, mutually constituting and entangled in a way that surpasses any cultural and historical constructions of ‘place’. To understand how these processes interact, and what it means to be part of this living world, we need to delve deeper into the life of the mountain by focusing on the theme of Chapter 2: ecology.

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Ecology

Shepherd’s sole collection of poetry, In the Cairngorms, introduces the mountain from multiple perspectives. Over forty-six short lyrics, she zooms in on corries, burns and lochs and steps back to take in wide vistas: the flicker of fire in the sky, the fall of snow, the astonishment of light at dawn and dusk. While The Living Mountain feels like the culmination of Shepherd’s thought on the relationship between humanity and ecology, her poetry attests to the importance of the Cairngorms as a site of contemplation. In these poems, Shepherd returns to the mountain again and again, producing brief and gnomic reflections on the relationship between thought, matter, self and world. It is therefore a strange collection with which to start a chapter about ecology. But one poem in the collection in particular offers a way into this theme, capturing in miniature the ecological questions asked in The Living Mountain. It is ‘Pool Beside the Birches’, and it opens with the question: ‘Pool, where would thy waters run / Fleeing so fast towards the sun?’ In twelve lines of loose rhyming couplets, the poem traces the movement of the water bubbling up from the depths of the valley and being ruffled on its surface by the ‘air that hurries by’. The question is, is she looking at a landscape created by God, or one that pursues its own logic and intentions, ultimately mysterious to human understanding and study? It is obvious, even from the slight ripple on the water’s surface, that this world is living. ‘Does the heavenly mystery prove / So urgent that thou canst not but move,’ she asks. Or does the pool have ‘purpose of [its] own / To us, as to the wind, unknown?’ What is the nature of the relationships between things: how do they connect, what intelligences or agencies move and animate them and is that connection and its purpose ultimately knowable to the person peering into the depths of the pool in wonder and confusion? These are ontological questions – concerned with being and existence – as much as they are epistemological – concerned with knowing. Concluding on the word ‘unknown’, the poem does not actually reveal what binds wind, water,

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light and the micro-environment of the pool. What is left is a fascination and an awareness that mysterious interrelations motivate matter, connecting life forms, elements, places and entities in ways that curious human reason and imagination can barely penetrate. The natural world poses a series of questions, which may ultimately be unanswerable. Still, it is in the nature of enquiring humanity to ponder, and in this process of enquiry, the categories that usually structure reality begin to strain and stretch. Soon after she wrote these poems, Shepherd would lose her faith; by the time she came to write The Living Mountain, she was no longer asking questions about whether God motivated the living world. But here we see her weighing up the merits of scientific and religious explanations and involving her speaker (and in consequence, humanity) in the world that is being observed. Disturbing the division that separates the thinker from the object that has motivated their question, Shepherd shows how her speakers’ own surfaces and depths have, like the pool’s, been ruffled. Inspired by such questions, this chapter explores Shepherd’s ecological thought. Early twentieth-century ecological theory, particularly as it developed in Scotland, underpinned her understanding of the living world and the places she knew and loved. However, she also wrote from the perspective of the amateur naturalist – learning the secrets of life with the hands and contributing a distinctive strand of embodied ecological wisdom to twentieth-century Scottish nature writing. The chapter begins with an exploration of Shepherd’s scientific education and contemporary developments in Scottish literature, exploring the kinds of questions scientists were posing about the natural world and asking how did these discourses find their way into Scottish modernist writing. It then introduces current trends in ecocritical thought, to consider how Shepherd premeditated critical ideas about enmeshment and ‘ecology without nature’, and why she should be placed in a new canon of ecological writers.

Ecology and science In order to explore the influence of ecology on Shepherd’s writing, we need to look at the state of the life sciences in the early twentieth century. The term ‘ecology’ (Ökologie) was coined in 1866 by the field naturalist and morphologist Ernst Haeckel (1866). Meaning the study of the Oikos – home or setting – Haeckel derived the concept of an environmental ‘ecology’ from the work of Charles Darwin. He had read On the Origin of Species in the early 1860s, finding in Darwin’s ‘unified view of life’ cause to rethink the major tenets of zoological

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and morphological science (quoted in Stauffer 138). Instead of a teleological view of life, in which humanity is at the top, mammals, aquatic life and invertebrates below, and plants, water and geological foundations all around as a kind of lifeless backdrop, ecology offered a view of life as an integrated whole: what Arthur Roy Clapham and Arthur Tansley would call in 1935 an ‘ecosystem’. Ecology presented a new grand narrative of nature. Environments weren’t static backdrops to human action, but a living ‘economy’ of transformative interactions, struggles and instances of mutual aid and co-development. Darwin himself had used the term the ‘economy of nature’ – derived from Carolus Linnaeas’s Oeconomia natura (1775) – to describe the dynamic equilibrium found in well-established natural systems: ‘in the long-run the forces are so nicely balanced, that the face of nature remains uniform for long periods of time’ (Darwin 1996: 61). But this didn’t mean the natural world was placid. Struggles between plants, animals and other life forms (like viruses and bacteria) had seen these entities modify and improve themselves over time, in order to ‘seize on each place in the economy of nature’, producing processes of selective adaptation over long periods (Darwin 1996: 84). But the world, as Darwin saw it, wasn’t only in conflict. In On the Origin of Species, Darwin describes how It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with plants of many kinds, with birds singing in the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by the laws acting around us. (Darwin 1996: 395)

Observing these elaborately interdependent bundles of life, Darwin realized that ‘plants and animals, most remote in the scale of nature, are bound together by a web of complex relations’ (Darwin 1996: 61). This was more than a chain of influence or local relationship between key species: Darwin realized that ‘biotic’ organisms – plants, insects, animals, fungi, bacteria and so on – are intimately related to and interdependent with abiotic elements of the physical environment: water, temperature, atmosphere, light, soil, minerals and chemicals. Nothing, ecology insists, lives alone and everything both changes its environment and is changed by it in turn. Describing the social shock of Darwinism, many historians focus on the disturbing revelation of humanity’s evolution from primates. However, ecological revelations were equally discombobulating for cultures shaped

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by belief in Enlightenment hierarchies of species, cultural and nationalist constructions of place, and mythologies of human exceptionalism – that is, of humanity’s separation from and superiority to the life of organic nature. Ecology, by contrast, destabilized the foreground and background distinctions with which post-Enlightenment cultures are used to considering our environment: ‘The very word “environment” conjures up an impression of a structural, physical “stage-set” upon which background biological processes are acted out,’ as ecologist Rory Putnam puts it. However, ecological research shows that living organisms ‘are as much a part of any creature’s environment as are more structural abiotic components’ (Putnam 15). However, the distorting lens of anthropocentrism disguises the reality that, rather than being the sole player on the earth stage, humanity forms part of other creatures’ habitats and experiences.

Ecology in Scotland From the 1880s to the 1950s, Scotland experienced a flourishing of ecological research and ‘big-picture’ approaches to the living world. Shepherd’s experience of this movement was tied to her study of earth’s history, evolution and ecology at the University of Aberdeen between 1912 and 1915. Her MA included modules in zoology and geology, the former of which was led by the charismatic J. Arthur Thomson, who worked as a professor of biology at the university between 1899 and 1930 (Sabiston). An evolutionary biologist and former student of Haeckel, Thomson infused Darwinian principles with his Christian faith, proposing that organisms played a creative role in their own evolution and proposing that the web of life tended towards mutual aid and interdependence, rather than a brutal struggle for existence. Accessible communication was Thomson’s goal, and something he saw as a moral necessity. He aimed to make scientific understanding of interest ‘to the intelligent student-citizen, otherwise called “the man in the street”’, writing in a style that is remarkable for its control of prosody and vivacity of description (Thomson 1924: iii). Reflecting on the interrelations between species, he describes how Many birds feed on berries and distribute the seeds. The tiny freshwater snail is the host of the juvenile stages of the liver-fluke of the sheep. The mosquito is the vehicle of malaria from man to man, and the tse-tse fly spreads sleeping

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sickness. The freshwater mussel cannot continue its race without the unconscious co-operation of the minnow, and the freshwater fish called the bitterling cannot continue its race without the unconscious co-operation of the mussel.

Insects, viruses, land and sea creatures and humanity all co-operate and interpenetrate in this kaleidoscopic tour of species relations. Species gestate and transport one another through stages of life, past bodily boundaries and across distances vast and small. ‘[F]lowers and their insect visitors are often vitally interlinked in mutual dependence’: unconsciously, one form of life provides the conditions for the survival of another as part of a mutually beneficial web (Thomson 1924: 105–6). It was this view of science and ecology that Shepherd was trained in and, as I will suggest in a moment, brought to her writing of the living world. The second key influence on early twentieth-century Scottish ecology was Patrick Geddes. A collaborator of Thomson, Geddes was a polymath and innovator in the fields of biology, zoology, geology and cultural production. He held professorships in Zoology at the University of Edinburgh (1880–9) and Botany at University College, Dundee (1888–1919) where he shared his theory of botany as a ‘vitalistic science’ (Smout 32). In 1899, Geddes led the way in introducing ‘nature study’ to the Scottish government school curriculum and, in many other ways, pushed the study of biological interrelations beyond the narrow confines of academic settings, and into the consideration of realms beyond the disciplinary bounds of the life sciences (Smout 43). These changes in school teaching reached all the way to Shepherd’s High School in Cults, where ‘illustrated surveys of plant life and drawings taken weekly of a plant’s growth’ adorned the classroom wall, and where from 1906 her teacher Elsie Fyfe Findlay brought rigour and practical experimentation to her pupils’ scientific training (Peacock 69). Most distinctively, Geddes adopted an ecological perspective on politics – specifically, on the relationship between culture, place and nature, as briefly outlined in the Introduction. Now, with hybrid disciplines of cultural geography, environmental humanities and geohumanities, it is quite usual to consider geography as a meeting point between the study of physical features of the land, human development and the forms of knowledge and meaning invested in culture. However, in the late nineteenth century, geography was the province of cartographers and engineers concerned with mapping the land for imperialist, military and industrial purposes. Geddes’s innovation was to incorporate sensory and local knowledges into the practice of mapping, exploring the reciprocally

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shaping relations between environments and human societies. Communities and cultures, he insisted, had formed in relation to the land inhabitants worked on, lived with and dreamed about. The place/folk/work formulation expressed the ways in which local economics were produced by and shaped the land and, in turn, the ways in which regional identities and collective imaginaries were formed. The new kind of global geographer, he states, takes all the various results of the different sciences and reunites them into a series of living and characteristic world-scenes, in which latitude, configuration and relief, rocks and soils, climate and rainfall, flora and fauna, nature races and civilised races, industries and institutions . . . even ideas and ideals – are all expressed as the elements of an intelligible and interacting whole – the dramatic unity of the World and man – say, also of Man in his world. (Geddes 1904: 113)

As this example shows, Geddes founded his theories of urban and social transformation on the belief that there was an interdependent relationship between people, communities, physical geography and environment. ‘Country or region’ could be ‘looked upon as organism’ (Geddes undated, emphasis in original). Of course, the inherently colonialist distinction Geddes makes between ‘nature’ and ‘civilised’ races reaffirms the negative aspects of ‘dwelling’ which were challenged in Chapter 1. Nonetheless, Geddes does recognize that ecological processes meant people and place were equally ‘interacting’, whether they lived in the industrialized Global North or more traditional or indigenous societies. In this, and other ways, he pushed further than contemporary thinkers, certainly within Scotland, in erasing boundaries between environment and culture, and between the local and the global view. What influence did these developments have on writers? Louisa Gairn has done important work to establish the influence of Geddes on the Scots Renaissance writer Hugh MacDiarmid. Indeed, looking at his work from the 1920s to 1930s, Gairn reveals how the nub of MacDiarmid’s ideas about cultural renewal in Scotland can be traced to Geddes (Gairn 2011: 84). MacDiarmid was, according to Gairn, ‘one of the earliest figures within the British Isles to write about the science of ecology and, arguably, the first Scottish creative writer consciously to apply ideas drawn from ecological theory and practice in his own work’ (Gairn 2011: 82). In 1943, MacDiarmid reflected on how Modern ecology has destroyed the delusion which encouraged people to jeer at any suggestion of geographic ‘control’ and human ‘response’ to such control . . . today physiology and psychology are agreed that there is a relation, a functional relation, between an organism and its environment. (1994: 310)

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More practically, MacDiarmid noted a lack ‘of first-hand observation, intimate knowledge and loving particularity’ which ‘show[s] a real knowledge of nature’ in Scottish writing (1934: 336). Geddes also insisted that geographers and biologists should be dependent on fieldwork and the evidence of the senses rather than cartography or lab-based study (Gairn 2011: 87). In ‘Tam o’ the Wilds and the Many Faced-Mystery’ (1934), MacDiarmid described the investigations of a self-taught naturalist, who is fascinated by the minute forms and relations of life: ‘First hand knowledge was what he aye prized / And personal observation was his constant pride’ (1934: 147). Such attention to living systems, MacDiarmid claimed, was necessary for Scots’ cultural renaissance and social reinvigoration because it would acknowledge and deepen the interdependencies established between ecosystems and culture.

Shepherd and ecology In a 1977 article, Louise Donald (another Aberdeen graduate) recognizes a character in Shepherd’s novel, The Quarry Wood, is based on their former lecturer, Thomson (20–1). ‘The Professor’, as she puts it, ‘in a quiet voice that he never raised nor quickened, peopled for her the airs, glancing waters and grassblades, and the cold dark grave profundities of the sea’ (QW 62). Just as Geddes’s research influenced MacDiarmid, the tone and distinctively intricate ecological perspective of Thomson coloured Shepherd’s writing – instilling her prose with an exhilarating, scale-shifting capacity to capture life’s interrelations at multiple scales, and an intimate association between organisms and environments, so that environments themselves are seen to be alive. A look at his writing shows how perfectly Shepherd captured the soaring rhetoric with which he addressed students and his capacity to open grand imaginative vistas connecting life at all levels and across temporal scales. In The Outline of Science, Thomson explains that his book will address The procession of life through the ages and the factors in the sublime movement; the peopling of the earth by plants and animals and the linking of life to life in subtle inter-relations, such as those between flowers and their insect-visitors. (1924: 6)

The echo of Thomson’s vocabulary and style is heard in Shepherd’s prose. Not only do both chart a sublime sweep between scales – the depths of the ocean and heights of the air – but both use the term ‘peopling’ to describe the profuseness

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of life. Rather than simply anthropomorphizing these various realms, ‘peopled/ ing’ implies community and interactivity. Life and liveliness are brought to the ‘elemental’ forces of air and water, while descriptions of minute blades of grass are unusually precise. From this minor detail, the vista pans out dramatically, to connect tiny buddings of life with the sublime depth of the ocean. Micro and macro scales collapse as life rushes together in complex entanglement. This rapturous, precise devotion to drawing out the ‘subtle inter-relations’ between animals, plants, people and places also defines The Living Mountain. In the chapter on ‘Birds, Animals, Insects’, Shepherd zooms in on ‘life in so many guises’, describing dragonflies, moths, beetles, butterflies, midges and mosquitos as they teem in the mountain air ‘by the hundred thousand’ (LM 74). These creatures are of fascination in their own right, but also because of how they participate in mountain life. On warm days, the small, obstinate plants that live on the plateau throw out ‘honey scents’ to attract flies, and in the intensity and brevity of the show the interdependent relationship between the two is revealed. Pungent scent ‘is poured out most recklessly in the heat of the sun’ when ‘the insects are out in strength’ (LM 52) – this is because those ‘long livers’ – whose roots dig deep into the mountain – ‘must renew themselves at times, and it is only some of the summer days that insects can fly to the mountain top’ (LM 50). Relationships like this show how deeply living creatures depend on each other. They also erode differences between seemingly discrete entities and lives. Sometimes, this is a playful mistake, like the first insects that flit into The Living Mountain, but which are discovered to be young wrens (LM 69). In other cases, more pronounced blurring of lives takes place, disturbing the bodily boundaries of organisms and different sites on the mountainside. In her poem, ‘Pool Beside the Birches’, Shepherd asks of the water: ‘Does the heavenly mystery prove / So urgent thou canst not but move / In emulation of its flight / As it speeds onward to the light?’ (IC 25). Wind blends into water, which blends into air, in a mysterious journey of influence and transformation that is given a spiritual dimension. Thomson, likewise, reflects frequently on the interpenetration of supposedly distinct environs, which he calls ‘haunts or homes’ (1924: 115). The air and the land, for example, are not separated at the horizon, but earthbound life forms are found to be aerial: ‘in the air the only plants are floating bacteria, though there is a sense in which a tree is very aerial, and the orchid perched on its branches still more so’ (Thomson 1924: 115). In The Living Mountain, the air is also seen as ‘part of the mountain, which does not come to an end with its rock and soil’ (LM 41). This extension of the mountain into the aerial realm is in fact born out

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in modern ecology: as Chaplin explains that the atmosphere ‘extends from the gases between soil particles all the way to outer space’ (p. 5). Coupled with these ecological interests, Shepherd shared a moral and social cause with Thomson. Before Richard Louv coined his pseudo-medical diagnosis of ‘Nature Deficit Disorder’ in the early 2000s, Shepherd and Thomson were both concerned that people were losing bonds of affiliation with the living world. For this reason, Thomson advocated for an ecological education, particularly for the young. Writing with Geddes in 1931, he found hope in the observation that Our younger generation, despite all their apparent fascination by mechanisms, or absorption in sports, are increasingly coming to all this [awareness of evolution]. They are often turning to fuller-nature experience and appreciation, and towards varied occupational education and careers, and these are truly ecological; i.e. consistent with the understanding and conservation of nature and life in evolution; and hence towards their own better development and survival accordingly. (1931a: 46)

Many people, he feared, were losing contact with and understanding of nature because of the distraction of sports, entertainments and ‘mechanisms’ such as cars, radio, telephones and cinema. However, for those turning back to ‘fullernature experience’, this proved to be not just a pleasure but a necessity. The language of the Darwinian struggle for survival has been converted into a call for increased knowledge of and respect for natural processes. Such knowledge will not equip the knower to better exploit nature but to recognize that they are part of the living world and dependent on it for survival and development. Shepherd was also concerned about what people’s loss of contact with living things might mean for their health and for society. In a letter to Neil Gunn, she commends him for his fiction, which has the ‘power to evoke presences – principalities and powers – the sense of aliveness and awareness in the outer world’. This capacity is something she admired and sought to emulate in her own writing. Such writing was, she states, well to be insisted on in this age of crowded streets and cities, when so many of us are losing – perhaps have never had – the sense of life beyond man’s life, influences in air and earth and water, that man does not ignore if he is to be his full and complete self. (1931a)

Contact with ‘influences in air and earth and water’ was to her mind definitive of what it meant to be human, and to be in health. Literature, Shepherd hoped, might bring us back to this living world.

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First-hand engagement with nature was also a celebrated path to ecological knowledge and something that Geddes and MacDiarmid pinpointed as a distinctive asset in Scottish ecology and culture. Although Shepherd doesn’t connect direct knowledge with national sentiment or cultural revival, her writing is intensely tactile, concerned with embodied and sensory knowledge as a ‘way in’. Shepherd describes how, as a child, she was taught the ‘secrets of growth’ by her father. He taught her to pick stagmoss, or ‘toadstails’, which grow among heather roots: ‘We lay on the heather and my fingers learnt to feel their way along each separate trail and side branch, carefully detaching each tiny root’ (LM 58). It is by feeling the strength and depth of the roots that she learns how they withstand fire, wind and cold. This is knowledge she will take with her into the mountain as an adult, and which helps her see the resilience of the stubby outgrowths lying under the covering of heath and soil and snow. By means of an ‘exploring finger’, she also discovers the course of a burrowing mouse, and hence an understanding of how these tiny creatures make their homes (LM 31). Knowledge and pleasure unite in the hands, which discover both specific properties of the mountain, and are ever poised to know it better through the accumulation of sense impressions and embodied memory. Shepherd relates how she has avoided gloves since ‘a charming old gentlewoman’ said to her that ‘[a] lot of strength comes to us through the hands’ (LM 102–3). ‘The hands have an infinity of pleasure in them’, and through them, she experiences ‘the feel of things, textures, surfaces, rough things like cones and bark, smooth things like stalks and feathers and pebbles rounded by water . . . the warmth of the sun, the sting of hail, the blunt blow of tumbling water, the flow of wind’ (LM 103). Although these experiences do not translate directly to discoveries, as they amass they form a compound of experiences which reveal the ‘total mountain’ in all its multisensory and multidimensional complexity. Carla Sassi points out that Shepherd’s writing frequently explores the tension and resolution between ‘intellectual’ forms of knowing and ‘practical’ wisdom (Sassi 70–1). In The Living Mountain, ecological wisdom is founded on intimacy and touch, not purely on inventories of items, naming conventions or other conceptual and linguistic abstractions. However, scientific understanding and expertise reinforce and enrich knowledge gleaned through sensory encounters. She takes note of conservation work and incorporates ecologists’ perspectives on the hills (LM xlii). She walks with and befriends scientists who are there to study in ways far more formalized – though no less attentive – than her own, including a naturalist who has ‘business with every leaf, stalk and root in the rocky bed’ (LM 8). Another botanist, ‘with whom I sometimes walk’, keeps her

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informed of the ‘tenacity of life’ on the high and rocky plateau. (The botanist was family friend Grant Roger with whom she walked in the late 1930s and 1940s. See Peacock 173.) He tells her that ‘well over twenty species of plant grow there – many more, if each variety of moss, lichen and algae is counted. He has made me a list of them, and I can count them’ (LM 49). Science prompts reflection on humanity’s place in the world and alters aesthetic appreciation by making new ways of perceiving and knowing possible. It is, after all, a botanist who leads Shepherd away from the summit in search of rare wildflowers and who thus sparks her appreciation of forgotten, unostentatious regions of the mountain (LM 8). Factual and embodied ways of knowing overlay and inform one another, producing what Shepherd describes as a ‘reality of the mind’ rather than the ‘pallid simulacrum’ that can be gleaned from reference books, surveys and lists alone (LM 1).

Ecological art Shepherd’s revival is taking place in another moment of ecological reawakening. As the environmental crisis worsens, new hybrid forms of environmental art and science have emerged, from the Bioart Society in Finland to the land art of Milton Beccera, the EcoArt of Avila Rahmani and ‘Ecovention’ associated with Sue Spaid and Mel Chin. A common concern across these diverse international movements is the role art may play in exploring and excavating the sensory, spiritual and affective dimensions of environmental degradation. Often in collaboration with both scientists and more-than-human agencies – from bacteria to bogs – artists stage interventions and encounters across disciplines and species boundaries, producing artworks that sit in a new space between art and science: space where new kinds of attention might be cultured and action impelled. The Living Mountain also sits in a hybrid space: a literary memoir, it is also a work of scientific art, inherently concerned with generating new forms of attention and speculation on the kinds of knowledge with which we may know the ecological (even if, as the poem with which this chapter opened suggests, complete knowledge may never be available). It is no surprise then to see Shepherd’s work being reinterpreted by artists who are asking ecological questions – exploring how the senses mediate and enrich contact between people and the living world, for the benefit of individual well-being and ethical orientation towards the more-than-human. In 2018, the artist and performer

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Simone Kenyon used The Living Mountain as prompt and inspiration for a serious of outdoor workshops designed to help young people explore outdoor spaces in ways that engage all the senses. Like other events in the expansive Into the Mountain series, it was designed as ‘an invitation to come to know a place through sensory and embodied encounter’. This objective is as much concerned with guiding people into a feeling of presence and confidence in mountain settings, as it is with knowing the secrets of life – to paraphrase Shepherd – through the sensory resources that all participants have to hand (Kenyon). As The Living Mountain is being revived and reinterpreted by readers concerned with more pressing ecological questions than were being asked in Shepherd’s own time, it is fitting to ask how her work stands up to scrutiny under the lens of modern, ecological thought. How might we read Shepherd’s ecological vision now? What is its value for ecocritics concerned with the interpenetration of ecological and cultural spheres, or the oneness of humanity and so-called nature?

Ecological thought ‘Ecological thought’, a term coined by the philosopher Timothy Morton, is taken here to mean the migration of scientific ideas about the interdependence of life to philosophy, political theory and literary criticism, and the subsequent transformation of those disciplines under the influence of ecology. It also involves a critical approach to the sciences, including interrogation of their politics and biases, informed by the theoretical approaches of the humanities. Ecological thought is concerned, then, with the transformation of thinking and action, at the point the sciences and humanities meet each other and the world. Donna Haraway has long been at the forefront of this ecological thought. Across her work, she absorbs and transforms theories and insights emanating from the sciences, exploring what cyborg technologies tell us about embodiment and autonomy, or human–animal relationships about species boundaries and empathy. This work is concerned with the same kinds of questions Shepherd was asking about the connection between lives and processes prompted by ecological science – the subtle interrelations that disturb the fast and clear categories between creatures, environments and humanity. In The Companion Species Manifesto, Haraway also reflects on the couplings, exchanges and encounters between species, which in turn affect species’ identity and embodiment. Bodies, she proposes, are not discrete entities but come into being through elaborate

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iterations over long periods, in processes that are essentially ecological: ‘Through their reachings into each other, through their “prehensions” or grasping, beings constitute each other and themselves. Beings do not preexist their relatings’ (Haraway 2003: 6). Bodies are not complete prior to interactions, a realization which blasts what Haraway calls the ‘protection of species boundaries and the sterilization of category deviants’ (Haraway 2003: 4). In such a world, a mountain might well be seen as alive. Creaturely interactions grind down a rock, make soil, produce life and facilitate chemical transformations between earth and air. Gone are the protections of boundaries and false dichotomies between species and environment. And gone is the rather flat and stylized distinction between humanity and ‘nature’. Life forms are not discrete parts in a well-oiled machine, but constantly exchanging, interchanging and changing one another, as matter alters form and shape, passing between life forms. As Haraway puts it, ‘The world is a knot in motion. . . . There are no pre-constituted subjects and objects, and no single sources, unitary actors, or final ends’ (Haraway 2003: 6). If it was to be defined by one innovation, the ecological thought would be marked by its rejection of the term ‘nature’ and ideas of difference and exceptionalism that underpin it. Kate Soper was one of the first critics to ask What is Nature?, posing the question with such insistence and precision that the term was henceforth evacuated of its previously held meanings. A too-close look at ‘nature’ risks revealing its underlying incoherence and over-determination; as Raymond Williams put it, ‘[a]ny full history of the uses of the term nature would be a history of a large part of human thought’ (Williams 221). Donna Haraway has proposed the term ‘natureculture’, acknowledging interdependence and mutual histories of becoming, while Jhan Hochman offers a nature/Nature or n/Nature distinction to mark the cleavage between the living world and its Euro-Western cultural constructions. David Abram popularized ‘more-thanhuman-world’ to escape the hierarchical binary of human versus non-human, while Timothy Morton rejects ‘Nature’ outright as ‘an artificial construct’, denoting purity, otherness, authenticity and organic creativity which bears little relation to the functioning of ecological processes (Haraway 2003; Hochman; Abram; Morton 2010: 11). Romantic Nature, as he contends, was constructed as both beneficent deity and the connective medium between humanity and God. Morton dismisses this Nature, accusing it of evoking a pre-modern idyll, ‘a time without industry’, which comes into existence at just the time – the Industrial Revolution – that ecology begins to be threatened: ‘Just like a reflection, we can never actually reach it and touch it and belong to it’ (ET 5). Nature is, from its moment of inception, separate from humanity, and its celebration in poetry

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reveals exactly how other, how reified, it has become. This Romantic construction of Nature, ultimately, has to be done away with because it ‘fails to serve ecology well’ (Morton 2010: 3). If ‘plastic knockoff ’ nature is dismantled, then ‘ecology’ may expand from its specialist scientific meaning into an entire system of thought, an approach to thinking and a practice of life (Morton 2010: 7). This is what Morton calls ‘the ecological thought’. The ecological thought is the thinking of interconnectedness. The ecological thought is a thought about ecology, but it’s also a thinking that is ecological. Thinking the ecological thought is part of an ecological project. The ecological thought doesn’t just occur ‘in the mind’. It’s a practice and a process of becoming fully aware of how human beings are connected with other beings – animal, vegetable, or mineral. (Morton 2010: 7)

Not a ‘natural world’ or ‘sphere’, it is essentially everything rolled into one: a complete interconnectedness, encompassing not just animals and minerals and vegetables but the thinker, and what they’re thinking too. Rather than a ‘web’ of life or a ‘networked’ world, the ‘mesh’, Morton argues, best expresses ecological interconnections (Heise 65). Mesh, instead, avoids the technological and information-based dimensions of the former term, and the organic connotations of the latter (Morton 28). Instead, it is modelled on the Vedic metaphor of Indra’s Net. In Hau-yen Buddhism, the net is used to illustrate the interpenetration of all phenomena: beings exist autonomously, but principles of intercausality mean that ‘what affects one item in the cosmos affects every other individual’ (Cook 1977: 4). Morton likewise states that ‘[t]he mesh of interconnected things is vast, perhaps immeasurably so. .  .  . Nothing exists by itself, so nothing is fully “itself ”’’ (Morton 2010: 15, 19). Hauyen Buddhism describes a ‘totalistic world’, which exists like a ‘living body in which each cell derives its life from all the other cells, and in return gives life to those many others’ (Cook 1977: 16). The Hau-yen universe, in contrast to the Western, is non-hierarchical and non-anthropocentric: ‘there is no center’, or if there is one, ‘it is everywhere’ (Cook 1977: 4). Morton likewise states that ‘[e]ach point in the mesh is both the center and edge of a system of points, so there is no absolute center or edge. . . . All life forms are in the mesh, and so are all dead ones, and as are their habitats, which are also made up of living and nonliving beings’ (Morton 2010: 15, 19). Death provides the conditions for life and vice versa. Even within the living body, there is death in the form of iron and calcium. All these elements interconnect and mutually constitute

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one another: ‘We drive around using crushed dinosaur parts. Iron is mostly a bi-product of bacterial metabolism. So is oxygen. Mountains can be made of shells and fossilized bacteria’ (Morton 2010: 29). In the living mountain, there is also death. Likewise, Hua-yen, as well as many global indigenous belief systems, share the conviction that ‘things commonly thought to be dead or inanimate exert a continual, crucial influence on each other’ (Cook 1977: 17–18). The Huayen principle of interpenetration describes a mode of being that long predates but is given relevance by ecological science: Darwin, Morton claims, ‘sensed the mesh while pondering the implications of natural selection. .  .  . Every single lifeform is literally familiar: we’re genetically descended from them’ (Morton 2010: 28–9). While Western thought systems, derived from Cartesian ontology, struggle to adapt to the discoveries of ecology, these ideas translate easily to Buddhist cosmology.

Shepherd and ecological thought As ‘nature’ is the ghost that the ecological thought seeks to exorcise, it makes sense to start with exploring this tricky term in relation to Shepherd’s writing. Despite her recent reclamation and categorization as a ‘nature writer’, the terms ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ are rarely used in The Living Mountain. When they are used, ‘nature’ generally means one of three things: ‘the essential quantity and character of something’, ‘the inherent force’ directing ‘the world or human beings or both’ and ‘the material world itself ’ with or without humanity (Williams 219). These critical terms are Raymond Williams’s, designed to encompass in brief the three major approaches to ‘nature’ he encountered in English-language nature writing. Shepherd deals with all three categories, and with meanings of ‘natural’ ranging from action that is within the order of nature (category two) and true to the thing itself (category one). To take the first category, she writes of how water is ‘black by place and not by nature’ (LM 25); that is, water’s essential character is clear, though the depths and minerals of the mountain pool might make it seem black to the viewer. This pronouncement, and others like it, tends to describe interactivity between one kind of being and another, attesting to both an internal coherence of character and the recognition that the ‘nature’ of something, whether human or morethan-human, is permeable to change. In her poem ‘A Girl in Love’, the woman’s nature and the light of the sun combine, ‘And manifold in her art thou / Her loveliness a part of thine’ (IC 27. Shepherd is addressing ‘thou’, the sun). If this

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is a world composed of distinct entities – water, a mind, a girl, the light, a place – then the essential characteristics of these things-in-themselves can be altered and transformed by encounters. In her description of movements and qualities of things, we see Shepherd toying with Williams’s second category. ‘Natural’ can mean something that is unforced and unadorned, or something that comes so easily it must be in accord with the ‘inherent force’ driving things in the world. ‘If sleep comes at such a moment’, she writes, reflecting on a moment of pause on the mountain top, ‘its coming is a movement as natural as day’ (LM 92). Similarly, reflecting on the whiteness of water, she writes that ‘like roundness, or silence, their quality is natural, but is found so rarely in its absolute state that when we do so find it we are astonished’ (LM 3). These descriptions are rather value-laden – to be natural is to be good and right – so in these cases, Shepherd alludes to a world of order and ‘oneness’ with an idea of inherent nature directing the world and humanity. The third category, ‘capital N’ nature, occurs only once in The Living Mountain. It is when Shepherd notes that ‘Few things are more ludicrous in Nature than a white hare “concealing” itself . . . while all around it stretches a grey-brown world’ (LM 65). ‘Nature’ here is addressed in a tone that is bathetic and emphatic for comic effect. Elevating capital ‘N’ Nature in a humorous comparison with the hare, she implies that he fails to live up to his own elegant coat due to the unpredictable permutations of mountain ecology. The use of ‘Nature’ here is all the more interesting because it is isolated. It is used in a taxonomical sense, describing a world of variation and also of order. It is also a world of things: of species standing out in stark contrast to the worlds they inhabit. This is amusing, but not ultimately a perspective on ‘nature’ that she will pursue. The living mountain is a place where the distinction between things and places blurs and collapses, where the foreground and background are one and the same. Ecology, instead, offered ways of breaking down place–thing distinctions, disturbing boundaries between ‘organism’ and ‘environment’. As a critic, Shepherd was highly attentive to experimentations of this kind in others’ writing. In her 1938 review of MacDiarmid’s poetry, she describes her admiration for how ‘Persons start up from the pages, complete in a phrase, their whole environment implied’ (Shepherd 1939: 58). Character, as Shepherd suggests, is created in an interchange between organism and environment, and in her own prose and fiction people are often described in such terms. For example, Jenny Kilgour of A Pass in the Grampians ‘is rooted deep in the earth’ (PG 115), while her father Andrew’s nature is described as ‘interpenetrated’ with the moor (PG 20). In The Living Mountain, locals are ‘bred of the bone of the mountain’, and a sense of

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ecological interconnectedness lurks behind her gnomic claim that ‘[p]lace and a mind may interpenetrate until the nature of both is altered’ (LM 8). As this last quote shows, Shepherd’s understanding of this relationship isn’t a determinist and static one. Human natures and places are not homeostatic and fixed; just as an organism materially changes its environment simply by being there, and just as organisms are materially changed by influences in the air, water and bacterial life of their surroundings, so character is understood as a materially grounded entity, in a dynamic material interchange with environment. The self is, ultimately, an ecological entity, produced through an interactive process of co-development and co-becoming. Often science is described as a tool to help understand ‘the world around us’, but ecology breaks down the us/world binary. It is a way of orientating ourselves towards the world of which we are a part: a tool with which we apprehend the world that we are in. If the mind, like the body, is part of the world, with the tendency to change it and be changed by it, then this means that the person observing the world – whether writer or scientist – is not doing so from a privileged place of separation and distance. Awareness of this entanglement contradicts the supposedly objective stance of post-Enlightenment science and its methods of observation, which assume that the observer is capable of both registering things directly and closing down emotional responses in order to provide a true account of an objective reality. Much modern critical theory has attacked the pseudo-objective scientific perspective. Thomas Kuhn’s theory-dependence of observation proposes that ‘it cannot be expected that two scientists when observing the same scene will make the same theory-neutral observations’ (Bird). Similarly, the feminist-standpoint theory of Sandra Harding questions the neutrality of scientific knowledge and the patriarchal cultural assumptions that underpin it (2004). Within ecological cultural criticism, Haraway has called for a ‘successor science’ that will be committed to providing both: an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects . . . and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a ‘real’ world, one that can be partially shared.

Common to these critiques is the assertion that the value-neutral perspective of the objective observer is a fantasy, or at best a tenuous construction. The scientist conducting fieldwork is not a rational, detached ‘conquering gaze from nowhere’: they are affected by and affective of the phenomena they observe (Haraway 1988: 579). The need to achieve communication and translatability across cultural

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and individual experiences – the faithfulness to the ‘real’ world addressed by Haraway – must be compatible with the embodied reality of human existence and our inevitable situated-ness. The stance Shepherd adopts in The Living Mountain is neither neutral nor external to the thing witnessed. A love and a sensual attraction draw Shepherd to the mountain – getting to know the Cairngorms is a ‘journey pursued with love’ (LM x). Maintaining detachment when observing living creatures in their habitats is impossible, as creatures are affected by her presence, and she by theirs. Squirrels become ‘a little reckless about humanity’ after prolonged contact with hill-walkers (LM 73). Crested Tits ‘scold like fishwives’ when Shepherd gets too close (LM 56). Deer make a ‘startled jump’ when they spot her, and a new-born fawn shams dead at her touch (LM 73). Observation is a transformative process and a form of relation. It is also one in which the body determines what can be seen and how it can be known. ‘I have discovered my mountain,’ Shepherd writes, But if the whole truth of them is to be told as I have found it, I too am involved. I have been the instrument of my own discovering; and to govern the stops of the instrument needs learning too. Thus the senses must be trained and disciplined, the eye to look, the ear to listen. (LM 90)

The body is not detached but reciprocal and responsive, and must change and be trained to see and learn. The use of the word ‘instrument’ to describe this relationship is particularly intriguing. Alone, it may indicate a scientific device, but the subsequent phrase ‘govern the stops’ suggests Shepherd is actually referring to a brass instrument. As the musician uses the body to manipulate sound through atmospherics, so the observing human is involved in an interactive play between self and world. There are limits, though, to training and discipline, and Shepherd is acutely aware of her own restrictions as an observer. In the final chapter of The Living Mountain, after her journey into the mountain is almost complete, she reflects that ‘[t]here must be many exciting properties of matter that we cannot know because we have no way to know them’ (LM 105). How better to realize one’s own implication in ecology than to recognize that the position from which one looks is that of an animal – an earthbound organism – with particular attributes that make some aspects of the environmental tangible and visible, but lacking other ways of knowing which allow different creatures to sense and navigate the world? In The Ecological Thought, Morton reflects on how ecological entanglement transforms what we think of as knowledge, the knower and the thing know.

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‘The more you know, the more entangled you realize you are, and the more open and ambiguous everything becomes.’ Although science has been accused of disenchanting the world, what Morton calls the ‘inner logic of knowledge’ suggests otherwise: ‘Even if biology knew all the species on Earth, we would still encounter them as strange strangers, because of the inner logic of knowledge. The more you know about something, the stranger it grows’ (Morton 2010: 17). One discovery opens up another question and leads to another – bringing you back to the strange stranger, a name for the lives, matter, processes and entities with which we connect, be they earthbound or interstellar: minerals with nonearth origins, the energy source of the sun or the moon’s tidal pull. Shepherd makes the same discovery about knowledge. Learning about the antiquity of Alpine plants from her botanist friends, she realizes that ‘Knowledge does not dispel mystery’. Her peering eye reveals wonders, and these wonders are reinforced by the ‘stories’ scientist friends tell her which ‘make the world so interesting’. Knowledge is compatible with wonder because one piece of information prompts further questions and deeper uncertainty. This is not a hunger for conquest and absolute mastery, but an acceptance of the wide, wild weirdness of ecology itself, and the lives with which we interconnect: The more one learns of this intricate interplay of soil, altitude, weather, and the living tissues of plant and insect (an intricacy that has its astonishing moments, as when sundew and butterwort eat the insects), the more the mystery deepens. (LM 59)

Rather than diminishing life forms as objects of study, they grow and expand the more she learns about them and encounters them in the flesh: ‘Knowing another is endless’, she states, ‘And I have discovered that man’s experience of them enlarges rock, flower and bird. The thing to be known grows with the knowing’ (LM 108). Knowledge is limitless, and the more knowledge is acquired, the more strange and unknown qualities, capacities and relations become tangible. In spite of the scientific urge to gain total knowledge of life, it can never be fully achieved: ‘The secret of the mountain never quite gives away. Man is slowly learning to read it. He watches, he ponders, patiently adding fact to fact’ (LM 58).

Ecological structure As writers absorbed and interpreted ideas from ecology, they used those insights to inform innovations in literary aesthetics. As Robert Crawford suggests,

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ecological insights corresponded with ‘the experimentation in representations and viewpoints’ pioneered by modernists like MacDiarmid and James Joyce (1989: 149). In The Living Mountain’s telescoping aesthetics and innovative structure, Shepherd also pioneered ways of exploring the relations that bind lives and processes minute and vast, near and far. Implicated in the systems under observation, Shepherd critiques the construction of the omniscient, separate observer by emphasizing the entanglement of the human in the thing observed. Gillian Carter describes The Living Mountain as a ‘complex narrative arrangement’, marked by ‘transgression of discursive and generic boundaries’ and ‘interweaving of structure and content’ (Carter 2000: 7). Macfarlane has noted how patterns of colour and imagery bind the book together ‘laterally’ producing a ‘transverse descriptive weave’, rather than a collection of perspectives offering a ‘dozen different facets of the mountain’. He also recognizes how, on a structural level, The Living Mountain ‘embodies ecological principles’ (LM xxiv), or what we might, after Morton, call an ‘enmeshed’ text. While each chapter follows an organizational rationale, divided into twelve sections with titles such as ‘Water’, ‘Life: The Plants’ and ‘Life: Man’, such rigorous taxonomies are not borne out within each subsection. The content swerves away from the title theme, so that ‘Water’ contains elements of memoir, stories of friendship and animal encounter, while in ‘Plants’, Shepherd reflects on insects, geology and atmospherics. This transgression and extension of self-imposed categories suggest that the lives and elements described in the chapters cannot be easily disentangled. Although the chapter structure allows attention to focus for a time on that particular element or environment, to better know it in itself, we need to see it in its relations, because it is in these relations – not in itself – that the thing truly exists. In this way, scientific insights are folded into an artfully constructed, miniature masterpiece of ecological revelation. Even the structure of the book itself is subtly revealing. Beginning with ‘The Plateau’ and ‘The Recesses’, each subsequent chapter zooms in on different abiotic elements – water, air, light, frost – before moving onto biotic elements – including plants, animals and, finally, humanity. This gives the impression of a teleological development which centres humanity and confirms an anthropocentric hierarchy: what Sassi describes as the ‘Aristotelian (and anthropocentric) ascending scala natura’ (Sassi 71). Shepherd, however, cautions against such a reading. As the book moves from abiotic elements (rocks and ice) to living ones, she explains: I have written of inanimate things, rock and water, frost and sun; and it might seem as though this were not a living world. But I have wanted to come to the living things through the forces that create them, for the mountain is one and

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indivisible, and rock, soil, water and air are no more integral to it than what grows from the soil and breathes the air. All 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. (LM 48)

Although this descriptive development superficially mimics the biblical story of Creation – in which the stage is set day-by-day for the arrival of humanity – Shepherd subverts the anthropocentric trajectory of the narrative. By the time charismatic living creatures come on to the stage, she has already intimately introduced ‘backgrounded’ elements like water, soil and air. Reaching humanity is less of a culmination than a realization of how the parts all fit together. From the heat of the sun to the beat of a creature’s wings and the flash of water, all are one. Re-positioning the body helps open up new ways to perceive this interconnected world. She describes how [b]y so simple a matter . . . as altering the position of one’s head, a different kind of world may be made to appear. . . . Details are no longer part of a grouping in a picture of which I am the focal point, the focal point is everywhere. Nothing has reference to me, the looker. This is how the earth must see itself. (LM 10–11)

The statement remodels human–nature relations in order to place humanity back within ecology as the sole context of our being. Failure to appreciate the ecological is revealed as a problem of perspective – of culture, hegemony, aesthetics and physical positioning – as much as it is a lack of purely scientific knowledge. In destabilizing human–nature binaries, it may be that dominant ways of knowing the natural world – of knowing ‘nature’ itself – are part of the problem. Action and movement further break down divisions between humanity and nature. In the repetitive, meditative act of walking, she finds her identity can be ‘for the time being merged in that of the mountains’ (LM 14). In this state, the fundamental connectivity of all lives is grasped briefly, as in a vision: when the body is keyed to its highest potential and controlled to a profound harmony deepening into something that resembles trance, that I discover most nearly what it is to be. I have walked out of the body and into the mountain. I am a manifestation of its total life, as is the starry saxifrage or the white-winged ptarmigan. (LM 106, emphasis in original)

The use of ‘manifestation’ and comparison with the lives of plants and birds is striking. It is, to some extent, easy to imagine the integrity of the mountain ecosystem and the creatures and plants which live and grow there. They do not

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move or leave the mountain: the ptarmigan, unlike the dotterel or swallow, does not migrate in summer or winter, and the saxifrage, a slow-moving ‘stone-breaker’, is ideally adapted to mountain conditions. When it comes to an itinerant human, the notion that she may be a ‘manifestation’ of the mountain’s life challenges fundamental understandings of the autonomy of the human subject and personhood. It is, as Shepherd admits, a brief experience – a trance which passes. However, in that instant the imaginative divisions which separate humanity from ecology are erased, and the material reality of our ecological entanglement becomes the medium in which she walks. The loss of humanity’s place at the top of the hierarchy is not feared but invited. Anthropocentrism gives way to ecocentrism, and instead of experiencing panic at the ways in which ecology disturbs assumptions about humanity’s distinction from the so-called natural world, Shepherd revels in this discovery of oneness. This response is markedly different from what Simon Estok describes as ecophobia: ‘irrational and groundless hatred of the natural world’, exacerbated by the knowledge that we are not above, but a part of it (p. 208). Shepherd does explore fear of nature though, reflecting the reality that the mountain isn’t a place of guaranteed safety but a challenging, unpredictable environment. Storms, blizzards, avalanches and freezing temperatures threaten mountaineers and crofters, but this does not make the place, or nature, ‘evil’ and in need of human control. Acknowledging the potential for disaster ‘is the risk we must all take when we accept individual responsibility for ourselves on the mountain, and until we have done that, we do not begin to know it’ (LM 40). To assume the mountain is safe and yielding to human mastery is to romanticize it. All the mountain’s moods – including its storms and blizzards – are good because they ‘are part of its essential nature’ (LM 1). As much as she grieves sincerely for the people who have been lost on the mountain, she avoids moralizing about its capacity to both thrill and terrify, to nurture and kill. This is, in her view, what it means to be human and to be part of a living world. Shepherd’s ecological vision of the interconnected mountain can seem startlingly ahead of its time. It was not until Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979) that James Lovelock offered his paradigm-shifting account of the earth, describing how the planet functioned as an interconnected, living entity. Lovelock’s hypothesis introduced the earth as ‘Gaia’, the ‘superorganism composed of all life tightly coupled with the air, the oceans, and the surface of the rocks’ (Lovelock xii). In such a world, seemingly minute and irrelevant animal and plant behaviours served a purpose not only within relatively localized ecosystems but in vast and complex processes of planetary regulation.

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Lovelock and Shepherd’s lives crossed, though there is no record of whether she encountered his writing. Still, it’s tempting to compare her living mountain with his grand vision of earth as an ecosystem that he laid out. Robert Macfarlane has done just that: ‘Long before Lovelock gave us Gaia, Shepherd was proposing a holistic vision of her small world as one and indivisible,’ he writes (Macfarlane 2011: xxv). Perhaps the similarity should not surprise us. Ecology grounded both their works, and though Shepherd could never have proven that the lives she knew intimately connected in a material way with those elsewhere, she was nonetheless able to place the Cairngorms in a planetary context, tracing global processes through sensory engagement and first-hand observation. Looking back to Darwin, the Cairngorms are Shepherd’s entangled bank, where wonder is animated by scientific insight, and processes of touch and imaginative speculation open her up to the material intricacies and temporal dimensions of the ecologically interconnected land. Her distinctive contribution to twentieth-century ecological writing, then, lies in her dual capacity to envisage the magnificent interactivity and holistic reciprocity of world ecosystems and to transform theoretical principles into tangible, lively realities through writing that is sensuous, embodied, philosophical and characterized by both wonder and uncertainty. Emphasizing and developing many of the themes of interwar ecological science, her writing argues for a politics and an ethics of interconnectedness, breaking down Cartesian categories that separate humanity from nature, and self from world. Accepting humanity’s participation and entanglement in ecological processes, she rejects anthropocentric narratives of human history, which have tended to distinguish humanity’s development from the life of other species and the economy of nature. Ecological thinking, as proposed by Shepherd, tilts the angle of approach, reorienting humanity as simply one participant in the superorganism – the living world. Of course, this rather tranquil description of ecological ‘oneness’ can obscure the fact that human communities have been highly destructive agents in the ecological systems of which they are a part. Modern capitalist and industrial societies have, of course, been unprecedentedly destructive, damaging ecosystems and treating ‘environments’ as sites for limitless resource extraction, rather than a web of life of which we are a part. More recent theories of global ecosystems have disturbed fantasies of our capacity to understand, conquer and manage what we reductively call ‘the environment’. To what extent did Shepherd reflect on this disruption, and is ecological thought possible, without a sense of ecological crisis? These questions are part of a new discussion, which will be the subject of Chapter 3.

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When Nan Shepherd first showed the manuscript of The Living Mountain to Neil Gunn, at some point in the 1940s, he responded that ‘in the circumstances of the times a publisher would be hard to find’ (LM xliii). The exact meaning of the criticism is mysterious, though there’s a certain implication the work is not fit for its moment – that it is in some way untimely. What purpose could a slim volume of reflections on Highland walking serve in the aftermath of a distinctly brutal world war, amid such catastrophic loss of life? As Shepherd explains in her 1977 introduction, in ‘that disturbed and uncertain world it was my secret place of ease’ (LM xliii). Highlighting the therapeutic, even escapist qualities of the text, Shepherd seems to affirm Gunn’s criticism, adding an air of legitimacy to the book’s abortive publishing history. After one submission to a publisher, followed by a quiet rejection, the manuscript was thrust into a drawer and forgotten. Luckily, her feelings about the book’s significance changed in the intervening years. When Shepherd turned attention to her neglected manuscript in the 1970s, scientists, politicians and an increasingly concerned public were looking at the countryside, ecology and the environment in radically new ways. Might the burgeoning environmental movement have played a role in helping her reassess the manuscript’s worth? By 1977, organized reaction against environmental damage was well established in Europe and the United States, with campaigns on pollution, toxicity, deforestation and nuclear proliferation leading to demands for new legislation and boycotts. It is unimaginable that Shepherd – a friend of ecologists, member of natural history societies and keen observer of the living world – would have not noticed the shift that was occurring in human– nature relations in the 1970s. How might this new movement have informed the reappraisal of the manuscript, and can proto-environmentalist ideas be found in the original manuscript itself?

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It’s true, there’s little hard evidence to prove that environmentalism might have swayed Shepherd. We do know that she was aware of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which in Scotland centred around the Hunterston nuclear power stations (from 1957) and Faslane naval base (built in 1964), the home of the Trident missile and submarines. Her papers at the National Library of Scotland contain a poem by Robin Munro, ‘The Clyde Coast’ (1974). An outcry against the nuclear industry, Munro’s poem eulogizes landscapes and human–nature relations obliterated by atomic edifices which invert the boundaries between land and sea, harnessing the raw energy of the atom and the force of the tide in a bid for geopolitical mastery: I’m watching my childhood become a development dreaming of ships in a field, lost like seagulls. There are roads on the sea to take from the tide all the power of our world, and Cumbrae, an embryo, rests in a nuclear womb. Duneen sinks in holy protection.

Macfarlane has written that The Living Mountain is an environmental text, but not an environmentalist one. Shepherd does not campaign, as Munro does, against nuclear energy, or deforestation, or overgrazing, or any other disaster befalling the Cairngorms. But without campaigning for a single issue, or singling out a villainous agency as responsible for the damage, Shepherd’s writing explores ways of thinking and feeling about environmental change which are at the core of the environmental movement. From her wonder at the complexity of ecological relations to her interrogation of anthropocentrism and her sensitivity to multiple inhabitants’ experiences of place, Shepherd explores ethical positions, chains of harm and mutual responsibility. Though we might not close The Living Mountain with a clear sense of what needs to be done to fix the problems, we may be furnished with new orientations, new ethical obligations and new ways of understanding the complexity of the problem. In our own moment of environmental catastrophe, I would like to propose The Living Mountain as a text that modern environmentalism needs and richly deserves.

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This chapter looks at The Living Mountain as a text that straddled the change from more traditional conserve-and-preserve approaches to wild and natural landscapes, to one that explores the mountain as holistic ecosystem, in which humanity is a potentially damaging presence. Moving beyond conservation paradigms of the English Romantic or US National Parks movement, Shepherd shows affinity with Scottish ecologists like Patrick Geddes and Frank Fraser Darling, who insisted that humanity and nature should be seen as part of an integrated, mutually influencing whole. Then, turning to innovative thinkers like the biologist James Ritchie, I consider how Shepherd weighed-up competing economic, cultural and political interests, spurred by politically volatile debates about the value and uses of mountains. Finally, I compare the ethical stance she develops to the Land Ethic of Aldo Leopold and more recent multispecies justice approaches developed in environmental philosophy.

Profit versus preservation When Shepherd walked in the Cairngorms, she was witness to two centuries of modern land use and its detrimental impacts. Since the 1700s, the Cairngorms – like other Highland regions – were caught in a conflict between profit and preservation. The Scottish Agricultural Revolution (1700s–1850s) saw landowners embrace an ideology – practically a morality – of rationalization. Land enclosure, cultivation for profit and the rescinding of traditional common-use land rights for Highland communities all went hand in hand, as communities who had previously been sustained by crops, livestock, hunting and fishing were gradually and then decisively dispossessed and removed (Richards 155). Before the clearances, Highland communities were undoubtedly highly stratified societies, subject to severe fluctuations of wealth and hunger. Nonetheless, they were relatively sustainable and bound together by shared use of communal bailtean farmland, customary obligations to the clan chief and relations of reciprocity (Richards 28). Since the early eighteenth century, intervention from the Crown gradually weakened clan rights and had overseen the transfer of property to feudal lairds loyal to the British state. After the final defeat of the Jacobites in 1746, estates were newly formed and augmented, completing the century-long process of dismantling traditional land use and occupation. Peasants, cottars and small farmers, proving less profitable than sheep, plantations and game hunting, were forcibly removed from glens and

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crofts from the 1780s and were displaced to industrial cities, coastal fisheries or new settlements overseas. ‘Scottish lairds turned British capitalists’ went to war on uncultivated land. Estates were enclosed, growing landowners’ incomes and fuelling Britain’s military and colonial might (Paye 4). Between 1740 and 1830, the Dukes of Atholl planted fourteen million larches in Perthshire, transforming the landscape and biodiversity of the region to serve the needs of an expanding colonial navy (Grove 332). From the 1780s, the ancient pastime of deer hunting began to attract English aristocrats inspired by the rugged splendour of the Highlands. When mutton and wool prices collapsed in the 1870s, grouse and deer hunting made up losses, the sheep that had replaced people were themselves removed, and red deer populations were encouraged to swell well beyond their historic numbers to fuel the hunters’ demands (Smout 27). Grouse shooting also became popular and was accompanied by a shocking slaughter of small birds and mammals. Local records suggest that 70 eagles and 2,520 hawks and kites were killed by hunters between 1776 and 1786 in estates surrounding Braemar. Pine martins, wild cats, badgers and otters also suffered, as did the polecat – slaughtered for its skin – which was extinct in Scotland by the end of the nineteenth century (Smout 28; Ritchie 128–36). At the same time as the Highlands were being run for profit, a conservation movement was working to construct the mountains as sites of recreation, sport and scenic appreciation (Smout 23–4). From the 1760s, aesthetic discourses of the Sublime and the popularity of works like James Macpherson’s Ossian boosted a tourist craze for the Highlands. Ironically, perhaps, these visitors were some of the loudest voices decrying the despoliation of the hills. In 1880, John Ruskin grieved over the ‘desecration of Loch Katrine’, and then in the 1940s, politicians protected Glen Affric from a damming project. Rivers and lochs had already been harnessed for power by the British Aluminium Company at Foyers in 1896 and Kinlochleven in 1907, while the Grampian Power Company opened dams at Loch Rannoch (1930) and Loch Tummel (1933), which were ‘much criticised both for their environmental damage and for their failure to sell power to local industry’ (Smout 35). Six new Highland hydroelectric plans were proposed to Parliament between 1929 and 1941 but were actually rejected by English MPs enthused by Scotland’s romantic scenery (Payne; Smout 39). In these cases, Parliamentarians were drawing from longestablished scenic traditions, seeing ‘[t]he Highlands [as] the spiritual heritage of the whole nation which it is the duty of Parliament to preserve’ (Hansard; Smout 36). However, it wasn’t only patrons of hunting and shooting estates

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who made a case for protecting landscapes from damming. One of the most vocal Westminster speakers against these projects was Noel Baker, MP for Derby. Scoffing at the premise that the work of building dams would bring prosperity to Highland communities, in a 1941 debate he pointed out that the wealth of the countryside lay in agriculture, industry and tourism that would entice workers, not just aristocrats, to the hills. The preservation of the land and the creation of national parks were therefore economic, social and political necessities, because ‘[n]o one cares for the beauty of the countryside more than the workers of our towns who have been largely starved of it in the past’ (Hansard). Outside of Parliament, a conservation movement was growing. In 1917, D’Arcy Thompson founded the Wild Bird Investigation Society (1917), whose journal included detailed information about species numbers and habitats, as well as reports on the failure of legislation to protect wild birds (‘The Report’). Scotland acquired its own National Trust (SNT) in 1931 (forty years after England), a somewhat slow uptake that was illustrative of the utilitarian attitude many Scottish landowners had to the Highlands. In this and subsequent confrontations between developers and conservationists, ‘traditional land use attitudes gather round the sports interests to present a common “insider” Highland front’, while those constructed as outsiders represented postromantic interests in preserving the magnificence and beauty of the ‘wild’ and ‘uncultivated’ land (Smout 47). That said, the belief in the importance of scenery for recreation and spiritual uplift was also framed in economic terms. In a parliamentary debate about the flooding of Glen Affric in 1941, the Conservative MP for Twickenham claimed that ‘every time you injure a glen such as Glen Affric you are injuring very many people who depend upon beautiful scenery to restore their nerves and to revive their minds and souls’. At the same time, he did not neglect to mention that the ‘beautiful scenery has commercial value’, tourism being one of the Highland’s most significant industries (Hansard 207). The irony of this, of course, is the emptiness visitors admired was the product of the forced removal of working people from the land, and the carefully constructed artifice of landowners associated with the English ruling class, a dozen of whom owned half of Scotland in the early 1900s (Short 75). As Scottish socialist (later secretary of state for Scotland) Tom Johnston wrote in 1909, because ‘His Grace of Atholl must have freedom on his August moors and solitude in his embattled keep . . . soon no sound will echo in the smiling valleys but the crack of the sportsman’s rifle and the plaintive cry of the lonely whaup’ (Johnston ix).

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The development of the Cairngorms became a hot topic in the 1920s, when the Cairngorm National Park Scheme set out to buy the Cairngorms for the nation (Hamer). The National Trust in England were approached, but they declined the offer. Once it was formed in 1931, the Scottish National Trust bought areas of Glencoe, while the Forestry Commission ‘offered the unplantable parts of their Glenmore holdings in Cairngorm for public access’, switching from their politically appointed function of reforesting the UK for the benefit of national security, to preserving forests for the sake of hikers. In this new climate of landscape preservation, land was set aside for tourists and access was improved, on the assumption that there would be no conflict between nature and tourism (Smout 38). Nature conservation still meant heritage and scenic preservation, not environmentalism, as it would come to mean after the 1960s. Scotland was left out of National Parks legislation due to the opposition of landowners, concerns about obstruction to ‘the development of the glens by the new Hydro Board’, and because ‘the [National Trust for Scotland] and the Forestry Commission believed they unaided could meet the need for scenic conservation and public access’ (Smout 41). The threat that rising deer populations pose to woodlands and moorlands has also been a subject of conflict for at least two centuries. Debates as to whether ‘deer forests represented the sterilisation of a valuable resource for the amusement of the rich or the only practicable use for otherwise almost valueless land’ raged, while the land itself was said to have become a ‘wet wasteland’ through long cycles of cutting for iron-forging, sheep ranching and deer herding (Smout 27; the term ‘wet desert’ is Frank Fraser Darling’s 24). Cairngorm historian Alan Watson blames the grazing red deer populations for hampering the regrowth and regeneration of ancient Scots pine forests following eighteenth-century land clearances (1983). A popular sight for tourists and iconic imagery for every traditional Highland hunting lodge, Fraser MacDonald notes how much of the Highlands have been ecologically arrested to support red deer and red grouse, species that in turn support the recreational bloodsports of princes and bankers. What we take to be ‘wild land’ is really a closely managed political ecology that has turned landscapes of privilege – the ‘wild’ deer forests – into the now familiar canon of Scottish scenery. (MacDonald)

The two-centuries-old controversy about deer populations in the Highlands perfectly encapsulates the entangled conflicts between the romance and aesthetics of Scotland’s ‘wild’ landscapes, and the social and environmental cost of the sport.

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A cautious synthesis When Shepherd was writing The Living Mountain, the debate between profit and preservation was raging. Shepherd’s stance in these issues is not one of simple nostalgia, and neither does she conform to the dominant landscape aesthetics of the Sublime or the picturesque, which underpinned and structured the heritage stance. She is sympathetic to tourists, being one herself, and also intimate with crofters and farmers. As Carter notes, Shepherd ‘presents the views of the dominant groups represented in the current natural heritage debate – conservationists, the Estates, and tourists . . . sliding between different viewpoints in a cautious attempt to weigh up and synthesise competing demands on the land’ (Carter 2001: 31). A test case of her ‘cautious synthesis’ can be found in the chapter on ‘Man’, where Shepherd explores humanity’s influence on animal life in the Cairngorms: He tends the red deer and exterminates the wild cat. He maintains, in fact, the economy of the red deer’s life, and the red deer is at the heart of a human economy that covers this mountain mass and its surrounding glens. There are signs that this economy is cracking, and though the economy of the shooting estate is one for which I have little sympathy, I am aware that a turn of the wrist does not end it. The deer himself might perish from our mountains if man ceased to kill him; or degenerate if left to his wild; and on the crofts and small hill farms wrested from the heather and kept productive by unremitting labour, the margin between a living and a sub-living may be decided by the extra wage of ghillie or under-keeper. Without that wage, or its equivalent in some other guise, the hill croft might well revert to heather. (LM 80)

Here Shepherd describes the troublesome complexities caused by humanity’s meddling in the hills. A prized animal species, the deer, is protected and multiplied beyond all sense, while the wild cat (predator of grouse and hare) is exterminated. Species preference is clearly swayed by the economics of animal industries. Wealth is amassed and augmented by the aristocratic sporting industry, but simply campaigning to end it will not solve the problem: the deer is deeply implicated in Highland livelihoods, even Highland ecology, in ways that make it difficult to extricate with one swift move. What, then, should be done? As Shepherd’s inconclusive conclusion suggests, it is not a simple problem to solve. While commentators like Watson and MacDonald write with clarity about the injustices of the deer industry, Shepherd ‘slides between different viewpoints’, to paraphrase Carter, weighing up different views. This might be seen as evasive, even weak, if we take environmentalism

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to be the adoption of a didactic position on an issue. There’s a slippery quality to her reasoning, which often ultimately sees her settling back on the status quo. On the other hand, a cautious synthesis of positions can also be seen as a meaningful, perhaps even vital, stance. It is only from a position of synthesized, carefully weighed-up viewpoints and interests that ethical positions and actions can be proposed. This point, about ethics, will be returned to in a moment. In Shepherd’s reflection on the deer problem, it is instructive to see how she places humanity as an agent within the Highland ecosystem. Without the wage paid to the ghillie – perhaps a husband, son or part-time crofter or farmer – smallholding families might be forced to leave their Cairngorm homes, and ‘the hill croft might well revert to heather’. On the one hand, this addresses the depopulation and impoverishment of the Highlands in Shepherd’s own time. Remnants of the Highland Clearances of the early nineteenth century can still be seen in the national park, where along the River Dee after Inverey and the Linn of Dee, abandoned villages and crumbling dwellings mark the land. In Shepherd’s novels, in particular A Pass in the Grampians, anxiety about the depopulation of rural Scotland is expressed in her heroine Jenny’s decision whether to leave or to stay. The need to leave communities became increasingly necessary in Scottish rural society in the early twentieth century, thanks to the decline in the value of crofting, herring industries, sporting estates and sheep (Leneman). This, of course, increased the urgency of making money from the land even in ways that, to lesser or greater extent, were known to be environmentally damaging.

Humanity in ecology Shepherd’s sympathy towards crofters who have stayed can therefore be seen as a personal defence of her friends, and a statement about the role that humanity plays in mountain ecology. The Cairngorms are not, after all, uninhabited wilderness set apart from human lives and industries. Human participation has been mutually productive of species and the land. What might happen if these communities lost their foothold on the mountain was an often ignored and unconsidered consequence of change. In early twentieth-century Scotland, other writers were also paying attention to the ecological, cultural and social crises produced by changes to traditional land-use practices. In 1887, the literary historian John Veitch noted that Scottish poets were alert to the damage done by ‘modern planting and its wretched

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artifice, which has broken, blurred, and disfigured many a hillside and many a bracken glen’ (Veitch 150). In the 1910s and 1920s, Tom Johnston advocated for repopulation of the glens and meaningful Land Reform, declaring that ‘[w]e are on the offensive, taking back from men who stole . . . the wealth that originally belonged to the community’ (quoted in Richards 19). Forbidding Highlanders from the ‘beauties of the sylvan glade’ with barbed wire and trespass notices was a human catastrophe and misuse of the land, whose bird populations were ‘lonely’ and whose landowners continued ‘to crush and grind the soil’ that was legally, but not rightfully, theirs (Johnston x). These hills and glens had once supported significant clan populations, but development and hunting had damaged wildlife in the region. Indeed, the biological and ecological impact of removing Highland farming communities is still little understood (Smout 24). Historic records show that Highlanders kept sheep well before the clearances, suggesting that low-impact and itinerant livestock grazing has long had a place in Highland ecology (‘Farming’s Retreat from the Hills’ 34; Ryder 155–6). Johnston’s image of ‘lonely’ birds may be more than a poetic evocation: recent studies have shown that grazing helps maintain moorland bird biodiversity, while under-grazing in some upland habitats may be as detrimental as overgrazing to plant, insect, bird and mammals dependent on short grasses and the ecosystems that flourish there (‘Farming’s Retreat from the Hills’ 32; Response from the Hills iv). Scottish Literary Renaissance writers often emphasize the interdependence of humanity and nature and point out what happens when these relations are disturbed. In The Silver Darlings (1941), Neil Gunn explored the crisis of overfishing during the nineteenth-century herring boom, implicating postclearance capitalist rhetoric and resource extraction in the dual exploitation of nature and humanity. In Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song (1932), the land that ‘tossed and turned and perpetually changed below the hands of the crofter folk’ goes to ruin after a community’s male population are slaughtered in the First World War, while the clearance of a hillside forest produces soil degradation and a landslide (Grassic Gibbon 1986: 97). Shepherd, likewise, wonders if the loss of the deer economy might reduce local populations, in turn affecting blanket heather and biodiversity. Alternatively, the deer might ‘degenerate if left to his wild’, meaning that the semi-tamed creatures might become overly confident and more aggressive, or breed more extensively, further devastating woodland and wild plants. She describes how stags already antagonize crofters when they are found to have ‘broken in and ravaged the growing crops’ (LM 81). Or they might decline altogether, becoming the next victim of persecution if they ceased to function as living capital.

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The tendency to place humanity in the land, and to see the two as mutually interactive, which characterized Scottish ecological and proto-environmental thought was rather unusual. At the turn of the twentieth century, the theories of American ecologist Frederic Clements dominated the life sciences in the United States and England. Clements held that without interruption, over time vegetation would develop towards a stable state, meaning that ‘only a wilderness climax unaffected by man was worthy of study’. Scottish ecologists, instead, were more likely to challenge this view, seeing humanity as ‘a dynamic prime actor among other animals, instead of searching for a “natural world” uninvaded by man’ (Smouth 33). In the 1890s, Geddes investigated ‘historic filiations and dynamic biological and social relationships’ within the country or region, conceived of as an organism in itself (Guha 211). J. Arthur Thomson, writing with Margaret Thomson, also recognized the interdependence of life, noting that ‘every living thing has its own proper place and influence, and that no life, whether of man, or beast, or plant, can be lived unto itself alone, and none, however, lowly, can be destroyed without affecting many others’ (2). An integrated and complexly entangled nature-culture, the living world could not be conceived of as a pristine world apart from humanity, but a mutually influencing environment of active participants. In 1920, James Ritchie’s The Influence of Man on Animal Life in Scotland was published, having been developed from a course of lectures given in Aberdeen in 1917, the year Shepherd graduated. At over 500 pages, it is a vast tome dedicated to unravelling the ‘chains of circumstance’ – the processes of species growth, decline and destruction influenced by humanity – that produced contemporary Scottish ecosystems. Smout notes its rareness, observing that it was written thirty years ahead of its time, and ‘had no immediate imitators on either side of the border’ (33). In his opening address, Ritchie dismisses the ‘balance of nature’ hypothesis, instead revealing the ‘instability’, ‘changefulness’, ‘plasticity’ and ‘uneasy restlessness’ of life. Against a backdrop of slow and ceaseless natural change, he sets out to ‘trace the different ways in which Man’s power has worked and is working, and to realize to what degree a fauna of today owes it character and composition to his interference’. Because humanity’s changes are often swift and purposeful, Ritchie argues, they tend to obscure the operation of slower natural processes and give the false impression that humanity and nature are separate spheres (Ritchie v–vii). Unravelling this error, his book addresses the immediate and accretive, deliberate and indirect consequences of humanity’s presence in the hills. Adopting an approach that foreshadows modern environmental history, Ritchie charts the heritage of humanity’s domestication of indigenous fauna and

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introduction of new species and the history of interference with habitats such as woodland and moor. He also considers the wilful destruction of creatures for skins, oil, sport and self-protection, including the extermination of the wolf and wild cat, and the war on the Golden Eagle. This long view implicates humanity absolutely in the creation of modern Scottish nature, exploding any romantic notion of the Highlands as an untouched wilderness. Alterations which served a purpose in short-term and local contexts are revealed to have had unimagined and unimaginable consequences. Natural biographies which chart the arrival of ‘camp followers’ and ‘stowaways’ – the insects and vermin who travelled with ships, imported food and timber – attest to the futility of trying to control the movement of species in a global economy and ecosystem. Some of these indirect consequences have come to ‘recoil’ on humanity for the better or worse, with the arrival of flea-ridden rats bringing plague, ague and parasites on the one hand, and the introduction of hive bees fertilizing plants for the benefit of farmers on the other (Ritchie 515). If these examples seem to suggest that a kind of happy medium or balance is reached in the end, they should not. The consequences for humanity have, overall, been for the best, Ritchie argues, but this is more a case of luck than design. What is more, the situation is ever changing, making a final reckoning of gains and losses impossible to determine. While scientists should attempt to adopt a holistic view when they come to interfere in ecosystems, all these manifold entanglements expose the impossibility of ever succeeding to do so. Another key figure in the story of mid-century Scottish ecology is Frank Fraser Darling. His fieldwork, writing, public lectures and policy work were conducted during the era between Shepherd’s first walks in the Cairngorms and the eventual publication of The Living Mountain in the 1970s. These dates also overlap with the transition from a conservationist to an environmentalist discourse, though Fraser Darling’s ecological perspective on human–nature interactivity and man-made harm complicate this neat distinction. In the 1940s and 1950s, current wisdom dictated that humanity and nature inhabited separate spheres. National nature refuges and reserves were held to be the best means to conserve scenic spots and protect useful and beautiful species, for the benefit of ‘sportsmen and scientists’, as Smout suggests (42). Instead, Fraser Darling proposed comprehensive rural planning attentive to humanity’s impact on nature, going so far as to suggest that wildlife conservation should be extended ‘over the whole country, and not only over Parks areas or those additional areas to be scheduled as Nature Reserves’ (Smout 43). Likewise, he challenged the division of the Nature Conservancy council between English and Scottish

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regional offices, noting that ‘wild life does not observe political frontiers’ (Smout 41). In these objections, he came into direct conflict with landowners and the Department of Agriculture for Scotland, whose interests were served by the division of the land into small nature reserves set against large and developed arable areas. In West Highland Survey: An Essay in Human Ecology (1955), Fraser Darling sketched out a full critique of land management practices, exploring ‘the interactions of human behaviour, ideas and practices, . . . the growth and decline of populations and their consequences on the terrain and the present generation of folk’. Fraser Darling warned readers of ‘the bald unpalatable fact’ that ‘the Highlands and Islands are largely a devastated terrain’ and that ‘any policy which ignores this fact cannot hope to achieve rehabilitation’ (Fraser Darling viii). Nineteenth-century land use had caused deforestation, water loss and soil degradation, producing the landscape that scenic conservationists misguidedly believed to be ‘ancient and natural’ (Asherson 222). On this basis, the nature policy he advocated conflicted with both an aesthetic regard to this romanticized and quintessentially Scottish landscape, and traditional approaches which advanced the financial interests of landowners. As Mark Toogood suggests, Fraser Darling advanced a shift in the geographical imagination towards an understanding of a total landscape ‘based on ecology’ (3). He also advised a bold management approach founded on close surveillance of ecological relations and the potential repopulation of the Highlands with farmers who would live by ‘cropping the wild land’, not ‘mining’ it, as had been done previously. Fraser Darling’s views had national and international impact, attracting the attention of influential literary supporters like Naomi Mitchison and finding fellowship with American ecologists, notably Starker Leopold, the son of ground-breaking environmental philosopher Aldo Leopold. In 1969, Fraser Darling gave the influential Reith Lectures on BBC Radio 4. Entitled Wilderness and Plenty, the series addressed the impact of humanity on the environment, the ecological consequences of the industrial revolution, the question of responsibility and the way forward for conservation. The Reith Lectures sparked public and policy interest in Fraser Darling’s work, at the same time as a wider cultural and scientific shift was moving nature debates away from conservation and towards environmental discourse. However, the integrated ecosystems approach of the kind advanced by Fraser Darling wouldn’t be taken up by conservation authorities for many decades, and even in the twenty-first century, organizations are still only beginning ‘to consider whole systems rather than individual elements of the system’ (Scottish Wildlife Trust 4).

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The threatened mountain Geddes, Ritchie and Fraser Darling may have been part of a ‘Scottish tradition that was eclipsed and lost in its day’, but from the 1970s, the need for integrated ecological thinking was becoming all too apparent (Smout 47). During these years, Barbara Ward published her classic works on sustainability and development Spaceship Earth (1966) and Only One Earth (1971); Rachel Carson released her anti-pesticides opus, Silent Spring (1962); and the Club of Rome met to address the accelerated globalized, techno-capitalist industries which had creating interconnected social and biological crises, but failed ‘to conceive the ethos, morality, ideals, institutions, and policies requisite to an inter-dependent world’ (Club of Rome 5). Shepherd’s life and writing spanned the transition between conservationist, preservationist attitudes to nature and modern environmentalism. Accidents like oil spills and the catastrophe of species and wilderness decline began to permeate political and public consciousness, leading to an acceleration of environmental legislation in the United Kingdom and the United States, and to international efforts to name, explore and address the problems. International charities including the World Wildlife Fund (1961), Friends of the Earth (1969) and Greenpeace (1971) were founded, while activist groups like Sea Shepherd (1977) and Earth First! (1980) brought the tactics of direct action to environmental advocacy. While before environmentalist, nature-advocacy had focused on the emotional, moral, even spiritual dimensions of protecting areas of outstanding natural beauty, modern environmentalism was more concerned with intersecting human and cultural issues and connecting local destruction to more systemic global crises. The late 1970s were therefore a timely era for the publication of The Living Mountain. Shepherd, according to her own account, read the book again in the 1970s and realized that ‘the tale of my traffic with a mountain is as valid today as it was then’ (LM xliii). The ‘Foreword’ carefully reframes the original manuscript, suggesting how that meets the drastically changed circumstances facing the mountain. It opens with a list of the changes – some dramatic, some minor – which have taken place in the last thirty years: Aviemore erupts and goes on erupting. Bulldozers birse their way into the hill. Roads are made, and re-made, where there were never roads before. Skiers, swift, elate, controlled, miracles of grace and precision, swoop and soar – or flounder – but all with exhilaration.

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All of the changes mentioned are deeply implicated in the struggle between growth and preservation, economy and ecology, and private and public good which dominated conservation and subsequent environmental discourse in the Highlands since the early nineteenth century. The Cairngorms emerge as a contested region, whose meaning, uses and ecology were then being continually altered and redefined by the people living, holidaying and profiting there. For example, Shepherd references the controversy caused by the intensification of tourism in Aviemore, road developments in the lower valleys and the opening of a ski resort and cafe in the northern corries of Cairn Gorm in 1961 (‘End of the Trudge up Cairn Gorm’). As The Living Mountain was first published in a small print run by Aberdeen University Press, this ‘Foreword’ was clearly written in mind of a readership who knew the Cairngorms and their current struggles fairly well. But merely mentioning these things does not make The Living Mountain an ‘environmentalist’ text. An obvious argument against Shepherd as environmentalist is the limited comment she makes on these changes – where is the anger, the attribution of guilt and the unravelling of the ‘chain of circumstances’ leading to disaster, to borrow Ritchie’s term? It is true that Shepherd does not accuse modern societies of destroying species, ecosystems and ways of life. What the passage offers instead is a rather ambivalent commentary on the pace of change. Skiing is graceful, as much as it is dangerous and disruptive, and intensified access for hikers produces joy, but also scrappy heath. Nonetheless, the term birse – a Scots word translated as kiss, bristle, bruise, press or anger – is laden with value and critique. So too is the reflection on roads coming, ‘where there were never roads before.’ These lines express concern about the intensification of activity and change on a geological edifice which, according to the then common-sense laws of nature, humanity should stand no chance of altering or damaging. Perhaps we should not read the ambivalence of this section as wavering, but born of a desire not to erase human presence from the mountain altogether. She notes how ‘[e]cologists investigate growth patterns and problems of erosion, and re-seed denuded slopes’ (LM xlii). At that moment, the Natural Conservancy Council (NCC) were adopting a more stringent policy of nature reservation against development for forestry and tourism (Smout 107). Shepherd undercuts the NCC’s policy with humour, noting how ‘[t]he Nature Conservancy provides safe covert for bird and beast and plant (but discourages vagabonds, of whom

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I have been shamelessly one – a peerer into corners)’ (LM xlii). While land management policies might try to keep people away from the hills, Shepherd sees people’s desire to involve themselves, to be present, as a good, to be defended as far as possible. Between 1940 and 1980, there was, according to a Scottish National Trust report, ‘an expansion of features associated with urbanisation, agricultural intensification and afforestation, and a consequent reduction of long-established or semi-natural features’ (Mackey et al. 5). In the eastern Highlands, this resulted in a decrease in ‘heather-dominated blanket mire, heather moorland, and broadleaved and mixed woodland’, as overgrazing caused damage to vegetation and soils (Mackey 9). The northern corries of the Cairngorms were developed for a controversial ski resort and funicular, causing disputes between conservationists and developers in the 1960s to the 1980s (Smout 24). In the context of these changes, environmentalists entered the fray, often, but not exclusively, siding with the conservationists. In 1964, the Scottish Wildlife Trust was founded ‘to take all appropriate measures to conserve the fauna, flora, and all objects of natural history in trust throughout Scotland’ (Scottish Wildlife Trust 2). Initially, they bought land to build nature reserves: self-contained silos in scenic areas in which rare and interesting species could find refuge. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds also became a major player in the area, taking over woodland in Abernethy in the 1980s. Complicating the insider/outsider debate between ‘traditional’ Highland populations and wealthy landowners on the one side (supporting growth and private management), and conservationists and legislators on the other (supporting aesthetic preservation and public ownership), environmentalists objected to developments on ecological grounds, prioritizing impacts on bird populations, declining species and plants. In these confrontations, a discord arose between human and environmental interests, which resembled the older profit versus preservation, insider versus outside battles of the past. Late twentieth-century Highland economy was still built on farming, fishing, shooting, tourism and sports, and arguably served the needs of long-term residents who had ‘an obvious interest in developing and diversifying’ industry. The clearances, after all, had ‘not been forgotten and the goal is to increase the population of the Highlands, not to keep it empty’ (VandeSteeg 29). As recently as 2001, Kirsty MacLeod, the leader of the People Too campaign for Highland development and part-owner of the Glen Roy estate near Inverness, accused environmentalists of wanting to keep the place empty: ‘[t]here is a feeling about the RSPB that if the choice is people or birds, then birds would always get the priority’ (Quoted in Maxwell). Kathleen Jamie

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makes a comparable observation, noting how on the Isle of Coll some residents are ‘hostile to the very idea of conservation’ and ‘believe it is somehow antihuman and therefore unacceptable to devote a corner of a faraway field to the endangered corncrakes’ (Jamie 96).

Environmental ethics Insisting that humanity has a place in mountain life is an ecological statement, but it is also an ethical one. To better understand Shepherd’s environmental ethics, we need to consider how her work sits beside contemporary philosophical writing about humanity’s place in nature. This will reveal the qualities and attitudes that she shares with major traditions in environmental ethics, and what is so distinctive about her writing. Environmentalism itself is, of course, a statement of an ethical position, engaging and challenging moral attitudes to the natural world. Environmental ethics, though, explores and defines the obligations and responsibilities people have to more-than-human nature. The rights or wrongs of an action will be determined in different ways depending on how important the environment is held to be, and indeed what the definition of ‘the environment’ is used. Ethical positions can be loosely divided into anthropocentric, biocentric and ecocentric. These positions determine the weight given to different beings, entities or spheres in ethical calculations. Anthropocentrism, of course, centres the human as the absolute and sole holder of moral obligations. Western faith and philosophy have been shaped around the hierarchical structure of a Great Chain of Being, deriving from Plato, which places God and divine entities at the utmost point, and beneath them the heavenly bodies, monarchy, aristocrats, workers, animals, plants and matter. Anthropocentrism has largely defined European theories of power, rights and responsibility until the modern era, from the early modern social contract to the human and civil rights declarations of the late eighteenth and the early twentieth century. As successive waves of protest and hard-fought victory have shown, ethical obligations have been extended from their former narrow definitions to incorporate marginalized and oppressed groups not previously recognized as ethically significant subjects. From human rights designed to protect the interests of white, property-owning men, to women’s rights, civil rights and rights-based movements focused on race, sexuality and disability, rights have been a constantly expanding field of ethical concern.

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At the same time as Shepherd was writing, another author on the other side of the Atlantic was making this same point. In A Sand County Almanac (1948) conservationist and philosopher Aldo Leopold outlined the principles of ‘The Land Ethic’. As rights had, historically, extended from a small group of men to all of the human community, Leopold proposed that the land ethic would do the same for the ecological community: it would ‘simply [enlarge] the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land’ (224–5). This demands a very different understanding of ethics. While rights discourse was traditionally focused on the needs of the individual, the land ethic is more concerned with the entire ecological ‘community’. A deer, a fir tree or a waterway would not hold rights like a human individual, but decisions about what was good and fair would now have to take the entire ecological community into account. A thing is right, Leopold claimed, ‘when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise’ (224–5). What is so radical about Leopold’s ethics is the shift from an individualistic understanding of rights to a collective sense of what it means to act and to live well. Instead of a universe of rights-holding individuals, the community and the ecosystem are things that hold collective, overarching prerogatives. This leads to a radical reappraisal of the moral obligations which bind societies. Ethical considerations must be extended beyond those held to the self, to the family, to the human community and then to the wider community of nature. There are good reasons to compare Shepherd with Leopold. Both were writing in the same era of deepening scientific understanding, trying to apply ideas of ecological interdependence to their thinking about human and morethan-human communities. Both wrote outside of philosophical schools and on the peripheries of academic culture. The Living Mountain and A Sand Country Almanac both explore experiences of walking in a well-known place and contain abundant observations on wildlife, features of the land, weather and seasonal change. The fact that Leopold placed ‘The Land Ethic’ at the conclusion of a longer work of reflective nature writing, modelled on Thoreau’s Walden, implies that an ecological ethics can be derived from first-hand experience and subjective writing of this kind – much as it is in The Living Mountain. Both were reissued in the 1970s, as environmental activists were asking challenging questions about agency and responsibility, and the rights and wrongs of actions. One of these texts is now read as the foundation of the environmental ethics tradition; the other is rarely considered in this light.

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So, what kind of ethical stance does Shepherd take in The Living Mountain? Although she doesn’t outline a strong philosophical stance, as Leopold does, multiple shifting perspectives and an ever-expanding, alternating sense of concern, emotion and ethical attachment see Shepherd weighing up a variety of needs and costs. Such care and concern move beyond individualistic representations of a universe of objects in which ‘moral issues might be understood as competing and mutually contradictory clashes of “rights” of separate individuals’ (Callicott 22). What is found in the Cairngorms is a community that experiences conflict, but is nonetheless interdependent: a realization that makes eco, social or individualized ethical pronouncements difficult to make. When Shepherd lists changes to the mountain in her author’s introduction, she does not avoid passing comment altogether, but folds critique and alternative perspectives in through a careful handling of language, moving through multiple, changing affective and embodied states. The passage registers activities of different intensities and the operation of forces pulling, pushing, drilling and grinding the mountain into shape. Aviemore erupts – not literally but as a tourist centre at the heart of a winter sports economy. Bulldozers drill deeper into soil and rock. Roads ferry cars and tourists higher into the hills. Skiers swoop downwards, ‘miracles of grace’ (LM xli). Human activity cuts across and into the mountain, wearing the surface down and adding new and artificial layers quite different from the geologically slow accumulation of soil and rock. These are things that ‘concern man’, as Shepherd states, and it might seem that the mountain provides the stage for human activity alone, as well as the inert and malleable materials with which new constructions are built. Certainly, the two ascendant movements – the swoop and soar of skiers and the uplift of walkers’ hearts – both concern the swell of human emotion and the uplifting experience of hillwalking. The fall, too, describes a human tragedy. Still, elation and grace seem to be privileged over disturbance to wildlife, flora and topsoil. Swifts are described as ‘miracles of grace’ in the original 1940s manuscript (LM 61), linking sporting humanity to a more-than-human denizen of the hills. All in all, it could be read as an outline of an anthropocentric ethics, in which human desires for transcendent experience and economic development outweigh other costs. However, concern for the non-human and wider ecology is carefully seeded in. Physical impact and the operation of forces on flora, fauna and rock are also described through affective and physical language. ‘Scrape’ and birse imply injury to the ‘skin’ of the hill. Damage to the mountain is recorded through this gently anthropomorphizing word choice, which foregrounds the physicality and presence of the mountain and describes the harm as if it has been done to a

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living body – which is ultimately how Shepherd comes to write the mountain. This anthropomorphic language premeditates the shift from human activity to the mountain’s life. Behind human activities, she writes, ‘is the mountain itself, its substance, its strength, its structure, its weathers. It is fundamental to all that man does to it or on it. If it were not there he would not have done these things’ (LM xliii). The mountain creates the possibility for human activity, experience and history, demanding moral attention as a holistic entity encompassing both the seemingly separate eco and social ‘spheres’. Humanity is nested in ecology, and ecology is complexly influenced by humanity, for better and worse. However, the rights and wrongs of changes to the mountain are not easy to determine. ‘Right’ and ‘wrong’ mean different things depending on which perspective one is looking from, while assessment of influence is complicated by consideration of the multiple temporalities on which change is registered in the mountain: the immediate, the generational, the ancestral and the geological. A major criticism of Leopold’s Land Ethic is his value-laden assumptions about natural harmony and balance. Ecological systems may reach constant states, but they are by no means harmonious: disruption and destruction come from natural agencies, as well as human. Shepherd’s writing, by contrast, takes account of multiple perspectives. She attributes responsibility for harm and unravels the chain of influence when needed, but also acknowledges that ecological states are not static, and what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ for an ecological community can be difficult to determine. In the same vein as Ritchie and Fraser Darling, she reflects on how Man’s touch is on the beast creation too. He has driven the snow bunting from its nesting-sites, banished the capercailzie and re-introduced it from abroad. He has protected the red grouse and all but destroyed the peregrine. (LM 80)

The excerpt begins with a critique of environmental management at the hands of both conservationists and gamekeepers. A lack of oversight and connected ecological thinking has manufactured species decline, leading to arbitrary meddling with little concern for how the web of life might be damaged by individualized species protection or destruction. Although Shepherd refers to ‘Man’ and uses the masculine singular pronoun, the passage gives the sense of a multitude of uncoordinated and ill-equipped human agencies, prioritizing individualized entities over one another in an effort at control which is doomed to failure. To take one example, when Shepherd was writing, peregrine falcons were nearing extinction in Scotland through persecution by

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grouse-moor gamekeepers. Between 1940 and 1970, the use of organochlorine pesticides exacerbated their decline by negatively affecting fertility (Tingay and Wightman). From 1946, volunteers began monitoring peregrine nesting sites, and in 1954 they were fully protected by the Protection of Birds Act. However, recent population surveys show that though numbers are on the rise, recovery from pesticide poisoning is still being hampered by ongoing illegal persecution (McGrady 10). In 2018, for example, data from electronic tracking devices suggest that two newly released Golden Eagles have gone missing on Scottish grouse moors, most likely at the hands of gamekeepers bent on protecting grouse for shooting estates (‘Yet Another Golden Eagle Disappears’). Individualized species protection may have given populations a boost, but interconnected land management approaches – taking into consideration the power of the shooting estate, agro-capitalism, land ownership, local economies and historical prejudices against the birds – are necessary in order to have a meaningful impact on the future of the species, and the socio-ecology of the moors. Perhaps Shepherd’s ecological ethics are closer in tone to ‘multispecies justice’ approaches, which see humanity as ‘participants in a complex dynamic ecopsycho-social system that is subject to certain biophysical limits’. Rather than attempting to predict and control these systems, humanity’s ambition should be to ‘learn how to participate appropriately’ by paying ‘more attention to systemic relationships and interactions’ and aiming ‘to support the resilience and health of the whole system’ (Wahl 2017). On the contrary, Leopold’s approach has been criticized for failing to do this. Estok describes it as ‘philosophically ungrounded and scientifically naïve’ to assume natural systems are beautiful, static or intrinsically good or bad (Estok 209). These are anthropocentric notions which should not be foisted onto nature. The problem of who gets to decide what is ‘good’ for the community also matters. As people will be the ones making these choices, there is little chance that we’ll be able to do so in an unbiased way, or with anything approaching the real depth of understanding of ecological processes to do so well. And what about human needs? Is it right to calculate on behalf of the entire ecological community, if it means that some people will suffer for the good of the whole? There can be a misanthropic strain to such reasoning – as Garrard points out – in spite of disclaimers that ‘vital’ human needs may often take priority over other species’. Sustainability calculation often meets short-term needs at the expense of long-term planning, failing to account for incremental harms and injustices that may be played out over long temporal and geographical scales. The struggles between humanist social justice, individualized species justice and ecological or land ethics can produce an impasse. At this point, multispecies

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justice approaches offer an alternative. Multispecies study is inherently concerned with ‘multiplicity’, the ‘multiplying of perspectives and influences’. The environment is approached not as a passive backdrop for focal species but as a ‘complex ecology of selves’ which has emerged through coeval histories of interrelations that may be ‘linguistic, gestural, biochemical, and more’. In this context, anthropocentrism and ecocentrism are both ‘unjustifiable’ biases: our current situation instead demands ‘detailed practices of attentiveness to the complex ways that we, all of us, become in consequential relationship with others’. How political forms and social changes ‘play out’ in the web of life are ecological and ethical concerns, while the needs and interests of multiple morethan-human agencies are respected within an ethics that is both relational and responsive to others’ existence and experience (Van Dooren et al.). Decisions and changes need to be made, and multispecies ethics does not shy away from conflict and competing demands with lyrical ecological relativism: what it cultures is an understanding of other modes of living, with repercussions on our ways of being in the world and our practices of ‘living with’ (Haraway 2008: 19). The one section of The Living Mountain in which Shepherd is most critical of environmental management, and most ‘multispecies’ in her approach, is her discussion of the cultivation of red deer. ‘[T]hough the economy of the shooting estate is one for which I have little sympathy, I am aware that a turn of the wrist does not end it,’ she writes (LM 80). Although she is critical of its environmental impact, she is also aware that these patterns of life have become integral to the living tapestry of the mountain and the livelihoods of workers who keep the hill crofts alive. An economic problem is also an ecological and a human one, affecting social and multispecies justice alike. The furthest extremes of anthropocentric or ecocentric ethics are of no value: prioritizing humanity in the short term would damage humanity in the long term, and the same is true of more-than-human nature. The fact that humanity and nature are not homogenous categories also adds complexity. Should animals or plants take precedence, and in either case which animals and which plants? The question of determining what is good for the ‘beauty and integrity of the whole’ is also dumbfounding. The ‘whole’ is not beautiful and has not evolved towards stability and integrity. The land has been produced through political and cultural processes in the context of power, and the lives of its inhabitants have been shaped by long histories of coevolution and co-becoming. Ending the red deer economy would not return the land to a state of former harmony but produce a new set of circumstances needing to be observed and negotiated afresh. Shepherd’s characteristic epistemological uncertainty shapes her thinking. This might be seen as producing a valueless impasse. Certainly, the paragraph

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ends with no clear resolution, just an admission of an ethical attitude towards the entanglement of culture, nature, economy, history, human and animal lives. The endless unpicking of ecological threads might make it impossible ever to affect change, even for presumed environmental benefits. If the unpredicted consequences of actions must always act as a check on action, how can disturbance ever be remedied? A more overtly environmental text – to use Macfarlane’s term – might have made a bolder statement against the ecological devastating industry. However, Shepherd’s uncertainty sets out an alternative mode of engaging with ecological issues. She does not mention rights – either of the human, the animal or the land – or the impetus for growth. In this way, she avoids clashing the interests of various individual ‘stakeholders’ against one another. She also avoids the crudities of economic calculations as the final word on deciding whether an action is for the best or not. Rather than assuming a total ecological knowledge that is impossible, her careful weighing of needs and observation of interrelations embodies the ecological ethics of multispecies studies, what Despret and Meuret describe as an ‘experimental cosmoecology’: learning to hold possibilities open, learning attentiveness to the infinite ways of being affected and of affecting, where no one may know ahead of time the affects one is capable of or the kinds of forces and entities that will constitute landscapes and worlds with us. (35)

An ongoing practice and experiment in change-making, it engages thought and action, listening and response in a long-term, dynamic and open-ended process of co-becoming. The Living Mountain charts a process of ‘learning to hold possibilities open’. This includes adopting an ethical attitude towards its more-than-human inhabitants, and to the people who make their lives there. This does not mean that Shepherd believes ecology to be stable, healthy, unchanging and without conflict. Without ever becoming a struggle for survival of the fittest, Shepherd writes the mountain as a community based on an understanding of community as conflict. Ecology is ‘a radical intimacy, coexistence with other beings, sentient and otherwise’, as Morton puts it, but coexistence also means things are brought into close quarters, often producing unexpected entanglements, interests and strife (Morton 2010: 8). In The Living Mountain, some entanglements are brought to light, while unknown others are imagined and given shadowy recognition. Part of the story is made visible, while other elements and affects operate out of view, scuppering any human bid for control while demanding that

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the consequences of actions are given careful, if always provisional, thought. The act of listening, paying attention, proposing actions and responding to outcomes that Shepherd suggests is by nature environmentalist, though it moves beyond the simple dichotomies of nature and humanity, local and outsider, traditional and modern which have long shaped and distorted the history of inhabitation and coexistence in the Highlands. Shepherd may not fit the mould of an environmentalist writer. But she is an ecological writer, and it is gratifying to see how her literary revival is becoming entangled with new management approaches in the Cairngorms range. The national park has long suffered from its lack of integrated ecological vision: divided by conservation trusts and shooting estates, royal landlords and the forestry industry, the kind of holistic vision imagined by Fraser Darling has been impossible to achieve. Launched in 2020, the Cairngorms Connect project is seeking to address this by uniting neighbouring land managers across the national park ‘committed to a bold and ambitious 200-year vision to enhance habitats, species and ecological processes across a vast area’ (Cairngorms Connect). Projects involve the restoration of diverted water courses, the opening up of natural flood plains, restoration of native woodlands, thinning pine plantations and the critical work of controlling populations of red deer. It is, indeed, a bold vision, incorporating both the multiplicity of perspective that has been shown to be such a vital component of justice and the long-time scales necessary to conceive of the way that complex ecosystems change over time. It would be fanciful to suppose that Shepherd’s writing has anything to do with these changes. However, as many Cairngorms National Park conservancies commit to rewilding and reversing damaging land-use practices, Shepherd’s understanding of the ‘total mountain’ as a connected ecology – fragile, complex and vividly alive – is being seized as a way of underpinning environmental messaging. If you take the ‘long walk in’ to the mountains from the Mar Lodge estate, managed by the National Trust, you might spot a series of information boards explaining how regenerative forestry is restoring ancient woodland to its pre-deer stalking glory and making the site climate change resilient. One board boasts a quote from Aldo Leopold; another, a line from Shepherd. ‘When the aromatic savour of the pine goes searching into the deepest recesses of my lungs, I know it is life that is entering’ (LM 52), the line on the board states. It is a sign that there is a place for ecological writers, as well as environmentalist writers, in this moment of crisis and, hopefully, regeneration.

4

Deep time

When Nan Shepherd wrote The Living Mountain, she was poised between two moments in earth and human history. Educated in geology and earth sciences in the 1910s, her geological imagination was shaped by the scientific discoveries of the long nineteenth century. The deep age of the earth and the forces that had shaped mountains, carved valleys and bought living species into being were in evidence all around in the granite mass of the Cairngorms. But she was also writing on the cusp of a new age: one in which human activity would leave its own traces on this seemingly eternal landscape. Writing in the 1940s, and reflecting on the mountains again in the 1970s, she witnessed first-hand the coming of industries that would permanently alter the geology and ecology of the hills and, behind the scenes, begin to subtly disrupt wider global natural systems, from the hydrological to the carbon cycle. This period is now defined as the Great Acceleration and dated to around 1950, when industrial activity, intensive farming and plastics production escalated in previously unimaginable ways. How Shepherd made sense of these changes – and made them sensible in her literature – is a vital context for reading and understanding The Living Mountain. It may also be instructive for us in this moment of Anthropocene awakening. As human activity is being registered as a decisive global agency, altering earth’s geology, atmosphere and ecology in long-lasting ways, how might we read The Living Mountain: as a rejection of nineteenth-century geological pessimism, as feminist geopoetics, or as a cautionary tale for the Anthropocene? Exploring each of these possibilities, this chapter reveals Shepherd’s intellectual and literary influences in the work of nineteenth-century geological pessimists, including the Scottish poet James Thompson, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Thomas Hardy. These writers reflected, often with an extreme sense of doubt and despair, on the social and existential implications of geology: the mindbogglingly expanded temporal horizons revealed through investigation of rock strata, the natural processes operating on landforms, the discovery of fossils and

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the bones of dinosaurs. An inevitable inheritor of these traditions, Shepherd also wrote against them. The epic tropes associated with geological writing, and the apocalypticism and despair of much late Victorian poetry, are notably absent from her work, although they are often parodied in striking and iconoclastic ways. If not in a despairing register, how did Shepherd make sense of the earth’s age and processes of deep temporality? Shepherd’s distinctive contribution to geologic literature seems to be her cultivation of a ‘deep time’ sensibility, characterized by a feeling of wonder and openness, and an expanded sense of interconnection and kinship with the living world. In the second part of this chapter, I explore the importance of these modes of engagement with the geologic, and debate Shepherd’s identity as a feminist ‘geopoet’ and reader of deep time. Finally, in our current Anthropocene epoch, as humans have become agents of change on a planetary scale, deep time consciousness has re-emerged as a rallying cry for a new cultural approach to living on and with the planet. The task of writers and artists concerned with the future may now be to situate humanity ‘within the geologic as a condition of our present time’ (Ellsworth and Kruse 9, emphasis in original). In the final part of this chapter, I’ll explore how Shepherd does just that by observing one landscape over the course of a lifetime, and revealing the many layers of personal, industrial, ancestral, vegetal and deep time that accrue there. Adopting an Anthropocene reading strategy, as suggested by the ecocritic Timothy Clark, helps bring these multiple scales into simultaneous presence. It also reveals the timeliness of Shepherd’s writing on the integrity and changeability of mountains, and its value in our own moment. The Living Mountain, I suggest, provides an example of literature that is not so much predictive of the future but has been unwittingly written for it.

The forms of modern geology By the time Shepherd came to write The Living Mountain, the earth’s long history was well established among scientific and non-scientific communities. Scottish geologists including James Hutton, John Playfair and Charles Lyell had been at the forefront of discoveries for just over a century, with many of the major discoveries of modern geology tied to sites in Scotland. These discoveries had a considerable impact on the literature Shepherd was reading, and also on her studies. During her MA at the University of Aberdeen, she undertook

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modules in both theoretical geology and practical geology, gained experience of fieldwork and formed friendships with geologists and botanists working in the Cairngorms (Sabiston). As such, her eye was that of a literary scholar and a geologist, both of which prepared her to write a hybridized geological lyric memoir of the hills. What did Shepherd’s studies at Aberdeen teach her? A standard theoretical introduction to the field would cover the major achievements of the ‘Golden Age of Geology’, starting with the discoveries of Scottish geologist, James Hutton (1726–97). When Hutton began working, a biblical calendar was still widely accepted. In Christian cosmology, the earth’s creation was dated to around 6,000 years ago, but Hutton’s The Theory of the Earth (1788 and 1795) laid out a paradigm-shifting account of earth age and of the cataclysmic events that brought about the creation and destruction of the stony world. Landmass and mountains were not created in biblical moments, but they came into existence over unimaginable aeons, driven by the heat processes of the earth’s core. Destructive processes were at work too, and also subject to the same time laws. Observing evidence of the movement of matter from mountain to soil, and land to sea, Hutton concluded that matter is constantly in motion and that the earth had formed through ongoing processes of deconstruction and reconstruction: our fertile plains are formed from the ruins of the mountains; and those travelling materials are still pursued by the moving water, and propelled along the inclined surface of the earth. . . . [B]y the agitation of the winds, the tides and currents, every moveable thing is carried farther and farther along the shelving bottom of the sea, towards the unfathomable regions of the ocean. (Hutton 215)

Hutton’s vision of the earth was, in many ways, deeply pessimistic. Material that once made mountains would end, eventually, on the depths of the ocean floor. From the pinnacles of the peaks to the uncharted depths of the ocean, all of life and human and natural history seemed to be sliding, inevitably, into watery obscurity. However, Hutton also observed a counter motion – a kind of marine reclamation. Observing fossils and rock strata in mountains and cliffs, he realized that much of the dry land of earth was once beneath the seabed. ‘We find the marks of marine animals in the most solid parts of the earth, consequently, those solid parts have been formed after the ocean was inhabited by those animals, which are proper to that fluid medium,’ he wrote (Hutton 219). The sea had become land, and the land would become sea in turn.

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Although his writing was essentially Christian in world view, Hutton’s theories contradicted previously held beliefs, derived from Genesis, that the earth’s geological features were formed in the catastrophic biblical deluge. Despite this, he acknowledged the role of divine wisdom in the design of the earth, writing of man as ‘possessor of this world’ and conforming to the norms of Enlightenment science in describing the earth as part of a mechanical universe adapted for divine ends (Hutton 214). His rejection of a crude mechanical account of earth history was coupled with a proto-ecological vision of earth interconnectedness. Indeed, as Gairn notes, Hutton’s work influenced James Lovelock; in Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, the earth is envisaged as an interconnected superorganism, in which rocks are in intra-active unity with air, oceans and all of animal, plant and bacterial life. It was Hutton, Lovelock asserts, who first suggested this interactivity within Western science: ‘I consider the earth to be a superorganism, and its proper study is by physiology’, as Hutton is quoted in Lovelock (Lovelock xvii). When scholars like Macfarlane describe Shepherd as cannily prescient of Lovelock, in her ecological understanding of interconnectedness, it is worth remembering that this vision was as influenced by an understanding of geology as evolutionary science (Macfarlane 2011: xxv). As well as establishing the foundation for interconnected thinking about mineral earth and its living inhabitants, Hutton also recognized the importance of cataclysmic events in earth’s history. In what is now named Hutton’s Section, a rock face at the base of Salisbury Crags in Edinburgh, Hutton saw the evidence of igneous spreads that had once been magma cutting through layers of sedimentary rocks. From them, he realized that the dolerite sill that forms the crags had pushed through the sedimentary stone around twenty-five million years after the volcano of Arthur’s Seat had become inactive. Instead of a slow and predictable accretion of materials since the Deluge, the landscape had been, and continued to be, produced by material flows that created stark ‘unconformities’ in the geological record. One epoch lay against one another, but in these unconformities, he saw the evidence of vast periods of unaccounted-for geological time. Another Scottish intellectual, Charles Lyell, would have formed the basis of Shepherd’s introductory curriculum. Lyell is famous for establishing the philosophy of earth studies in his Principles of Geology (1830–3). Synthesizing knowledge from natural sciences, engineering and mineral surveys, the Principles attempted to raise the study of geology to the status of a science. By determining fixed underlying principles and methodologies, Lyell hoped he could put a restraint on the kinds of wild speculation common in the new discipline (Secord

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xvi; Lyell 8). To do so, he drew attention to the physical laws of nature acting over time, which produced the physical world. Mountains and valleys were not formed in moments of divine retribution, like the Bible stories suggested, but only through the infinitesimally slow process, or sudden events, like volcanoes or tsunamis, which the geologist was able to witness in the world. Already, Hutton had made the shocking pronouncement that ‘We find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end’ in the records of the earth. By Lyell’s reasoning, the age of the earth ricocheted even further backwards by millions of years, with any point of origin likely impossible to determine (Secord xvii; Lyell 437). In the mid-nineteenth century, evolutionary science stepped forward with its own deep time hypothesis. Charles Darwin read Principles of Geology as he voyaged on the Beagle and later wrote that ‘[t]he great merit of the Principles was that it altered the whole tone of one’s mind, and therefore that, when seeing a thing never seen by Lyell, one yet saw it partially through his eyes’ (Darwin 1987: 55). What was seen was the slow operation of forces that could shape mountains and transform species. The geologist, as reader of the land, would be thereafter equipped to make sense of these presences, and to read the land through observation and reasoning. What made Lyell so distinctive, in this respect, was his emphasis on fieldwork and hands-on examination over abstract theorizing. The immensity of the past could only be truly grasped by the geologist working in the field: a tactile, empirical approach to reading landscapes that would later be developed in striking ways by Shepherd. Geologists of the ‘golden age’ had high hopes for the new discipline to become a comprehensive science, offering a total history of the creation of the earth. However, the millions of years of earth history opened up by their investigations could not easily be distinguished and organized. The fossil record proved to be damaged and incomplete, while the evidence of the rocks is fraught with ambiguity. As Jim Secord states, ‘Where most geologists dreamed of filling the lost page in the book of life, Lyell believed that they should work under the assumption that almost the entire volumen have been destroyed’ (Secord xvii). Faced with geologic uncertainty, Lyell and those who came after him were forced to adopt synchronic, rather than diachronic, modes: ‘describing in detail geological worlds at particular points [synchronically], rather than speculating on the development of these worlds through time [diachronically].’ The ‘allencompassing view’ of earth history remained the ‘powerful epic promise’ of geological science and an underpinning ambition of its grandiose cosmology (Buckland 101–2, emphasis in original). However, the geologic witness had to remain content with synchronic fragments.

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Geology as structuring principle When Shepherd came to write The Living Mountain, this epic promise had moved on a pace. While she was studying at Aberdeen, the geologist Arthur Holmes sought to better establish the age of the earth through radiography, an advance on older methods of reckoning based on counting sediment layers (Holmes). It was also during this era that geologists began to understand plate tectonics and the continental drift, revealing the deep-historical oneness of distant landmasses and exposing the dynamic, shifting, reforming and processual nature of life on earth. Numerous geological surveys were conducted and published in Scotland, sharing knowledge of the long and ‘complex process of mountain building’ with non-specialist readers (Machair v). These books also proposed new ways of looking at familiar landscapes and approaching the act of looking itself. The geological witness was urged to take a step back, to read the track-marks of the deep past on a seemingly stable landscape and then to project themselves into distant futures to imagine how infinitesimally slow forces might operate on the physical world over aeons. All in all, the first decades of the twentieth century were a lively time to be looking at the shape of the land in Scotland. The first clue that Shepherd is looking at the mountain as a geological entity comes right at the outset, in the book’s title. If the geological imagination involves becoming witness to the earth as a mobile being in an ongoing, unceasing process of becoming, how better to communicate this than with the title, The Living Mountain? In three words, Shepherd undercuts commonplace assumptions about the mountain range. Its compositional matter, stone, is assumed to be cold, dead, inorganic, static, primeval. It is no huge imaginative leap to accept that it is shaped and changed by the creatures, life forms and forces that operate upon it. What Shepherd suggests in her title is going a step further and naming the mountain as a geological agency, which is as interactive with those lives as it is subject to the forces they exert on its many faces. Geological awareness is also registered in The Living Mountain at the level of structure. Macfarlane has written of how the book structurally embodies ecological principles by interweaving writing on different forms of life and modes of experience. I would go one step further, to suggest that The Living Mountain also embodied geological principles. Its eventful publication history, and the manner in which Shepherd reflects on it in her introduction, ensures that temporal disorder is built in from the outset. It is well known that thirty years passed between the writing of The Living Mountain and its publication. In her 1977 author’s introduction, she describes the rediscovery of the thirty-

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year-old manuscript in her desk drawer, a moment that has since become a core component of the text’s mythology. It has a distinctly Proustian quality and, indeed, echoes the opening volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, where an aged Marcel recovers the tang and savour of youth through the sensory sorcery of madeleine dipped in tea. Similarly, Shepherd’s memories of the Cairngorms return, with all the clarity, freshness and vitality of the original experiences, when the manuscript emerges, ‘as valid today as it was then’ (LM xliii). She offers no explanation of what has happened in the interim in her own life: all the text reveals is two moments in a human life, the former seemingly frozen in time. Reading it now can feel a lot like opening a time capsule, or revealing a prehistoric creature caught frozen in amber: a moment of its life, revealed in vivid clarity in ours. As the book continues, distinct moments in time press against one another, as Shepherd moves backward and forward through time. Events and observations which took place over a period of around fifty years, from her first climbs in the 1920s to the book’s final publication, are brought up as and when they seem fit, according to the theme of the chapter, with little regard for an organizing chronology. This non-linearity amounts to a kind of unconformity, comparable to the spontaneous recoveries of memory that delighted Proust, and indeed to the geological record in places like Salisbury crags, where unconformity disturbs the depositional order of rock strata. The buried past is thrust up, cutting through the layers of the present and jostling the ancient and the recent against one another. This impression of disorganized rock strata and of a geological temporality which refuses to reveal its secrets, only thickens as the book continues. At the opening of the 1940s text, Shepherd describes her work as a journey into the mountain’s life, and her own. The organization of chapters gives a general sense of the journey’s direction. Moving from ‘The Plateau’ to ‘The Recesses’, Shepherd takes in ‘The Group’ (the whole Cairngorm massif) before focusing attention on ‘Water’, ‘Frost and Snow’, ‘Air and Light’, ‘Life: The Plants’, ‘Life: Birds, Animals, Insects’, ‘Life: Man’, ‘Sleep’, ‘The Senses’, and ending with the mystical and suggestive chapter, ‘Being’. It does not mimic the typical mountaineering narrative of ascent, conquest and descent and observes no chronology, despite being ostensibly a memoir. In fact, the shape of a human life is only loosely layered over the manuscript. References to the date or Shepherd’s age at the time of each incident described are sparing. For example, in the first chapter, ‘The Plateau’, Shepherd discusses her childish ambitions to climb the Cairngorms and hints at the lapse in time that stopped her reaching them for many years. In the closing chapter, she recalls the excitement of her first climb, while also

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remarking on how her age and a loss of independence at the time of writing have opened up new ways of being in the hills. The Living Mountain therefore ends with a layering of time: present, past and future overlap. Beyond these markers, it is impossible to place experiences in time, or even to determine the route or timescale of most walks outlined in The Living Mountain. The problem of time is further confounded by a look at Shepherd’s poetry. Many of the incidents and encounters described in The Living Mountain already appear, often nearly word for word, In the Cairngorms. The poem ‘Loch Avon’ describes the experience of looking into the depths of the water; ‘Above Loch Avon’ reflects on walking in hideously engulfing mist; and ‘Singing Burn’ of pushing her finger into the bubbling stream of water coming from a rock. All of these experiences neatly match specific instances in The Living Mountain. Shepherd does little to disentangle experiences in time, or to distinguish them from their poetic counterparts, authored some ten years earlier. A cynical reader might conclude that Shepherd is simply recycling material (a creative process that is in itself potentially ecological). Something more interesting is, however, taking place. Events and anecdotes unfold in a way that confounds any promise of diachronic vision, the comprehensive, overarching view of time’s successive impacts on the land, which was the unrealized promise of nineteenthcentury geology. Instead, the text can be compared to a rocky beach, where the stony records of different epochs and life forms jostle together. A collective entity and a continuity, these fragments have been rolled together, turned over, broken up and re-encountered afresh. Across distinct works authored a decade apart and formally reorganized from prose to poetry, Shepherd turns over the same fragments, outlining a shape here or a newly revealed colour and texture there. In the process, the operation of memory and the act of authorship mimic geological processes: details are lost, epochs are unrecovered. What remains are the strongest, most striking traces of the past: a mountain landscape, smoothed and cleaved by glaciers, and a memory of a place, which has been shaped by tactile, sensory encounters with the place itself. The Living Mountain’s innovative, non-chronological structure suggests that memory is structured geologically. It also brings the deep past and the fleeting present into vivid textual and imaginative presence. Without anthropomorphizing geological processes, or reducing them to a metaphor for the human unconscious, Shepherd brings the geological dynamism of the mountain to the forefront of her text. Like the extreme weather that is a part of its ‘essential nature’, the deep and disjunctive temporal scales one lives with on the mountain must be grasped as a part of its life, and its living reality.

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Multiple scales of time are tangible and visible. The chapter ‘Life: Man’, for example, overlays human and natural history in the Cairngorms. The moors and glens have been marked and rubbed as a palimpsest with records of journeys, inhabitation and notable occurrences, which are visible in paths and cuttings, the ruins of homes and in place names. Historical traces of human inhabitation are then placed in the context of a gaping deep time. The Thieves’ Road, she notes, ‘runs south from Nethy through prehistoric glacial overflow gaps’ (LM 77). These multiple temporalities telescope and move in and out of focus, as Shepherd is brought into physical and imaginative encounters with multiple and overlapping moments in time. At The Living Mountain’s close, Shepherd comes to apprehend ‘the total mountain’ as a superorganism formed between ‘the fire of the rock and the fire of the sun’ (LM 105). Presence in the mountain makes her a participant in its life and tentative witness to its modes of becoming. But what does it really mean to live with deep time? How did her literature of geological witness differ from what had gone before, and to what end? James Hutton’s collaborator, John Playfair, was among the first to put the disturbing experience of witnessing deep time into words. In an 1805 report, he reflects on how ‘the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time’ (Playfair). Physical and affective states of vulnerability produced imaginative overload, astonishment and a closing down of awareness. Similarly, many literary responses to deep time awareness register the experience of falling into a newly torn abyss. Desperate to preserve a precarious sense of stability and security, many writers quaked, rather than thrilled, at the rent in the known universe that gaped open before them. Awareness of geologic time, most obviously, destabilized the anthropocentric universe. No longer was the human, as in the biblical narrative, at the centre of earth’s creation; instead, humanity had emerged over aeons through disinterested processes of evolution, and in the context of more cataclysmic events as far as the earth was concerned. Accordingly, nineteenth-century geologists and writers exhibited doubt, anxiety and guilt in their writing on deep time, as people ‘found their senses of self and their traditional mythologies displaced in relation to, or not conforming to, the notion of deep time’ (Baker and Gordon 163). Artists and writers responded as best they could. Some poets produced new mythologies of selfhood, environment and community embroiled in the Burkean sublime. In his 1816 poem, ‘Mont Blanc’, Percy Bysshe Shelley examines the subjective effects produced by the awe-inspiring geology of mountains, cliff-faces and ravines. Instead of creating existential despair, these

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scenes offered him a canvas to a shore up the heroic individualism of men capable of facing and withstanding Nature’s most overwhelming creations. Vistas of unrecorded time and premonitions of catastrophic futures produce bold aesthetic pleasures and ‘extatic wonder’ (Shelley in Higgins 62). However, pessimistic contemplation of future desolation also creeps in. ‘[D]id a sea / Of fire envelop once this silent snow?’ he asks, as deep time disturbs homeostatic understandings of place and opens space for speculation on earth’s various forms of catastrophic and creative destruction. The world, as David Higgins puts it, ‘is not really “dead” at all, but a world of nonhuman agents’ (Higgins 66). Movement is in everything, and it is recorded with compulsive fascination and horror: ‘from the boundaries of the sky Rolls its perpetual stream; . . . the rocks, drawn down From yon remotest waste, have overthrown The limits of the dead and living world, Never to be reclaimed.’ (Shelley 123)

Responding to this shocking discovery, much Romantic literature and philosophy tends ‘to valorise the autonomous, self-willing subject . . . partly as a response to [the] challenge to anthropocentrism’ thrown up by geological debates concerning catastrophic and slow landscape change, and earth age (Higgins 61). However, many writers bowed under the pressure of the deep time imaginary. Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850), with its cry against nature ‘red in tooth and claw’ and humanity ‘seal’d within the iron hills’ addresses ‘themes of universal decay and the vastness of time’ derived from the work of Lyell and Hutton (Secord xi). As Christian-geologist Hugh Miller wrote of Tennyson and his doubting peers, ‘They see the onward procession of being as if but tipped with life, and nought but inanimate carcasses all behind – dead individuals, dead species, dead genera, dead creations – a universe of death’ (Miller 104). Even by the late nineteenth century, by which time Hutton’s, Lyell’s and Darwin’s ideas had been widely disseminated, geology was still capable of opening up a terrifying chasm and revealing the indifference and otherness of deep time and the material world. In his long poem The City of Dreadful Night (1874–80), the Scottish author James Thomson explored the horrors of deep time in the allegoric hell-scape of the nocturnal city. Geology, for Thomson, revealed an interactive and materially entangled universe, which implicated humanity in the physical world and crushed the mythology of humanity’s exceptionalism. The sedimentation of all life into the foundations for the next cycle, revealed through

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the fossil record, acts as a corrective to Christian beliefs of reincarnation, divine design and the timescale proposed in the biblical narrative: Nothing is of us but the mouldering flesh, Whose elements dissolve and merge afresh In earth, air, water, plants, and other men. We finish thus; and all our wretched race Shall finish with its cycle, and give place To other beings, with their own time-doom Infinite aeons ere our kind began; Infinite aeons after the last man Has joined the mammoth in earth’s tomb and womb. (Thomson XIV, ll.52-60 23)

Hutton’s conclusion that, on looking on geologic features, ‘we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end’, finds tortured expression in Thomson’s abject vision of all life intermingled as a soulless compost (Hutton 304). Thomas Hardy’s novels yoked together contradictory mythologies of temporality: Judeo-Christian time, geologic time and the accelerated speed of modernity. In his first tragicomic novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes (1872), Hardy leaves his protagonist Henry Knight hanging by his fingertips from a perilous sea-cliff, from which position he is able to contemplate his own brief mortality while looking face-to-face with an ancient fossilized sea creature, another victim of earth’s indifferent geological processes. Then, in his final novel, The Well-Beloved (1897), Hardy presented a whimsical love story informed by an interpretation of Mendelian genetics and set against the slow grindings of geologic time. The novel is set on Portland, the south coast peninsula ‘carved by Time out of a single stone’ (Hardy xxii), on whose ‘restless sea-bed’ drowned sailors have ‘rolled each other to oneness’ (Hardy 9). In each novel, the scale of human lives and human temporality is diminished in a compression of time-moments that amounts to geological vertigo.

Shepherd as reader of deep time As a teacher of English and Scottish literature and an avowed admirer of Hardy, Shepherd was well familiar with both Romantic awe and melancholic Victorian narratives of creation and decay. Writing over a half-century later, her former student, Sheila Gill, who studied with Shepherd between 1955 and 1958, still recalled the passion with which Shepherd lectured on Hardy (Gill). Shepherd,

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perhaps evoking Shelley’s glaciers that ‘creep / Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains’, describes water slipping from the rock ‘like an ancient snake’, though the bite is missing from her metaphor. Further insight into her reading and influences can be gleaned from the commonplace books she kept throughout her life. Geological and deep time themes emerge in the snippets of poetry and prose, although her selections conspicuously resist tropes of despair and godlessness. Instead, human history is slotted into an elongated timescale as part of a divine, or otherwise sacred and meaningful, design. For example, her 1907–47 Medley Book opens with an excerpt from the poem ‘Each in His Own Tongue’ (1909) by Unitarian poet and academic, William Herbert Carruth: A fire mist and a planet, A crystal and a cell, A jelly-fish and a saurian, And a cave where the cave-men dwell; Then a sense of law and beauty, A face turned from the clod – Some call it Evolution, And others call it God. (Carruth, quoted in Shepherd 1907–47: 3)

The poem occupies shifting temporalities, moving in short, rhyming lines from the pre-formation of the stars and universe to the evolution or creation of humanity, from the material substance – the humus – of the earth. It encompasses our species’ prehistoric past as hunter-gatherers and looks to the collective origins of life in the ocean, in rocks and minerals and in its cellular, biological building blocks. Interacting with this interlinked, rapid, dizzyingly compressed account of humanity’s evolution are both the abstract qualities of order derived from Plato’s theories of the Forms and the creation narratives common to JudeoChristian and Classical traditions. The scientific or sacred/mythological strands are not contested, and neither are they collapsed. The poem’s playful nonresolution suggests that evolutionary theory can be accommodated by religious thought and that humanity’s coeval creation with such ‘lowly’ life forms as apes and jellies does not lower us, as Thomson feared, but demonstrates a kinship with entities whose development was guided by the same underlying principles of ‘law and beauty’. Whether those principles are underpinned by mathematics and the laws of physics, a divine creator, or both, is not ultimately clear. Either way, the poem lays out the plans for a teleological, purposeful and organized universe, underpinned by conscious, or in-other-ways organized, design.

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It is not at all surprising to find Carruth’s poem among Shepherd’s gleanings. It speaks to her own tendency to sidestep the orthodoxies of organized religion and to gesture to an underlying principle of organization motivating natural processes – the ‘life’ she believes to connect everything. The great revelation is not that humanity has a divine mission or sacred purpose, but simply that we are all ‘part of this force of creation’ and that the ‘miracle’ of life is simply ‘being’. This quote, which comes from her short story ‘The Descent from the Cross’ (Shepherd 1943: 351, 367), is wholly consistent with the secular ontology developed in The Living Mountain, in which humanity is placed within, not alongside, earth’s long history. Shepherd’s interest in placing humanity in earth history offered new possibilities for escaping from narratives of nihilism or conquest. In this respect, she shared sympathies with contemporary writer, Hugh MacDiarmid. With Shepherd, he spear-headed a distinctly Scottish tradition of modernist geologic writing, reflecting on the ways that agency, selfhood and aesthetics were altered in the context of deep time. His 1934 poem ‘On a Raised Beach’ (1934) offers a visionary perspective on humanity’s inhabitation of the earth. Written when MacDiarmid was living on Shetland, its speaker is situated on a beach scattered with the detritus of multiple geological epochs and a lithic vocabulary derived from numerous cultural, religious and scientific traditions. Modernist cultural hybridity is alive on the stony limits of Western Europe, though trying to come to some kind of understanding of their temporal and physical reality proves challenging: I study you glout and gloss, but have No cadrans to adjust you with, and turn again From optik to haptik and like a blind man run My fingers over you, . . . Bringing my aesthesis in vain to bear, An angle-titch to all your corrugations and coigns, . . . I grasp one of them and I have in my grip The beginning and the end of the world

Cosmic and subjective registers clash as the speaker strives to fit subjective and embodied experience within the stony world. At the poem’s close, he issues the pronouncement: ‘We must reconcile ourselves to the stones, / Not the stones to us’ (MacDiarmid 1993a: 428). Overcoming human hubris and accepting vulnerability, contingency and mortality are the necessary conditions of an opening to the geologic, while presence among the stones and activation of the senses is the essential starting point for geologic reconciliation.

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Deep time as ‘opening’ or ‘abyss’? Shepherd’s approach to writing the geologic is comparable to MacDiarmid’s and Carruth’s in many respects. She shares their awareness of humanity’s kinship with wildly various species and life forms, and our entanglement in the geologic as a trace of earth’s long past and a living reality in the present moment. She also shares their fascination with the dizzying compression of eons, matter and life forms in the stones, and – with MacDiarmid – a desire to use the hands as an entry point to deep time: clashing human time against deep temporal scales. What is lacking from her writing is the horror, the sense of existential disturbance and collapse of meaning, associated with much nineteenth-century writing on the geologic. For example, in The Quarry Wood, she describes studying biology with J. A. Thomson through the eyes of Martha. Following on from the discussion of this passage in chapter two, ‘Ecology’, we now see that the window opened onto deep time is just as fascinating to Martha as Thomson’s ecological vision: When he spoke, incredible shapes moved through an unimaginable past; and an unimaginable present surged in on one, humming with a life one had not seen before, nor even suspected. So full the world was and so clamorous! (QW 62)

Awareness of geological and ecological richness does not trigger the existential crises common in the protagonists of Victorian literature but opens up vistas of thrumming with the multiplicity of life. It is a critical, if not cataclysmic, moment in young Martha’s education, as her thrill at the jostling exuberance of life and the record of innumerable epochs do not diminish, but instead expand her horizons. To explore why this is, and what it might mean for a reading of Shepherd orientated towards our present moment, requires a brief detour into the realm of ‘geopoetics’, and a consideration of the difference between deep time as an ‘opening’, or deep time as an abyss. Many writers and theorists have speculated about the disturbing understanding of time opened up by Hutton’s discovery of earth age and the subsequent ontological ruptures it precipitated. ‘Opening’, in fact, has become a key metaphor in contemporary reflections on the cultural and scientific impact of Hutton’s work. The poet Kenneth White describes poetry that engages with the geologic as ‘concerned, fundamentally, with a relationship to the earth and with the opening up of a world’ (quoted in Baker and Gordon 163). To Matt Baker and John Gordan, ‘[i]n the late 18th century, James Hutton’s insights opened new worlds, both geological and cultural’, while Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

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describes how in the intercuts and unconformities he observed, ‘(stone from fire, stone land from sea) [Hutton] discerned the opening of deep time, the earth in slow liveliness’ (Baker and Gordon 163; Cohen 188). The defining features of this narrative are an opening up to deep time less defined by shock, fear, pathos and egoistic crisis, and more with wonder, patience, expanding conceptual horizons, and the acceptance of humanity’s place within vast temporal and material processes of change and decay. The associated practice and theory of ‘geopoetry’ is hugely dependent on this metaphor of an opening as a means of understanding and changing cultural and subjective perceptions of deep time. Geopoetics involves not just the recording of geological phenomenon but a kind of writing and art-making that proposes, and may even affect, a way of living and thinking with the earth as a geological entity that is at once incomprehensibly ancient and disturbingly lively. It is perhaps surprising that the term ‘geopoetry’ originated in the sciences, rather than the arts. It was the mid-century American geologist and plate tectonics expert, Harry Hess, who first coined the term in an article concerning the natural history of ocean basins (599). Hess was struggling to advance a new theory about sea-floor spread but lacked the hard data to prove it. Instead, he tried to engage readers in an act of creative speculation, a ‘geopoetic’ moment of imaginative audacity. The need to bridge the gap between what Hess determined as ‘scientific’ and ‘poetic’ mindsets was, he claimed, necessity for all creative scientists – and certainly figures like Hutton and Darwin – whose momentous discoveries were made possible because of their willingness to experience wonder and confront radical uncertainty. More recently, the poet Don McKay has adopted geopoetics in order to understand the ways in which a scientist who moves beyond the obvious and the already-known ‘enters a mental space beyond ordinary analysis, where conjecture and imaginative play are needed and legitimate’. This, he asserts, is ‘a mental space shared with poets’, which ‘promotes astonishment as part of the acceptable perceptual frame’ and ‘makes it legitimate for the natural historian or scientist to speculate and gawk’ (McKay 47). Combining poetic and scientific ways of approaching and describing the world, geopoetry aims to make deep temporality sensible, without reducing things to ‘quanta of knowledge’. Instead, it expands them, altering the observer’s sense of both the thing seen and themselves in the process: one feels one’s thinking stretch as it takes on remote possibilities. That stretch is, I think, not only epistemological (having to do with knowing) but ontological: it involves wonder at the manifold possibilities of being in general, and these beings in particular. (McKay 48)

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‘Stretching’ describes the transformative experience of meeting the possibility of the geologic. The senses are vital in this encounter, as they assure the existence of the living world. That assurance is something, McKay notes, that is missing in a purely poetic engagement with nature. A scientific/geologic mindset is therefore also vital because it inhibits the tendency, most common in romantic poets, to translate the immediate perception into an emotional condition, which is then admired or fetishized in preference to the original phenomenon – fossil, bird, lichen or landform. For its part, poetry cultivates the astonishment that naturally occurs in the presence of such marvels. (McKay 49)

The thing that sparked the reflection is set aside in favour of the emotional response, echoing the familiar and potentially insurmountable critique in ecocriticism that nature writing embroils us in language and aesthetic concerns rather than bringing us closer to the original phenomenon. However, McKay believes that because poets, especially post-romantic writers, are excessively interested in registering the emotional impact of experience and knowledge, their work can help us ‘cultivate’ and accept the experience of astonishment and an ethics of openness, thus counteracting the tendency in science ‘to reduce objects of contemplation to quanta of knowledge’ (McKay 49). For non-scientists attempting a lived encounter with deep time, a poetic mindset may be essential in order to overcome the often reductive, fact-based understanding presented by science, and to grapple with feelings of vulnerability, minuteness, connectedness and wonder.

Shepherd’s geopoetics Geopoetics offers a useful lens for reading Shepherd’s fiction, and The Living Mountain. Shepherd also writes of humanity’s entanglement in earth processes, where the deep past and the present are in a constant and mutually reconstituting interrelation. ‘Geopoetry’ values the occupation of seemingly opposed perspectival positions (the scientific and the poetic), and likewise The Living Mountain combines close observation with philosophical speculation, lyric passages with local and natural history, and impressions gathered through the senses with those recorded by scientists. Her adoption of a modernist aesthetic register, concerned with the adoption of multiple perspectives, is an experiment with non-anthropocentric ways of writing earth history. At the same

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time, she remains grounded in the sensing body. In this way, Shepherd outlines the principles of an anti-individualist geological imaginary: collaborative, entangled, situated and conscious that the flourishing of one life is supportive of the flourishing of multispecies life. An imaginative encounter, what Shepherd calls a ‘continuous creative act’, is necessary to make the reality of the geologic both tangible and meaningful. Information gleaned from geography books is a ‘pallid simulacrum of the mountain’s reality, which, like every reality that matters ultimately to human beings, is a reality of the mind’ (LM 1). Making something a ‘reality of the mind’ doesn’t mean diminishing the stones to a form we are ready to encounter – that is, reconciling them to an existing world view – but adjusting perception and transforming the self in the process. This discovery decentres anthropocentric time and diminishes her significance in the mountain. Instead of producing terror, deep time opens up a sense of awe and wonder, which the imagination must stretch to accommodate. The ensuing acts of self-transformation she describes undercut the egotistical ambitions of Romantic and individualist selfhood. Overarching ‘diachronic’ modes are eschewed, and instead Shepherd experiments with situated and embodied understandings of the operation of time in the present moment, as it is available to her through the senses and imagination. Sometimes, encounters are charmingly mundane. For example, walking at night brings the body, through the boots, into contact with stony matter: ‘In the darkness one may touch fires from the earth itself. Sparks fly round one’s feet as the nails strike rock, and sometimes, if one disturbs black ooze in passing, there leap in it minute pricks of phosphorescent light’ (LM 46). It is in these chances and minor moments of contact that the liveliness of the earth is experienced as a stunning reality. Deep time may be felt in experiences that are homely, every day and minor. At other points, encounters with deep time are more subtle, and implicit in the book’s structure and forms of narration rather than in specific encounters. Although it observes no discernible chronology, the book is sandwiched by two descriptions of ways of observing a mountain. First, she provides a swift overview of the geological processes which produced the place: The Cairngorm Mountains are a mass of granite thrust up through the schists and gniess that form the lower surrounding hills, planed down by the ice cap, and split, shattered and scooped by frost, glaciers and the strength of running water. (LM 1)

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This is not the first line of the book but is placed after a first paragraph whose sentences are conspicuously terse. By contrast, this introduction to the mountain is composed of one long and sinuous sentence. What it achieves is an impressive compression: aeons of unrecorded time pass as rock collides with rock and then with the elemental forces of water, cold and heat. As a mass of granite thrust up through existing metamorphic rocks, the entire Cairngorm range is an unconformity of sorts, subject to forces so extreme as to split and shatter it. So too is it subject to the more gentle and accretive actions of waring down and scooping. However, the operations of deep time are described with a sense of drama and activity quite distinct from the gradual change over millennia described by Lyell, and different too from the sense of horrific inertia and the diminishment of humanity’s significance in earth history. In Shepherd’s introduction to the mountains, the movements of Cairngorm geology rush up to meet the present moment, a cataclysmic event without apocalyptic undertones or the all-encompassing diachronic mode of epic. Shepherd introduces the mountains – and indeed, structures the book – around the elemental forces that have created them: water, heat and cold, and the succession of lives that have fertilized them through the layering of soil. This introductory description of geology focuses on the history and geological features of a single place, but the book closes on a long passage that compresses a vast array of places and planes in order to describe one synchronic moment of experience: 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, moss, grass, flower and tree, insect, bird and beast, wind, rain and snow – the total mountain. (LM 105)

These two segments book-end The Living Mountain and mark the shift that has occurred in perception through a deepening grasp of the continuity between the past and the landscape of the present. The ‘grinding’ and ‘grumbling’ of the rocks below attest to the slow movement of the earth and the continuity of geological processes within a living world. Coming to such awareness sets the limits of temporal perception off in two directions at once: the singularity of the moment is counterpoised with the abyss of deep time. The internal fires of the earth are of a type with the burning orb of the sun, and between these fires, the life of organisms, elements and chemical elements is co-created. Lying on the grass and stones of the plateau, Shepherd participates in this moment in the mountain’s life. The passage is primarily concerned with the

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present, and though there is no outright acknowledgement that the slowly moving mountain and the waters that flow upon it will outlast her, the human life is inevitably set against the temporal scale of mountain life. This moment and this life – her life – will pass: as she puts it in her introduction, fifty years is a blink of the eye in the life of a mountain. This life is both process and procession, and humanity is a minor player, but this is no cause for egoism. The passage soars with energy and elation through the list of succinctly addressed life forms, abodes and sources of energy. It telescopes out to look at the immediate biotic components of the ecosystem, then the wider cycles of water and air, and finally, planetary, atmospheric and solar energies that connect and constitute the environment, and the human observer too. The word ‘fire’ is mentioned three times, deepening the connection between local and distant energies and processes: the fires of the earth’s core, which made the mountain itself, and the heat and light of the distant sun. It is all achieved in one long, flourishing sentence, which grasps at and encompasses all elements and forms of life at breathless pace. It then comes to rest at the same place from which it launched, with the woman lying on the mountain top, alive to the world and living in deep time.

The limits of astonishment On the other hand, Shepherd is not immune to ecstatic moments. Listening to the roar of nocturnal storms, she describes how ‘Mankind is sated with noise; but up here [. . .] this infinitesimal cross-section of sound from the energies that have been at work for aeons in the universe, exhilarates rather than destroys’ (LM 97). The sublime is inherently exhilarating, but her caution here is telling. The destructive potential of the sublime is neutered and neutralized, producing a thrill without existential dread or risk. That is not to say that Shepherd writes of the mountain as a landscape lacking in danger. She records numerous instances of real physical risk and fatalities in the Cairngorms. Instead, intense sounds and awe-inspiring geological energies are experienced with astonishment and pleasure. The mountain isn’t a theme park for extreme sensation, but seeking these thrills imparts knowledge through the body and senses, revealing ‘the energies that have been at work for aeons in the universe’ as they act on the matter of the mountain and, in a minute way, the sensing, feeling human. The human becomes a next-generation Aeolian harp, with geologic sensibilities. This receptiveness serves a dual purpose. In the midst of the gale, the senses apprehend what the rational mind can barely grasp: the ‘pallid

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simulacrum’ of the mountain’s age which she took from books becomes a living reality. Rather than simply translating an encounter with living phenomena into an emotional or aesthetic experience, scientific knowledge is given body by the physical reality of the mountain, and the ontological underpinnings of the self are tested, as different ways of being within and part of the mountain’s life, its ‘essential nature’, are grasped. However, many of the changes the mountain undergoes are beyond the horizon of sense perception. Ecosystem dynamics are, as more recent geological investigations have revealed, ‘a product of many temporal scales. The rates of ecosystem processes are constantly changing due to fluctuations in environment and activities of organisms on time scales ranging from microseconds to millions of years’ (Chaplin 5). In the long history of the earth, the mountain has shifted, morphed, risen up and crumbled under the pressure of heat and ice, tectonic movements and the slow weathering of rain and wind. As the storms prove, it is continuing to do so even at the very moment Shepherd is experiencing their force. What value does affect and the senses really have as a gateway to apprehending deep time? What are their limits, compared to more rationalist and scientific forms of knowing? In ‘On a Raised Beach’, MacDiarmid wrote of the frustrating experience of handling stones, which failed to give him access to the stony world. Shepherd also confronts the ambiguous illumination gained through emotions and sensory experience. This comes through most directly in her writing on water. The ‘pure and terrible streams’ of the high Cairngorms are those very forces that have changed the shape of valleys and gorges. ‘They rise from the granite, sun themselves a little on the unsheltered plateau and drop through to the valleys,’ Shepherd writes (LM 4). This movement charts the visible life of water, its appearance and disappearance, but not the science of its origins or its function in the wider life of the mountain. Although at other points Shepherd seeks scientific knowledge, here she is content not to dispel the enigma of water: 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. It does nothing, absolutely nothing, but be itself. (LM 23)

The last three lines have the ringing, complex clarity of imagist poetry and the compression of a meaning and language of a Zen parable. Water is not understood in the entire interdependency of ecological relations. Instead this

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mysterious stuff wells, improbably, impossibly, from rock and flows away to an unknown destination. This is in spite of all that Shepherd knows: ‘We make it all so easy, any child at school can understand it – water rises from in the hills, it flows and finds its own level, and man can’t live without it.’ The mechanics of the hydrological cycle – quanta of knowledge – are matters less than the persistence of the movement, the gushing out of a mountain spring which Shepherd tells us she once tried to hold back with a childish finger (LM 28). While rocks convey the awe and majesty of deep time, diminishing the human in the face of nature’s otherness, the tactile, lively and living qualities of water spark a different kind of wonder. Water is not the bedrock of a remote and challenging mountain landscape. It is life-giving, mundane and essential: something which ‘man’ must see, hear, touch and taste ‘if he is to be in health’ (LM 28). The experience is health-bringing, even if it is uncanny and provides an opening into a world that refuses to come into any firmer focus. What is revealed is simply too large to grasp. The act of pressing water back with her finger brings the irresolvable imaginative leap into greater focus; human time and the temporality of water are brought into an absurd contrast, whose comedic undertones are a gesture of humility in the face of deep time. To see it at its point of origin, at its coming into life, and to not understand it any better, is what baffles. It is a flow that is at once symbolic of time passing, and indifferent to it, and to all forms of symbolism. Complete in its own absoluteness and refusal to be contained or resolved through the semiotic or symbolic, it moves in perpetuity, touching things into life and then passing on indefinitely. The astonishment of water addresses the problem the imagination faces in ‘stretching’ to accommodate deep time as a living reality. For this reason, it provides a useful rejoinder to the promises of the poetic mode – concerned with affect, wonder and sensation – within the work of geopoetics. In the face of phenomena that reveal the operations of time, and earth’s deep antiquity, the imagination can sometimes stretch, but it can also tear. Geology, the scientific mode concerned with engaging with the thing itself (and not just the emotional state it produces) must come together with the experience of awe and wonder in order to come at all close to approaching the reality of the thing.

Ways of seeing plants The Living Mountain, as should already be obvious, is pretty much obsessed with the question of perception, and how different angles of approach and ways of

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seeing alter the qualities of the thing perceived. When it comes to deep time, it is no different. How do poetic or scientific angles of approach make the life of the mountain more or less vivid and tangible to the perceiving subject? What distance, or proximity, is necessary to get to know a place that is beyond our understanding in the complexity and variety of its life, and always changing? One of the clearest examples of this kaleidoscopic approach to perception, and one of the most tender and surprising encounters with deep time, takes place with plants. On the Cairngorm plateau, Shepherd finds heather, miniature azalea, saxifrage and the Alpine milk-vetch. From their hardy roots she can tell that these deceptively delicate flowers are persistent, but how persistent they truly are revealed by the expertise of botanists: Scientists tell me that the alpine flora of the Scottish mountains is Arctic in origin – that these small scattered plants have outlived the Glacial period and are the only vegetable life in our country that is older than the Ice Age. But that doesn’t explain them. It only adds time to the equation and gives it a new dimension. (LM 59)

Scientists are a source of wonder and knowledge, but the book’s characteristic epistemological uncertainty extends to their pronouncements. What Shepherd responds to sceptically is the bareness of the fact and how its surface simplicity reveals the limitations of an understanding of the world based primarily on technical explanations. Placing a date on the longevity of Alpine plants does not make them easier to grasp conceptually and emotionally. If all realities that ultimately matter to humanity are realities of the mind, this statement of the fact is resistant to synthesis into her understanding of the world. The fact that the Cairngorm plants have outlasted the Ice Age is a fact that makes her imagination ‘boggle’: ‘I can imagine the antiquity of rock, but the antiquity of a living flower – that is harder’ (LM 59). The longevity of plants creates a disjunction between the evidence of the senses and objective knowledge. The beautiful, according to Burke’s aesthetic schema, is revealed to be the sublime in disguise, while the fragility and freshness of the flower is a misleading ornament to a more-than-human wisdom gained through thousands of years of survival in the most inhospitable of environments. Recalling McKay’s warning about the dominance of poetic lyricism, the original phenomena is not here obscured or forgotten because of a poetic fixation on the emotions it produces. Astonishment pulls her back again and again to the plants themselves. However, Shepherd registers affective attachment in a number of ways, experiencing humour, surprise, fondness and awe. Through this charmed humility, Shepherd

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acknowledges that there is a limit to her capacity to encounter and apprehend deep time. As a helpful side effect, this provides a check on the ‘autonomous, self-willing subject’ which Higgins finds in Romantic writing on mountains, and whose efforts are geared towards overcoming the disturbance created by the deep time of the world that it witnesses (Higgins 61). Plants discombobulate with their age, and also with their very modes of being. Species-hierarchy, established in Enlightenment scientific taxonomy, classifies plants as lesser life forms than the insect, fish and mammalian. Plants do not (or should not) think, move or feel. Their life spans are brief, their deaths inconsequential. However, research into plant intelligence and experience – what Michael Marder calls the ‘phytophenomenology’ of plants – suggests that plants should be understood as ‘not only a what but also a who’: that is, as entities who make sense of the world and register experience in creaturely ways (Marder 2012). Plants also experience time in very different ways from humans and other sentient animals: as Katherine Bishop proposes, they ‘embody and experience an alien “when” . . . one that threatens, in turn, the linear-temporal finitude of anthropocentric phenomenology’ (Bishop 9). Vegetal time, in consequence, is distinct from both anthropocentric and deep time. It demands its own scientific and theoretical approaches. The emerging field of phylogenetic paleoecology addresses plant time scientifically, exploring their participation in evolutionary change and in ‘ecosystem recovery from past environmental crises’, which may prove instructive in future response to climate change effects (Lamsdell). Randy Laist also addresses the meaning of plant time, noting how ‘[p]lants seem to inhabit a time-sense, a life cycle, a desire-structure, and a morphology that is so utterly alien that it is easy and even tempting to deny their status as animate organisms’ (Laist 12). And yet plants do move, both in pursuit of nutrients – as Shepherd observes, ‘when sundew and butterwort eat the insects’ (LM 59) – and territory, sometimes incredibly quickly, as when non-native species adapt briskly to new conditions, or much more slowly. Observation of mountain plant distribution, for example, reveals that ‘[v]egetation is still migrating in response to the retreat of Pleistocene glaciers 10,000 to 20,000 years ago’ (Chaplin 6). Between object and subject, animate and inanimate, earthling and alien, the time-experience of plants tests the limits of the imagination and inter-species empathy. As Shepherd puts it, her mind ‘boggles’ as the plants shift from the twee centrerpiece of a Victorian posy to time-travellers whose grasp on and of mountain survival across geological epochs vastly overreaches that of her own species. The scientists who have told her the fact of the plants’ longevity do not help her make sense of the information they convey. She writes: ‘I find I have a naïve

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faith in my scientist friends – they are such jolly people, they wouldn’t fib me unnecessarily, and their stories make the world so interesting’ (LM 59). The lightness of the expression here reveals a playful scepticism, while the use of ‘stories’ gestures to the possibility of geopoetic contemplation within the work of science. To what extent are scientists always telling stories about the earth as a means of opening perception and taxing our understandings of the possible? On the other hand, the use of ‘stories’ diminishes the significance of the information, which remains trapped in the realm of the fictive, producing an emotional reaction (wonder and interest) but not necessarily deepening understanding of the plants in themselves. Seeded into this epistemological uncertainty is a question that disturbs the hegemony of anthropocentric time and challenges the ethics of biological science. Human societies have long sought to organize and alter vegetal temporality. In crop-rotation systems, greenhouses and poly-tunnels, selective breeding, genetic modification, biotechnology and the pseudo-scientific excesses of Soviet Lysenkoism, plants have been encouraged to grow outside of traditional seasons and to fruit in increasingly shorter growing cycles. Reflecting on agriculture’s voracious regulation of vegetal time, Marder concludes that ‘[m]astery over an entity’s time is immediately translatable into mastery over its being’ (Marder 2013: 102). Shepherd herself is guilt of this. In The Living Mountain, she makes unconscious assumptions about plant life cycles based on the floral growth patterns of familiar plants and domesticated species. This is a common error: indeed, flowers and small plants may be degraded to minor players in earth’s long history when mistakenly understood in relation to cycles that are seasonal, annual or contained with the scale of a human life. But plants have played a key role in long evolutionary processes, shaping and maintaining ecosystems and forming complex relations of interactiveness with other species (Lamsdell). In modern accelerated agro-capitalism, the commodification, objectification and mastery of plants through genetic modification (such as seed patenting) are based on such a misunderstanding. A perceptual schism between our reductive understandings of plants and their real longevity and ecological significance underpins an agricultural and bio-technological system falsely dividing domesticated crops from ‘natural’ flora, with unexamined and possibly unimaginable consequences on local and global ecosystems. For Marder, writing of agro-capitalist control, the only form of ‘effective resistance imaginable would be one that insists on the non-synchronicity, the asymmetry, and the non-contemporaneity of human and vegetal temporalities’

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(Marder 2013: 102–3). Anthropocentric time and plant time simply do not map onto one another smoothly, meaning periods of ecosystem flourishing and devastation look very different from the perspectives of humanity and, if such a thing can be imagined, of plants. Recentering vegetal temporality – between deep time and anthropocentric time – may produce radically different understandings of the multiple agencies, assemblages and processes involved in ecosystem growth, and also new forms of collective living, inhabitation and behaviour in consequence. This brings another dimension to Shepherd’s characteristic concern with modes of being beyond the human and ‘releases the time of plants back to the contingency of the other’ (Marder 2013: 102). Even the insight into vegetal time given by her botanist friends does not equate to a complete mastery over the organism: challenging them to explain the capacity of Alpine plants to cling on to the slopes during the Ice Age, she informs that ‘[t]he scientists have the humility to acknowledge that they don’t know how it has been done’ (LM 59). An encounter with plant time provides Shepherd with a baffling opening into the life of an organism, a place and an interconnected world, which grows in complexity and astonishment with each new insight. In her description of the plants, Shepherd makes use of anthropomorphism, allusion and metaphor, contrasting her own more creative and lyrical accounts with the supposedly objective and technical language of the sciences. However, in the long tradition of ecocriticism, anthropomorphism has been seen as controversial rhetoric. On the one hand, it can be accused of being a deceptive device, guilty of obscuring and erasing the otherness of nature in order to co-opt and reduce more-than-human others to cultural entities and psychological projections (Garrard 154–5). Alternatively, it can be a way of building conceptual bonds with non-human lives and processes, thus sparking care, concern and a sense of affinity. In The Living Mountain, anthropomorphism reaffirms a connection with long-lived entities like plants, while undercutting the notion that there is a direct and unmediated register for writing about nature, either scientific or poetic. While poetic language may obscure the precise details of the thing observed, relying on scientific language as an access point to the ‘real’ presupposes the ‘unproblematic existence of an un(re)constructed nature as allegedly described by the sciences’ (Wilkie 94). Even in direct tactile encounters with the natural world, cultural constructions of nature are present and shaping experience. As Serpil Oppermann puts it, ‘All discourses of nature and the nature of discourse itself intersect through a mutually coalescent experience of the physical world’

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(Oppermann 166). Discourse is productive of selves and the experiences that they have, and though nature is not reducible to our experience of it, it is impossible to produce a literary representation of the natural world that evades discourse, or to experience a pre-discursive encounter with nature. Scientific language provides one way of knowing the life of the mountain, but Shepherd also makes use of multiple, overlapping and contradictory discourses of nature. In combination, they demonstrate how the thing itself is a conceptual, affective and textual entity, as well as a living reality beyond literary transcription. Of Alpine flora, she describes how ‘these toughs of the mountain top, with their angelic inflorescence and the devil in their roots, have had the cunning and the effrontery to cheat, not only a winter, but an Ice Age’ (LM 59). As well as anthropomorphizing the plants, she alludes to Christian mythology and epic, suggesting a demonic resilience behind the brightest show of the surface flowers. This evocation, which reinscribes a Christian mythos into the Cairngorm landscape, might be read as a resurgence of the epic register of nineteenth-century geological writing. After all, not all geologists were atheists. Scottish creationist Hugh Miller, for example, proposed a metaphorical reading of Genesis in The Testimony of the Rocks (1857), in which the seven days of creation were mapped onto geologic epochs. Each ‘day’ was devoted to creating rock formations, the firmament, plant and animal life, with the Sabbath devoted to humanity’s ‘moral development and elevation’ (Miller 168). In a confusing blurring of science, faith and literature, Miller quotes Milton’s Paradise Lost extensively, treating it as a source of divine witness on pre-Adamic creation and record of events otherwise unseen by human eyes. As well as filling in the blanks left in Genesis, Milton’s lines confirm the epic qualities of the geologic story. Borrowing from classical and biblical forms leant geologist-writers like Millar borrowed authority and prestige, allowing them to assume chronological and perceptual comprehensiveness that was the ideal of geological investigation: ‘The teleological narrative line of epic form, and particularly Miltonian epic, with its claim to describe the total history of a nation or a people from beginning to end, could give dramatic shape to the history of the earth’ (Buckland 100). Descending to the depths of the fossil record revealed the volatility of ancient volcanic activity, making it apt for writers to borrow from Dante’s vertical organization of Heaven, Purgatory and Hell in their descriptions of descent into deep time through the fossil record, and ascent to those life forms that resembled present species. Shepherd’s metaphor certainly alludes to the vertical organization of heaven and hell associated with The Divine Comedy, with the plant’s inflorescence

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reaching to the heavens and the roots into a cavernous, interior underworld. However, the humour of the passage complicates an orthodox Christian reading. The lightness of wording evokes the precedent set by Robert Burns in ‘Address to the Deil’ (1785) of speaking lightly, in his case blasphemously, of the devil as a familiar and acquaintance. In calling on ‘Auld Hornie, Satan, Nick, or Clootie’ in his ‘Address’, Burns assimilated Satan as co-conspirator and neighbour in a picaresque and eldritch local geography. He also enjoyed the figure’s defiant qualities: following the precedence set by Milton, Burns ‘took the Satanic disposition to stand for rebellion against autocratic authority’ and ‘flirted with the persona of the Devil himself ’ (Carruthers). Shepherd – who saw the humanism and humour of Burns’s writing in her own work – pastiches the epic mode in her use of religious iconography to describe the plants’ survival since the Ice Age. In her hands, the plants take on the rebellious qualities of Milton’s anti-hero and the audacious persona of the trickster. Through anthropomorphism and allusion, stark binaries are established and then undercut: heaven and hell, familiar and other, unknowable and unknowable, cute and awe-inspiring, minute and vast in scale. Exceeding binary categorization, plants demand thinking across scales and seeming oppositions, acting as crucibles for deep time consciousness. While the conflict between small and grand scale and the present and deep past produces a kind of geological vertigo, the plants produce an invigorating wonder through their multiple contradictions.

The age of Anthropocene An awareness of deep time demands thinking in vastly different scales and in demanding ways about agency, responsibility, impact and the span of a human life. This is all the more pressing in our age of Anthropocene, in which humanity has been all but officially named as an agent of change on a geologic scale. Although The Living Mountain was written a half-century before the Anthropocene was noticed, debated and named, it invites a reading attentive to this ongoing epochal shift in human-planetary understanding and interactivity. Written within the various estimates dating the beginnings of the epoch, The Living Mountain can be categorized as an ‘Anthropocene text’, which reveals details about the conditions of modernity and the kinds of behaviours and cultural attitudes which prevailed during a period of extraordinary human destructiveness. It can be read both in its historical context, as it reveals accumulative changes to the material

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conditions of life in the context of the early twentieth century, and in the present moment, as a text that offers distinctive contributions to resituating humanity in relation to geological realities. The value of watching a landscape change over time and of using a combined geopoetic approach as a way into awareness of the geological speak clearly to our present moment, as artists, writers, philosophers, theorists and activists seek innovative ways to encourage modern societies to situate themselves ‘within the geologic as a condition of our present time’ (Kruse and Ellsworth 9, emphasis in original).

Anthropocene imaginaries Modernity has involved a coming-to-terms with conflicting temporalities. The deep time of earth history meets the disrupted possibilities of its deep future; at the same time, catastrophically sudden ecological emergencies (from species extinction to Arctic melt) intersect with the acceleration of high-carbon technologies and an intensification of earth-shaping projects from urbanization to deep sea drilling. At the present moment, changes to the earth’s atmospheric and hydrological systems are upsetting imaginative and physical dichotomies between the scales of human activity and the earth’s own capacity to self-regulate its natural systems. According to geologists and earth scientists, in all but official nomenclature we have entered the Anthropocene age. The term, coined by the chemist Paul Crutzen in 2000, challenged the scientific consensus that the Holocene still adequately described planetary conditions. Anthropogenic climate change and other earth-altering activities will significantly disturb global conditions and mark the geological record. Human impact can be measured in numerous ways. We might look to the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels, or the build-up of plastics, toxins and other human-made and non-biodegradable materials in the fossil layer. Alternatively, we can chart deforestation or quantify massive earth-moving and construction projects such as mega-dams and mines. Other forms of evidence come in markers like biodiversity loss, soil erosion, marine pollution and, most catastrophically, atmospheric changes caused by carbon dioxide build-up and the consequential disruption to earth climate. As Elizabeth Kolbert asserts, ‘[f]uture geologists are not likely to mistake the beginning of the Anthropocene’ (p. 31). But the date of the epoch’s beginning is contested – for example, William Ruddiman suggests the Anthropocene began 8,000 years ago with the advent of agriculture – and scholars have suggested further clarifications. Anna Tsing

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has proposed that the Anthropocene proper begins with the plantationocene, beginning in the seventeenth century when European colonizers, and later agro-capitalists, began to disturb ecosystems by creating arboreal and crop monocultures in the form of plantations. Alternatively, as the prefix ‘anthro-’ serves to attribute guilt for the cataclysmic changes brought about in modernity on an undistinguished ‘humanity’, critics, including Donna Haraway and Jason Moore, have proposed the ‘Chthulucene’ and ‘Capitalocene’ respectively. This nomenclature has the benefit of laying the blame squarely on the economic system that has cultured this ecocidal acceleration in resource exploitation and environmental misuse (Moore 2016; Haraway 2016). The arrival of the Anthropocene et al. as a new cultural and material reality has been experienced as a rupture in the already paradoxical and contested temporal imaginary of modernity, which is poised between a deepening sense of earth history and the exacerbated speed of ‘light modernity’, permitted by a range of inventions and technologies including electromagnetism, radio, internet and the internal combustion engine (Bauman). Within this co-synchronously deepening and accelerating sense of time, questions of human agency have been radically reformulated. As Ellsworth and Kruse state, changes to earth processes ‘are outpacing our ways of knowing’ (p. 8). In place of doubt about the purpose and meaning of the minute individual human life, we encounter new uncertainties about the forms of damage – ‘massively distributed in space and time’ – that modern industrial societies are wreaking on the planet (Morton 2013: 1). The recent ‘geological turn’ in the humanities is an attempt to make temporal realities tangible and bring awareness into politics and the practice of everyday life. The geologic is thus no longer simply ‘the specialized interest of scientists and infrastructure designers’; instead, the ‘existence, effects and nature of earth dynamics’ are now the concern of artists, writers and activists, ‘as humans work to meet the fact that not only is our species increasingly vulnerable to the geologic, we have also become agents of planetary geologic change’ (Ellsworth and Kruse 8). However, intellectual, political and social responses to the Anthropocene have been beset by absurd contradictions, which Timothy Clark has termed ‘derangements of scale’. The significance of everyday and local acts like recycling or veganism can be seen as both major and minute on a global scale, while massively distributed problems like climate change and ocean plastics pollution demonstrate that ‘the greater the number of people engaged in modern forms of consumption . . . the less the relative influence or responsibility of each but the worse the cumulative impact of their insignificance’ (Clark 2012). Western liberalism, rooted in early modern and Enlightenment social contract

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theory, grounded notions of agency, rationality, individuality and responsibility in small societies. In the context of a globalized and ecologically interconnected world, these concepts are now ‘being strained or even begin to fall apart in a bewildering generalizing of the political that can make even filling a kettle as public an act as voting’ (Clark 2012). In response to this derangement of scale, Clark proposes that literary critics abandon the practice of reading texts in their sociocultural and historical contexts, and instead look to their ecological and geological moment. The original context of a literary text, he suggests, ‘is now being understood on far broader spatial and temporal scales, and these make earlier notions of that “original context” look like kinds of containment.’ (Clark 2015: 66) For example, Clark analyses a poem of Gary Snyder’s, written in 1959 and reflecting on his work as a fire lookout in the Sourdough Mountains. Clark notes that the then supposedly ecologically beneficent activity of halting forest fires is revealed to be damaging in the context of the Anthropocene. An Anthropocene imaginary may be nurtured through such practices, placing the text in a grander narrative than its author or original readership could have possibly envisaged. Anthropocene-sensitive reading and writing practices attempt to reveal discourses that have contributed to the damage and seek alternative foundations for an Anthropocene imaginary. Attention to texts which particularly thematize conflicting and overlapping temporalities may ‘[present] us with a mode of reading and thinking across multiple scales which can help us to comprehend the disjunctive time of the Anthropocene’ (Farrier 133). As Rob Nixon’s ‘slow violence’ aims to make those damaging actions that unravel slowly over time both visible and accountable, an Anthropocene writing and reading strategy refocuses attention on the seemingly minor behaviours and normalized activities, and their accretive geological and environmental affects, as registered in literary texts and observed in scholarship. Similarly, in early twentieth-century British poetry, Tom Bristow has observed the development of a new aesthetic and creative approach which engages with the disjunction between felt experience of body and place, and vast and intangible global realities: Thickening our sense of time, process and scale – generic concepts with common currency in the discipline of geography – the fundamental coordinates of a progressive Anthropocene imaginary constitute an essential feedback mechanism that not only counters human exceptionalism and instrumental reason but contextualises human action within the long scale of evolutionary processes. (Bristow 2)

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Through feeling and thinking their way into the Anthropocene, writers and scholars may contribute to the replacement of older temporal imaginaries: Biblical time, epic, the geological sublime, and modernist fantasies of technological futurism, unhindered acceleration, light modernity and an ultimate conquest of geological time. Reading texts in the Anthropocene opens up consideration of transhistorical and cultural themes, such as the use of fire, at the same time as facilitating examination of culturally and historically specific uses of technologies and their meanings in the contexts of deep time.

Shepherd and the Anthropocene When Shepherd lies on the Cairngorm plateau, she is witness not just to the fullness of life humming around her but also to traces of earth’s unimaginably long natural and geological history. In the shape of the mountains, which have been smoothed or cleaved by glaciers, and in the seemingly eternal welling up of water from a break in the rock, living and fast-moving things reveal their indebtedness to vast temporal scales, and traces of the deep past can be held by eye and hand. In The Living Mountain, Shepherd tracks the experiences of sensing and perceiving the land as a record of life that has come before humanity, and a premonition of what might be still to come. In our current age of Anthropocene – in which artists and scholars are attempting to construct and theorize new aesthetics capable of registering anthropogenic affects on earth systems and geology, Shepherd’s cultivation of a deep time imaginary may provide an instructive precedent of how to live in the context of overlapping and telescoping temporal scales. More than this, the record of inhabitation in the Cairngorms traced in The Living Mountain might speak to different kinds of imaginable and unimaginable futures with a changing world. The domestication of the wilderness, the invention and development of agriculture, population growth, the creation and expansion of towns are all overarching themes fundamental to changes brought about during the Anthropocene, whether its beginning is dated at 200 or 8,000 years ago. Shepherd’s writing about human inhabitation of the mountain may contribute to an understanding of the long history of humanity’s relationship with wild places and raise questions about the direction of development as well. What might The Living Mountain say about the transhistorical and transcultural

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capacity of the human species to find the means to sustain life in remote places and inhospitable environments? How might the more temporary dwelling places, like bothies, the Shelter Stone and hillside crofts, compare to newer and potentially more ecologically disturbing constructions such as ski-lifts, roads and the controversial funicular that runs up the mountainside near Aviemore? The bringing of modern and unknown materials to the Cairngorms, including concrete, steel, plastics and tarmac, as well the intensified burning of fossil fuels necessary to fuel a mountain leisure economy, have changed the local landscape in significant ways, and also participated in global environmental and energy trends. Thinking on different scales and in the disjunctive time scales of the Anthropocene makes it possible to evaluate the meaning and significance of these changes beyond the immediate locus of the text. The 1977 introduction, as previously discussed, is used to reflect on the passing of time and the changes that have taken place on the mountain over the last thirty years. It includes a list of human deaths, the expansion of a winter sports economy and new building work, as well as conservation efforts. A restaurant now ‘hums on the heights’ and ‘the summit Cairn Gorm grows scruffy, the very heather now tatty from the scrape of boots’ (LM xli). Shepherd’s response to these changes is uncannily predictive of an Anthropocene reading approach. Though changes are conspicuous to those who know the mountain intimately, Shepherd restores a sense of scale by insisting that thirty years are ‘the flicker of an eyelid’ in the life of a mountain. This provides a geological memento mori, reminding that human development takes place in the context of the unimaginably long history of the earth. However, many of the changes Shepherd witnesses alter the mountain in ways that are more long-lasting: ‘Bulldozers birse their way into the hill’; ‘Aviemore erupts and goes on erupting’; roads are built ‘where there were never roads before’ (LM xli). Although Shepherd resists a conservative attitude to change, the deep time scale she has come to appreciate must be squared with more rapid and profound alterations to the fabric of the mountain. The ‘eruption’ of Aviemore imports a metaphor from one of geology’s more catastrophic phenomena, connecting the volcanic activity which shaped the land with recent land-shaping modernizations spurred by the rise of a mobile tourism industry. Dramatic disruption to environmental and natural processes is inevitable in current generations’ lifetimes. Writers and literary critics attempting to draw attention to these disruptions through cultural work may do so by paying attention to the records left in our literatures of nature. Environmental scientists use the terminology ‘shifting baselines’ to describe how different generations

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adapt to biodiversity loss (Pyle; Kahn). As species decline and environments degrade, successive generations alter their expectations of what a healthy, lively and ‘natural’ environment looks like. Literary critics might therefore ask how might this book be read in a century, or two centuries, or more? What wildlife will be missing, and which landscapes and places might be unrecognizable after different stages of predicted climate change? The Living Mountain may tell stories about the ghosts of landscapes and ecosystems past. Snow, for example, is unpredictable in the Cairngorms. Writing in the 1940s, Shepherd noted that ‘it doesn’t happen every winter, so unpredictable is this Cairngorm weather – the skiers may wait far into the spring in vain for the right depth and surface of snow’ (LM 35). One remarkable weather event does take place during her lifetime though: the particularly hot summer of 1934, which melted the snow drifts she had thought ‘eternal’: ‘Antiquity has gone from our snow,’ she laments (LM 37). At the time of writing, it is still true to say that in July in the Cairngorms one can still see snowdrifts and sheets of ice tucked into unexposed clefts in the rock. What sense might a future reader make of The Living Mountain if winter no longer brings snow to the Cairngorms, or blankets the mountain communities for longer and more dangerous periods, as took place in early 2018 when freezing storms from a warming Arctic caused unprecedented disruption across Northern Europe (Inness). What of the multiple species that she describes living in intricate interconnection in the mountains? Shepherd’s meticulous and tender descriptions of flora delight, but the Alpine flowers that offered her a unique window into deep and vegetal time now have their very existence threatened by climate change and warming weather (Carrell). Will the passages that now bring joy be read with grief and elegy in a half-century, as history in a century, and as fantasy in 200 years?

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Vital matter

By describing the mountain as ‘Living’, Shepherd seems to name her book with an oxymoron. How can hard rock – inorganic and static – possibly be alive? The answer lies in Shepherd’s theory of life. As the Introduction suggested, theosophy’s account of secretive, animating spirit in the physical world inspired much of Shepherd’s poetry, but her prose reveals the influence of neovitalism – a controversial theory of evolution which saw creativity and agency behind growth and adaptation, and a vital ‘life’ animating matter. In The Living Mountain, rock and organic life forms interact, shaping the mountain’s ecology: matter is not inert or dead, but pulsing with vitality and purpose. The theory of neovitalism informs her writing of nature, and the plotting of her fiction too. In her second novel, The Weatherhouse, Garry Forbes’s dissociative trauma is explored through neovitalist themes, as vitality binds him to both world and community. This chapter, then, explores the historical precedents of these ideas, and also their political implications. In particular, it considers how neovitalism underpinned her fundamentally egalitarian philosophy of life. Finally, looking to new materialist approaches in modern ecological philosophy, it asks what questions Shepherd’s work raises about agency, individuality and interconnectedness in the present moment.

Neovitalism Theories of a vital force animating change, movement and growth are found across Classical European and Eastern philosophies. Confucian, Buddhist and Vedic thought are all founded on a belief in qi or prana, the enervating breath that motivates life. Early modern European philosophy also had distinctive theories of being: in the pan-psychism of Margaret Cavendish, all beings were held to have own distinctive ‘motion’, which could not be reduced to the laws of

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collision (Cavendish). The discoveries of Enlightenment physicists and biologists discredited these theories, asserting that change derived from mechanical processes which could be measured and mastered and that life and living creatures could be compared to machines. These machine entities responded to an external stimulus in predictable ways, lacking self-determining force. In Cartesian logic, only humanity possessed the spirit of ‘mind’: animals and other living organisms lacked any comparable animating spirit, whether understood as ‘soul’, ‘qi’ or vitalism. As the nineteenth century progressed and Darwinian evolutionary thought took hold, humanity was brought within the mechanistic– materialist model as well. All biology, all living processes, in the new system, were ‘simply matter in motion’ (Allen 2005: 275). In the early twentieth century, however, a new movement in biology challenged this scientific mechanism. These neovitalists or critical vitalists, including Hans Driesch (1867–1941) and Henri Bergson (1859–1941), rejected the machine analogy in favour of more holistic approaches to the organism and its life. In Creative Evolution (1907), Bergson proposed that humans, animals and even plants do not operate in the manner of a machine, but make choices that alter their adaptation and development. Driesch agreed, claiming that vitalism offered ‘the possibility of true freedom in the sense of “freedom of becoming” – that is, the embryo or the consciously acting human is free to become itself, to actualize its potentiality despite a variety of changing inputs’ (Allen 2008: 54, emphasis in original). Organisms were not like typewriters or engines, fulfilling pre-designed functions, but living entities in continuous, spontaneous and co-creative interchange with the world. Critical vitalism at its core proposed a new theory of freedom. Mechanistic materialism held that at a cellular level, organisms were pre-disposed to act in certain ways, unhindered by theories of mind or will. By contrast, critical vitalists described an additional quality animating matter which could not be measured or isolated, and which made that organism’s freedom possible. It was bound up with matter, they proposed, but not reducible to it. Bergson called it elan vital, Driesch, entelechy. When matter was infused and vitalized with this ‘life’, its inherent capacity to grow, and to spread and nurture life, was liberated. For Bergson, ‘Life’ is characterized by a positive freedom: to transform, interact and grow. Humans exhibit an obvious conscious freedom, involving reflection, reason, emotion and choice. Life also exhibits forms of freedom, as its actions and configurations cannot be predetermined or reduced to mechanistic explanations. It is a free-acting, indeterminate force that directs matter. This indeterminacy is the ‘true principle’ of life, spreading ‘from the living to the nonliving through the

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virtuality that the living brings to the inorganic, the potential for the inorganic to be otherwise’ (Grosz 149–50). Life is also (re)produced by matter: ‘Immersed in matter and an eruption from it, life is the continuous negotiation with matter that creates the conditions for its own expansion and the opening up of matter to its own virtualities’ (Grosz 151). Matter is not dumb, but inherently receptive to the possibilities of life. Life is then a ‘latent principle’ of matter, bursting from it and urging it to further life (Grosz 150). Driesch’s ‘entelechy’ is similar to elan vital. Like Bergson, he rejected mechanical materialism in favour of a force he described as entelechy, from the Greek, meaning ‘an active principle of converting possibility into actuality’ (quoted in Allen 2008: 52). Although it shares many qualities with ‘spirit’, being ‘nonmaterial, nonspatial and nonmechanical’, Driesch’s life force cannot operate without matter (Bennett 71). It is not physical or chemical in nature, but the drive and ‘why’ behind matter’s creative unfolding (Bennett 70–1). Through observation of sea urchins and embryos, Driesch saw matter coming into existence where there was no matter before. Entelechy was behind this creative drive: ‘an agent acting manifoldly without being in itself manifold in space or extensity’ (Driesch 1908: vol. 1, 250). Driving the phenomena of life and ordering development, entelechy acted as an ‘agent responsible for the singular specificity of the outcome’, with some degree of autonomy (Bennett 73). It is an ‘immanent vitality flowing across all living bodies’, a ‘nonmystical’ and ‘teleological guiding force’ (Driesch 1908: vol. 1, 169; Bennett 75). Driesch’s theories of an organism’s agency added new dimensions to thinking about what it meant to be human, and they did so at a moment in which traditional beliefs about free will and agency were being strongly contented. In the concurrently developing field of neurology, scientists engaged in an ongoing search for the seat of emotions, intelligence, deviance and morality in the fleshy matter of the brain. Experiments were conducted to find the material stuff of thought and feeling, and neurologists wondered if tendencies towards immorality or crime might be produced by specific regions or lumps of nerves and tissue in the brain: if so, maybe they could be just as easily isolated as cut out. The simplicity of this understanding of the mind was compelling, but its dangers were manifold. Such scientific positivism, critics felt, ‘reduced life to a base mechanistic process and mind to predictable and quantifiable mechanical and chemical changes in the brain’ (Wolffram 152–3). For Driesch, positivism failed because entelechy defied mechanical analysis. Although change could be observed, mechanical explanations never fully accounted for changes in organisms (Allen 2008: 52). As Jane Bennett puts it, ‘Entelechy is born in the

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negative spaces of the machine model of nature, in the “gaps” in the “chain of strictly physico-chemical or mechanical events”’ (quoted in Bennett 70). Comparable to Bergson’s theory of creative evolution and indeterminacy, entelechy’s resistance to positivist science introduced uncertainty into scientific knowledge. We know that Shepherd had read, or at least knew of Bergson and his theories. His term for life, ‘elan vital’, appears at the end of a list of scientific theories of species development, jotted in her Commonplace Books: ‘Lamarckism, Darwinism, Neo-Darwinism, Orthogenesis, Elan vital’ (Shepherd 1911–c. 1965: 7b). It is not clear whether she read Driesch, although his bio-philosophy was well known in scientific teaching circles in Aberdeen. Driesch held the chair of Natural Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen between 1907 and 1909 and delivered the Gifford Lectures on ‘The Science and the Philosophy of the Organism’ between 1907 and 1908. As Shepherd began her degree in 1911, she is unlikely to have attended these talks. Nonetheless, his influence was felt in her curriculum, primarily through the teaching of none other than J. Arthur Thomson. Thomson most certainly would have been present at the Gifford Lectures, and participated enthusiastically in the neovitalist movement, turning his ‘back on the materialism of the Victorian era’ (Bowler 232). In Life: Outlines of Biology, Thomson (collaborating with Geddes) proposed that ‘psychologic and neo-vitalistic viewpoints and doctrines’ were needed to ‘complement’ modern mechanistic sciences. This involved appreciation of the ‘Psycho-biosis as well as the Bio-psychosis’ of each organism: its ‘Mind-body as well as its Body-mind’ (Thomson and Geddes 1931a: v). In his Gifford Lecture series (1914–16), Thomson outlined a theory of life which revealed the influence of Driesch and Bergson but was distinguished in significant ways. His Life describes ‘the psychological characteristics of living things [that] gave them a degree of spontaneity’ (quoted in Bowler 234). According to Thomson, living things have an agency – which he termed ‘efficiency’ – and this accounts for their mechanical metabolic functioning, as well as their extra-mechanical creative agency. An organism’s main objective is to regulate its metabolism, or else it will die. However, it also acts in ways unaccounted for in mechanistic theories of life. The Life that motivated biology was not physico-chemical and could not be pinned down by mechanical explanations: it was an ‘insurgent’ force, ‘peopling’ all corners of the earth with a restless agency (Thomson 1925: 100–1). As well as being a biologist, Thomson was a committed Christian. He understood life in terms of evolutionary deism, meaning God set the force

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of Life in motion but did not determine its outcomes. In one of his books, he quotes from Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies (1863) to explain how organisms fulfil their own creative potential: speaking from the position of God, the force of life explains that ‘I make things make themselves’ (Thomson 1925: 105). Deism informed Thomson’s own work, and his interpretation of leading biologists. For example, on Haeckel (who taught him at Jena in the 1880s), he states: ‘Theoretically, he was, perhaps, a materialist; practically, he certainly was not; and even in regard to his theory it must be remembered that everything – animate and inanimate – was to Haeckel “ensouled”’ (Thomson 1932: 159). For all this talk of ‘soul’, neovitalist Life was different from the Christian notion of ‘spirit’ – the sacred, not material soul, which was believed to reside in the earthbound body, and to escape from it on death. Although the critical vitalists could be accused of entrenching a Cartesian dualism, in which spirit, soul or mind is a separate force from body and matter, they actually challenged Cartesianism, insisting that the vital force was not separate from matter, but a kind of supplement to it. Thomson elaborated on his theory of the spontaneous animation of life, which infuses living organisms with a ‘psycho-physical individuality which has enregistered within itself the grains of experience and experiment’ (quoted in Kahan). Even in the ‘restless locomotor activity’ of single-cell organisms, there could be seen activity that goes beyond mere reflex, which formed ‘the counterpart of intelligent behaviour’. At the time Thomson was teaching and writing, animals were treated in much contemporary science as little more than glorified machines. Thomson, by contrast, claimed animals exhibited self-determining, ‘selective, controlled and purposive’ behaviour, even influencing their adaptation to some extent (Kahan). Attributing qualities of personality and intelligence allowed for progressive and transgressive possibilities in human–animal relations. The Study of Animal Life (1892) contains lively anthropomorphic accounts of animal emotion and mutual aid. As Peter Bowler puts it, ‘Even when not explicitly endorsing vitalism, he was portraying animals in terms which encouraged the nonspecialist reader to see them as creatures driven by mental powers which transcended mechanistic explanation’ (Bowler 238). Life-urges, Thomson claimed, had a ‘bio-psychological aspect’. There is the ‘urge of life’ in animal strivings towards pleasure, enjoyment and satisfaction, beyond instinct or reflex action, be it in the closing of a muscle or the pounce of the tiger (Thomson and Geddes 1925: 232). Thomson also extended this liveliness to plants. Active and full of energy, they move constantly and exercise selective and creative agency. ‘There is a good

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deal of the animal about some plants,’ he noted, ‘just as there is a good deal of the plant about some animals’ (Thomson 1921: 20–1). This supports Driesch’s hypothesis the life spreads across species boundaries, revealing the commonality of all living things. Plant activity delights because it ‘brings the plant nearer us; it is a touch of nature making the world kin’ (Thomson 1921: 19). Peeking into the intimate life of plants, animals and natural processes, he writes as an anthropologist or travel writer sketching out the relationships between different communities and cultures with whimsical pleasure. By the 1920s, however, neovitalist had been swept away by new chemicophysical approaches to the question of life. A greater emphasis was placed on empirical research and less on philosophical speculation (Bowler 235). Thomson, however, was not an empirical researcher, and rather than conducting lab work, he devoted himself to communicating with students and the public through teaching and mass market science guides. In consequence, he became something of a time capsule. As Professor in Biology in Aberdeen from 1899 until 1930, he continued to share his ideas about the vitality of life well into the 1920s, in spite of the fact they had become thoroughly outdated by then (Bowler 231). Shepherd only studied with Thomson in the early 1910s but was clearly beguiled by the thesis of Life. As the next section of this chapter will show, The Living Mountain is not just an application of critical vitalist ideas but a creative engagement with their meaning, implication and potential.

Shepherd’s vitalism Neovitalist understandings of Life make sense of a number of the more metaphysical statements about nature, and the ‘living mountain’, in Shepherd’s writing. The world she writes is a material one, vitalized by the animating energy and property of ‘life’. Explicitly associated with animals and plants, life animates water, bacteria and fire as well. It is a tenacious force and a mysterious quantity passed between the earth and stored in the roots of mountain plants: ‘Squat or stringy, like lumps of dead wood or bits of sinew, they conserve beneath the soil the vital energy of the plant,’ she writes (LM 49). Driesch, by contrast, rejected the premise of ‘vital energy’ because energy is a quantifiable, physical force, whereas his entelechy is an inherently unquantifiable mode of ordering matter’s potential. But to Shepherd, life is something that bunches and is ready to burst. On turning up a cluster of root mass, she notes ‘these knots of life are everywhere’ (LM 49), containing the potential to pass life on. The same is true of

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the Silene plant, which huddles for shelter, ‘keeping its vital essence safe against frost and fiery drought’ (LM 50). There is something jealous about these bundles of life, which contradicts the generosity of life described by Bergson and Driesch. Conditions in the Cairngorms necessitate this: extreme weather and the burning of the heather can obliterate life at any moment, meaning plateau species lack the luxurious profuseness found in sheltered valleys and tended gardens. But the plateau is far from barren: ‘[t]here is no time nor season when the mountain is not alive with’ the knotty root masses (LM 49). Life is everywhere, passed discreetly from earth to organism in the secretive dance between being and non-being. The Living Mountain recounts opportunistic moments where the vital essence is witnessed in motion, passing between organisms and entering the body through the senses. In fir trees, ‘the fragrance is the sap’, which ‘is the very life itself. When the aromatic savour of the pine goes searching into the deepest recesses of my lungs, I know it is life that is entering’ (LM 52). In the act of drawing water from the well, ‘you are touching life, and something within you knows it’ (LM 82). More than imbibing nutrients or sustenance, touching life is a sensory encounter which doesn’t consume, but sparks and nurtures new life. Learning to pick ‘toadstails’ from the roots of the heather, the child becomes acquainted with the tenacity of life as a motivating principle of existence: ‘Though I did not know it then, I was learning my way in, through my own fingers, to the secret of growth’ (LM 58). Shepherd’s characteristic sense of an underlying mystery to life is perfectly expressed in her recognition that the senses can never fully reveal the operations of matter: ‘There must be many exciting properties of matter that we cannot know because we have no way to know them’ (LM 106). Matter emerges as a lively and indeterminate substance, never fully knowable because of limits imposed by our own material composition. Because we are part of the world, its matter and its life, the division between humanity and nature is effortlessly blurred. Like Thomson, Shepherd often anthropomorphizes plants and natural processes. Thomson found plant activity delightful because ‘it is a touch of nature making the world kin’, and likewise, Shepherd’s plants have something of the animal about them (Thomson 1921: 19). They ‘creep, either along the surface, or under it’ (LM 49); the juniper is ‘secretive with its scent’ (LM 52). Placing the plant in the sentence’s subject position implies degrees of action and choice, even creativity and purpose. It acknowledges the strangeness of other-than-human life, at the same time alluding to correspondences between the human and the vegetal. The same is

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true of her writing of animals. From a high tree, a cocky squirrel ‘jeers down at [her] in triumph’ (LM 74). Nesting tits ‘scold like fishwives’ (LM 56). Yodelling stags produce joyful music, and though the theories of animal behaviour she has heard state that ‘the note changes to express different needs’, Shepherd doubts this functional explanation. Walking for hours, she hears two stags keep up ‘an antiphon . . . the raucous answering the bell across the ravine with absolute consistency’. Another theory suggests that stags have different vocal ranges, like people: ‘Then were they all tenor stags on that morning when the hill broke into a cantata? All young? or all tenor? or all in love with the morning?’ (LM 71). Animals are more than what mechanist theories reduce them to. To Shepherd, they are vital and charismatic beings, with intentions, intelligence and characteristics of their own. Sometimes Shepherd does use mechanistic language. However, a neovitalist idea is usually lurking behind the surface-simple scientific terms. For example, in talking about the smell of plants, she notes that ‘Scent – fragrance, perfume, is very much pertinent to the theme of life, for it is largely a by-product of the process of living. It may also be a by-produce of fire, but then fire feeds on what lives or what has lived’ (LM 51–2). Fire is not destructive of but dependent on life while burning can produce or sustain existence, as when dead fir roots are used as kindling in cottage fires. Life may also be a by-product of chemical action, but if there are obscure chemical processes at work in the dead stuff of the mountain, they give little indication to my nose. The smells I smell are of life, plant and animal. Even the good smell of the earth, one of the best smells in the world, is a smell of life, because it is the activity of bacteria in it that sets up the smell. (LM 52)

Here Shepherd makes a division between ‘chemical’ obscurities – meaning a mechanistic explanation – and ‘life’ – the indeterminate and vital stuff. Matter is not dull or inert: soil teems with living bacteria and has the capacity to produce new configurations of living matter, urging inorganic life to be otherwise. The exchange between the human and life is possible because we are also matter vitalized. She realizes that ‘as I penetrate more deeply into the mountain’s life, I penetrate also into my own’ (LM 108). Life is infectious, and physical and sensuous contact with the mountain is quite literally revitalizing: ‘[o]ne walks among elementals’ and in so doing, ‘[t]here are awakened also in oneself by the contact elementals that are as unpredictable as wind or snow’ (LM 4). These awakenings also cause existential and literal annihilation. Of cold water swimming, she writes, the ‘plunge into the cold water of a mountain pool seems

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for a brief moment to disintegrate the very self; it is not to be borne: one is lost: stricken: annihilated. Then life pours back’ (LM 104). The unusual use of colons and semicolons produces a stuttering effect emphasizing the stopping of the flow of life, akin to death or la petite mort: a loss of consciousness from fainting, orgasm or the spiritual and psychological release described by Barthes as jouissance (Barthes 1980). Life is abbreviated in the sudden contact, but then flow back all the stronger, producing an experience that is healthful and materially revitalizing. Towards the close of The Living Mountain, Shepherd reflects on the sense of beauty created when consciousness interacts with mountain forms: It is, as with all creation, matter impregnated with mind: but the resultant issue is a living spirit, a glow in the consciousness, that perishes when the glow is dead. It is something snatched from non-being, that shadow that creeps in on us continuously and can be held off by a continuous creative act. So, 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. (LM 102)

It is an allusive and metaphysical statement, which goes quite beyond Bergson, Driesch and Thomson. The ‘creative act’ sees human conscious vitality transferred to the matter of the mountain through love, bringing it into the ‘domain of being’. What is more, the gift goes both ways, as the beauty of the external world produces a ‘glow in consciousness’. The human is, after all, material, and animated by a ‘living spirit’ strengthened from without. The human and mountain, both equally material in composition, share the ‘glow’, back and forth between them. When Shepherd describes the interpenetration of the mountain’s life and her own, this is as much a physical exchange as an imaginative one.

Vital humanity: The Weatherhouse In The Living Mountain, Shepherd writes of the generosity of the visible and tangible world, finding solace in the mountain teeming with life. The mountain, as she explains, becomes her ‘secret place of ease’ (LM xliii) during the years of the Second World War, a stark contrast to the conflict-torn continent. But Shepherd’s vitalism is not apolitical or distinct from the major geopolitical events of her time. Vitalism, instead, offers a way of understanding the freedom and creativity of life, opening up an awareness of the continuities between humanity and the living world.

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To explore this, we need to look back to her second novel, The Weatherhouse. It was published in 1930 but set during the First World War in the fictional rural community of Fetter-Rothnie. A modernist experiment in multi-perspective storytelling, its plot centres around the return of the soldier Garry Forbes, who has been granted medical leave from the trenches after experiencing a traumatic shock. On his return, he discovers that a local woman, Louie Morgan, has been spreading the lie that she was engaged to his friend David, who recently died of tuberculosis. Aghast at her dishonesty, Garry decides to expose her, but the act of pursuing right over wrong brings Garry into contact with the complexity, ambivalence and suffering of human experience. Speaking with Louie, he discovers a strange and pitiful motivation behind the lie which would make exposing her to public scorn a pointlessly cruel act. She is simply a lonely, delusional girl, someone ensnared by her own silly, opportunistic lie and unable to emotionally withstand the fallout of confessing. Garry is shocked and saddened by the discovery and decides to leave her well alone. What he doesn’t realize is that an older aunt of his fiancée, the isolated, rather visionary Ellen, has been swept up by Garry’s rousing monologues about the importance of pursuing the light of truth. In a public meeting place, Ellen jumps to her feet and exposes Louie, to Garry’s mortification. The lesson learnt is that, having once interfered, he finds himself entangled in ‘a complex web of relationships’, capable of disturbing the community in unpremeditated ways (Watson 1996: vi). This rather complicated and also rather mundane plot is underpinned with theories of neovitalism. It is through these theories that Shepherd expounds the ethical lessons of the book, and through neovitalism that we understand Garry, and his attitudes towards life, better. Before the war, Garry trained as an engineer and was fired up by the technical science of shaping and controlling the physical world. Accordingly, the young man introduced by Shepherd on his return from the frontline is a detached and superior character. By inclination and occupation, he looks at the earth as raw, dumb matter, ripe for manipulation and control. On his return to Fetter-Rothnie, he is disgusted by the land, which he sees as stagnant and dead. Unexpectedly, for one returning from the horrors of the trenches, it is the battlefields he yearns for: Standing there on the ridge, dimly aware of miles of dark and silent land, Garry felt a sort of scorn for its quietude. [. . .] ‘This place is dead,’ he thought. The world he had come from was alive. Its incessant din, the movement, the vibration that never ceased from end to end of the war-swept territory, were earnest of a human activity so enormous that the mind spun thinking about it. Over there one felt oneself part of something big. One was making the earth. (WH 56)

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In the industrialized battlefield, among the din and vibrations of explosions, Garry experienced the thrills of mechanized modernity. Hubristic illusions of total control extend to the omnipotent fantasy of producing the earth itself. Only humanity has this creative potential, he believes, which is fully realized in the throbbing, moving, mechanized battlescape. But more than this, Garry extends his disgust beyond the land, and to the people who live there. The ‘old wives and ploughmen’ of his childhood home-from-home suddenly seem to him as dead as the earth: they are like ‘men made from the earth, dumb graceless, burdened’, for whom he feels ‘a sort of scorn’ (WH 56). To explain exactly how disturbing Garry’s vision of these dumb lives is, we need to consider the context in which Shepherd wrote, and in which the neovitalist movement played out. Driesch insisted that neovitalism tended towards theories of freedom, as life was a profligate quality which knew no boundaries. However, during the 1920s and 1930s, neovitalism was appropriated and misused by Nazi theorists, pursing fascist and anti-Semitic agendas. Nazi programmes to improve physical fitness, promote wholefoods and support families who were more ‘vital’, and hence more ‘valuable’, according to racist, eugenicist pseudoscience, were underpinned by an appropriated form of neovitalism, ‘as the basis for reviving old German cultural myths of the Volkish unity of man and nature’ (Allen 2008: 58). As well as being a misunderstanding of Driesch’s thought, this was also highly inconsistent with fascist ideology. The fascism of the 1930s was inherently mechanistic in its understanding and exploitation of the human. Fascist scientists, politicians, artists and scholars understood the relation between state and subject in terms of mechanization. As anti-fascist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich claimed, in conditions of modernity: What is called civilised man is in fact angular, machine-like, without spontaneity; it has developed into an automaton and a ‘brain machine’. Man not only believes that he functions like a machine, he does in fact function like a machine. (Reich 293)

These machine-men were easier to control, manipulate and synthesize into a political state, which also functioned like a machine. Deterministic theories dominated medicine, psychology and politics, while mechanization organized fields of work and leisure. Driesch robustly resisted the machine model of fascism as well as its appropriation of vitalism, asserting that ‘mechanistic functioning was the antithesis of life’ (Allen 2008: 54). Entelechy, he insisted, was spontaneous, organic and indiscriminately life-centred and could not be

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contained by racist or nationalist categories. In 1933, the Nazi government retired him from his university post, and in 1935 his rights to travel and lecture were revoked (Allen 2008: 59). He was ‘one of the first non-Jews to be stripped of his professorship by the Nazis because he objected to their use of vitalism to justify a German conquest of “less vital” peoples’ (Bennett 69). No one organism, he maintained, could be more or less vital than any other. Many of these events took place after The Weatherhouse was published. However, it is striking to see Shepherd address the brutality of appropriated neovitalist thought through the character of Garry Forbes. This theme is explored in five key moments – first, when he arrives back in Fetter-Rothnie and stands high above the community. Second, a moment later as he descends. Next, when he is pursuing his quest; a fourth time atop the ridge after the secret has been exposed; and finally, after the dust has settled, when he stands and looks out from on the ridge again. Charting what takes place at each of these moments reveals that Garry’s changing attitudes to matter, vitality and the land act as a weathervane for his changing approach to his neighbours and the human. His dualistic sense of the distinction between spirit and matter, as well as what counts as ‘living’ and ‘dead’, impoverishes his ethical relations with both the land and the people who work and live there, and it is only in the final moment, when his thinking more closely approximates the kind Shepherd explored in The Living Mountain, is Garry restored. First, then, standing on the ridge above Fetter-Rothnie, Garry believes himself transcendent above the dumb materiality into which the community is sunk. While he is full of zeal, righteousness and vitality, those around him seem like ‘a community of clods’ (Watson 1996: vii). Reproducing the traditional dichotomy between matter and spirit, body and mind and nature and human, Garry elevates himself as a kind of vitalized, transcendent agent, above dumb and dead working people and the land. As he descends from the ridge, however, a new fear engulfs him. Sunk amid the darkness of the land about him, he experiences a vision of the folk who have lived, warred and died before him. A pageant of Scottish history passes before his eyes, seeming to emerge from the primordial darkness. How will he resist the deadening forces of darkness and dumb nature, encircling the living spark? As Shepherd puts it, a ‘dark truth’ was thrust upon him ‘in his walk that evening, where time and the individual ceased to matter’ (WH 58). His quest, as the heroic individual, is to maintain his independence from the disgusting, decaying mess of the community and the dumb nature in which they wallow. But this living world keeps threatening to pull him in. In this spirit of angsty self-righteousness, he is ripe to interfere in the Louie Morgan scandal. Looking again at the fields in this third moment, he now sees a

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landscape subject to human cultivation and industry, where before it had been an ‘empty land [. . .] taking form from the primordial dark’ (WH 85). In this moment of assurance, he aligns himself with the men from the past who, using strength and grit, shaped unyielding matter to provide the means of sustenance over generations. With the eye of the engineer he experiences a fantasy of mastery, and yet he is also suddenly aware that he has discovered himself to be in a ‘teasing tangle’, as though ‘nets of spider-web, or some dark stinging noxious weed from under the ocean’ had been flung over them all (WH 86). Vegetal and insect agencies mobilize, imaginatively, to draw him back into the gross materiality of the living world. The fourth time Garry mounts the ridge, he has heard Louie’s confession in full. In an absolute reversal of attitude, the earth now seems ‘essentialised’: it is ‘insubstantial’, a ‘distillation that light had set free from the earth’ in contrast to the ‘primordial dark’ of the gross and mired world he saw before (WH 112, 113). Earth appears before him as ‘transmuted’, ‘substance become spirit’. He attempts to resolve his previous contempt for the cloddish community with a dualistic, spiritualized sense of their potential transfiguration: the people whom the land had made – they too, had been shaped from a stuff as hard and intractable as their rock; through weathers as rude as stormed upon their heights; they too (he thought) at moments were dissolved in light, had their hours of transfiguration. (WH 113)

This visionary proposition is much in keeping with Shepherd’s poetry in In the Cairngorms: the world has been created by ‘a god thought out in light’, as she puts it. It raises Garry’s mood, and the land and people, in his estimation too. His education is not, however, complete. This metaphorical transfiguration and dematerialization suggest that they are only vitalized in surges of elation and nobility. The rest of the time, they remain dumb. This produces an unhelpful binary and reveals that Garry still sees himself as transcendent above his neighbours and the material world. Even though he has lost some of his arrogance and exceptionalism, he still tends to see the world in terms of a spirit/ matter binary: ‘Limits had shifted, boundaries been dissolved. Nothing ended in itself, but flowed over into something else’ (WH 118). A feverish new vision comes to him: of solid realities melting into ‘forms he could not recognise’: the solid earth and folk transformed into new shapes, his aunt turned into a boulder, and then a ‘dancing star’ with neither ‘form nor substance’ (WH 119). This vision of life ‘essentialized’ will not do. It is also impossible, as far as neovitalism is concerned. The vital essence, according to the theories Shepherd

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drew from, does not exist separately to matter. Such thinking is pure dualism, in which the life essence exists as a kind of energy, spirit or, to use Shepherd’s metaphor, light. This fallacy can be seen echoed in descriptions of the natural world at various points in the novel. For example, willows seen in the morning light are described as such: ‘their stamens held so lightly to the tree that they seemed like the golden essence of life escaping to the liberty of air’ (WH 59). Such similes are poetic but meaningless: a kind of ‘glamourie’, which Shepherd admits that she does not care for because it ‘interposes something artificial between the world, which is one reality, and the self ’ (LM 93). The commonplace itself must be ‘irradiated’, as Shepherd outlined in a neovitalism-infused statement of her aesthetic vision found in her letters (and discussed in this book’s Introduction) (Shepherd 1930). In The Weatherhouse, this is achieved through the character Paradise, a nickname for the elderly Annie Dyce. Quiet and content in the Weatherhouse community, Paradise embodies the discovery that it takes Garry the duration of the novel to reach. Although her name implies the apotheosis of spiritualism, her life is really in the commonplace and in all living things: ‘She was hard-knit, like a homemade worsted stocking’ and cannot be thought of except in association with ‘chickens newly hatched from the shell . . . with dark, half-known, sweet-smelling corners in the barn, and the yielding, sliding, scratching feel of hay’ (WH 2). This list of Paradisiacal textures, smells, tastes, substances and motions runs on for a whole page of the book. It is not in life dematerialized, Shepherd suggests, but in enlivened matter, that paradise can be found. As Annie Dyce says to her brother, ‘I’m as much of Paradise as you are like to see, my lad’ (WH 3). After Louie has revealed her secret, Garry ensconces himself in the life of Fetter-Rothnie, building new connections and acknowledging the relations which already bind him. The more he learns of others, the more he realizes that his inflated sense of right and wrong, truth and falsehood, are simplifications and abstractions unable to account for the complexity of communities and the places they inhabit. His changing perception of the land is connected to his deepening understanding of his place in regard to other people, the community and the wider net of ecological relations. Having seen the landscape once as mass and darkness, once as substanceless and irradiated with light, Garry finally sees the world as neither light, nor matter, but both complexly intermingled: ‘he saw it as neither crass nor rare, but both in one.’ Moving beyond simple binaries, Garry approaches the life of others with love, astonished by what he can understand and what he cannot in the ‘secret nature’ of the world. His thoughts turn to the community, the people he dismissed, as ‘dumb, graceless, burdened’: ‘he was

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thinking no longer of the land, but of the men. Not irradiated by an alien light, but in themselves, through all the roughness of their make what strange and lovely glimpses on could have of their secret nature!’ (WH 176). The vital essence is not stronger in some men, and weaker in others, and neither is it a property contained in the human, animal or plant. The isolated visionary of the novel, Ellen Falconer, has a rare flash of inspiration, telling him that the farmers and villagers ‘too are men’. [This] seemed to him the wisest saying he had heard. He looked again at the wide leagues of land. And a curious thing happened. He saw everything he looked at not as substance, but as energy. All was life. Life pulsed in the clods of earth that the ploughshares were breaking, in the shares, the men. Substance, no matter what its form, was rare and fine. (WH 175)

Now, Garry sees the thrilling quality of life in everything: human, earth and supposedly inert objects (the ploughshare) too. This equalizing of all matter occasions a new kind of ethical and political relation of equality and mutual responsibility. What is so unexpected and thrilling about this is Garry ‘had learned all that in college. But only now it had become real. Every substance had its own secret nature, exquisite, mysterious’ (WH 175–6). Garry was, we can presume, trained in materialist and mechanistic sciences, but this line suggests Shepherd envisaged an education in neovitalism which resembled her own. This knowledge has been buried beneath ways of knowing more appropriate for an engineer and soldier. In place of a theory of matter which exposes it to instrumentalization, measurement and analysis, Garry realizes there are secret qualities to matter and humanity alike.

New materialism Garry comes to realize that substance has its own secret nature, while The Living Mountain charts a burgeoning awareness of the mountain’s life. In both these texts, Shepherd offered new interpretations of neovitalist thinking, extending the work of its key theorists to consider the ethical, political and ecological implication of a theory of enervating life. This final section considers how her writing premediates trends in the new materialism: the theories of vitality which have emerged over the last decade to challenge commonplace assumptions that matter is inanimate and lacking agency. I will then turn back

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to her writing, to consider what happens when Shepherd is read through a new materialist lens. While the world is obviously absolutely material, the properties and behaviour of matter have often been obscured and overlooked. Challenging this erasure, new materialism engages with the sciences, in particular quantum physics, to expose and expand deep-rooted assumptions about matter and materiality. According to older Newtonian understandings of matter, ‘material objects are identifiably discrete; they move only upon an encounter with an external force or agent, and they do so according to a linear logic of cause and effect’ (Coole and Frost 7). More recent breakthroughs in physics have determined that matter is not inert but possesses ‘its own modes of self-transformation, self-organization, and directedness’. In contrast to both Newtonian physics and the Cartesian matter, cogito divide, in modern physics matter, is recognized instead as indeterminate, constantly forming and reforming in unexpected ways. One could conclude that ‘matter becomes’ rather than ‘matter is’. It is in these choreographies of becoming that we find cosmic forces assembling and disintegrating to forge more or less enduring patterns that may provisionally exhibit internally coherent, efficacious organization: objects forming and emerging in ways that are corporeally meaningful for them. (Coole and Frost 10)

Matter’s capacity for self-transformation means that rather than having reached a final physical form, it is forever in an ongoing process of becoming. Matter is, as Karan Barad states, ‘substance in its intra-becoming – not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency’ (Barad 151, emphasis in original). This demands a physical, biological and also philosophical model which recognizes matter as a thing-agent participating in environmental and historic change, influencing the outcome of events, and acting distinct from human intentions and expectations: for example, in material formations such as water (which flows and evaporates), food (which grows, rots, affects the body mass and mood of those who consume it) and soil (whose disintegrative work is visible to any gardener), but also in supposedly fixed and stable inorganic entities such as stone and metal. New materialisms have implications for thinking about human–nature relations, as well as political organization and ethics. The core proposals of new materialism – including ‘connectivity, nonlinear causality, trans-corporeality, material agency, and an ethics of more-than-human “mattering”’ – are, as Kate Rigby outlines, ‘likely to make far more sense within an Indigenous horizon of understanding’ than reductive materialisms or New Age spiritualisms (284). At

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a moment in which Indigenous rights movements are gaining new ground in the long decolonial struggle to wrest back land and water rights, new materialism may present itself as a meaningful and respectful ontological starting point for non-Indigenous thinkers and activists seeking to engage with and support Indigenous communities, but rightly seeking to avoid appropriating Indigenous world views. The notion that matter and land are ‘sentient, agentic and speaking matter’, whose vitality is ‘sustained through practices of care that are inextricably social and ecological’, is, as Rigby reflects, reflected in Aboriginal understanding of ‘country’ (284). These beliefs produce radically different ways of treating the land, and organizing human society, than found in modern Euro-Westernized Australia, with its construction of passive matter and Nature ‘over yonder’. Bennett, though not coming from the perspective of Indigenous ontologies, yet advocates on behalf of vital matter because her ‘hunch is that the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalised matter feeds human hubris and our earthdestroying fantasies of conquest and consumption’ (Bennett ix). In conflict with a mechanistic materialism, Bennett proposes that multiple material components interact in networks of ‘assemblages’, after Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Assemblages are hodgepodges of heterogeneous elements and agencies which interact in lively and indeterminate ways. Conglomerated in these groupings, matter participates in and influences events believed to be under human control (Bennett xvii). Foodstuffs such as alcohol and fats, for example, have particular ‘strivings and trajectories . . . as they weaken or enhance the power of human wills, habits, and ideas, shaping the dispositions of persons and nations’ (Bennett 43). Rather than being an object or tool, matter in its interrelations with other elements, energies and agents, takes on the properties of an actant. As numerous ‘synthetic’ material agencies and conglomerations of matter interact with ‘natural’ elements, the nature/culture divide also frays. For example, an electric grid may be considered a human-made entity, but seen as an assemblage it is a corporate entity, bringing magnetism, fossil fuels, metals, bacteria, human operators, food and plastics into complex and indeterminate interrelation. There is a satisfying symmetry to the fact that Shepherd’s writing of the life is being revived at the same moment that Bergson and Driesch have come to the attention of new materialists. Their assertions that the ‘vital force’ has creative agency is one step away from the more recent notion that matter itself is a creative agent, acting ‘freely’. Freedom, in this sense, is the quality of an action, rather than the property of a doer. As Elizabeth Grosz states, after Bergson, ‘[f]reedom is not a transcendent quality inherent in subjects but is immanent in the relations that the living has with the material world, including other forms of life’ (Grosz 148).

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Life’s indeterminate quality ensures the absolute freedom of bodies, both living and non-living, to act in ways that create the conditions for both lives and the life force itself. Bennett, likewise, draws from Driesch and Bergson, though breaks from their theories of creative potentialities to assert an inherent vitality to all things. If matter is not inactive, then it is always in motion, even in rocks and metals where its movement often only becomes perceptible in deep time frames. As the editors of Material Ecocriticism outline, matter is both an entangled matrix of agencies and a ‘storied’ substance, which produces signifying forces through its enmeshment of ‘meanings, properties, and processes’ (Iovino and Opperman 2). This involves a reassessment of the kinds of agencies who produce stories and meaning, and the exciting proposal that ‘all material life experience is implicated in creative expressions’, as Opperman suggests (21).

Shepherd and new materialism New materialism offers ways of interpreting the distinctive anthropomorphism and zoomorphism of Shepherd’s writing. We know she was informed by neovitalism, developing a relational ethics in which plants, rocks and ‘inanimate’ entities are revealed in the processes of becoming and intra-becoming. What, then, might a new materialist lens bring to Shepherd’s writing? What happens when a critical framework, developed in response to the same theories that motivated a writer, is used to consider that work anew? We can start by thinking about the assemblage. This is a conglomeration of entities, energies and agencies, interacting in complex ways to produce unpredictable ends. The economy of the red deer, for example, discussed already, looks quite different when considered as an assemblage. This environmentally ruinous industry is one that Shepherd ‘has no sympathy for’, although she ‘knows a turn of the wrist will not end it’ (LM 80). So the one outspokenly political section of The Living Mountain ends on a rather ambivalent note. But how can we make strong pronouncements about intervening and correcting injustices and environmental issues bound up in assemblages? The economy of the red deer self-evidently connects humanity, deer, moor and money. As an assemblage, other elements involved may include water, soil, fire, firearms, foodstuffs, lifestyles, language, capital and class systems. This non-exhaustive list demonstrates the ‘sticky’ tendencies of assemblages, and also their capacity as a critical tool to reveal the distributed forms of agency which influence any heterogeneous grouping of elements. Once their interconnectedness is revealed,

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proposing a change to the economy of the red deer is revealed to be far from a simple matter, and one that involves a collection of factors and elements both closely and more loosely associated. New materialism posits that all matter is constantly transforming: ‘matter becomes’ rather than ‘matter is’ (Coole and Frost 10). A closer look at The Living Mountain reveals a world in fluid motion, and matter in a constant process of becoming. Chapter seven, ‘The Plants’, begins: ‘I have written of inanimate things, rock and water, frost and sun; and it might seem as though this were not a living world.’ This misapprehension is at once dispelled: ‘I have wanted to come to the living things through the forces that create them’ (LM 48). Life is an inherent capacity of matter and produces the conditions for life in new configurations. More than this, life on the mountain is not just a component of organisms like plants and animals. The growth of hardy mountain plants from bare rock reveals the capacity for so-called dead and inert matter to be enlivened: heather, Shepherd states, ‘grows in its most profuse luxuriance on granite, so that the very substance of the mountain is in its life’ (LM 50–1). Rocks and water do not just become vital at the moment their component parts are absorbed into a living thing as nutrients. According to Shepherd’s understanding of mountain ecology, to speak of one thing as having life, and another as not, makes no sense, as [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’ (LM 48). Shepherd’s verb choices – disintegrating, quickening, nurturing – emphasize this hidden reality. This is not a landscape of fixed entities, but a knot of matter in processes of intra-becoming. What we see, falsely, as ‘the mountain’ in the singular, is continually being produced and reproduced through multiple, innumerable material actions and intentions. She often describes coming to awareness of this intra-becoming through tricks of perception. As early as In the Cairngorms, she was writing short poems concerned with capturing moments of arrestingly strange vision which reveal the hidden unity of things. ‘Flood’ describes a rare vision of a water-soaked world after ‘The pools came over the brim at night’. ‘And all of a sudden the world was strange / With the strangeness of things that seem / More familiar the more they change’, she writes (IC 24). Water disturbs mundane perception, both mystifying and demystifying the world and revealing a strange relationship between things which feel paradoxically familiar. She goes on to describe the vision as the ‘queer familiar forms’ that reign in a dream, invoking Freud’s notion of the uncanny as something that is well known, but has been repressed. The implication is that you don’t need a degree in philosophy to witness this intra-becoming: there is an

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intuitive quality to it, suggested by the way perception interacts with the world, given enough time and close attention. In The Living Mountain, she describes how sitting quietly she witnessed ‘the stones come alive with small forms like flakes of the stone blown eddying upon the air’ (LM 67). This is not stone coming to life but small birds whose feathers resemble their surroundings emerging from rocky hiding places. In a moment of confusing enchantment, underlying material interrelations are revealed, for the co-habitation of birds with the stones has resulted in such complete camouflage. Rocks have nourished animal life on the hillside, but also can be said to have agency. They cycle through different stages and forms of ‘life’, from mountain mass to boulder, pebble and soil, dispersing with water and nutrient cycles and accruing cultural meaning and uses as they go. Liveliness is extended to the land as well. When Shepherd moves her eye slowly, she realizes static things are not static: the ‘changing of focus in the eye, moving the eye itself when looking at things that do not move, deepens one’s sense of outer reality. Then static things may be caught in the very act of becoming’ (LM 10–11), like the earth that bristles and arches its back. If so-called empirical reality has been shaped by modern constructions of inanimate and animate, then altered perception affords a glimpse into the vitality of a living world that is, like the viewer, never still.

The life of water In her poem, ‘Flood’, Shepherd describes water as a conduit for change and a perception-altering substance. New materialist thinking has also undergone a hydrological, as well as material, turn. Theorists have looked to water as a material flow which connects bodies across space and time, and as an agency in its own right. Often instrumentalized and treated as resource and capital, water produces the conditions for life, shapes landscapes and ecologies and mediates social relations. Water’s materiality, agency and liveliness tend, however, to be made invisible through culverting, plumbing, bottling and damming. Unless it is causing disruption through flood, or is the subject of resource conflict, ‘waters are often conveniently forgotten and assumed to be malleable resource’, as the editors of Thinking with Water explain. In this way, water is instrumentalized, hidden and ‘relegated to a passive role’ (Chen 3). But conscious attention to liquid presences and the act of ‘thinking with water’ acknowledges our sensuous, imaginative and pleasurable cultural and personal relations with water: the

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‘spiritual meanings’, ‘stories, identities, and memories’ that water gathers (Chen 5). The body itself is a watery substance, responsive to seasonal rhythms and tidal pulls. The loveliness of water attracts us in pools and lakes, while the environmental responsiveness of water – its ability to transform from steam, frost and free running substance – beguiles through encounters with absolute fluid otherness. On the other hand, thinking with water exposes the political and ethical dimensions of watery interrelations. Water is matter held in common, flowing across national borders and the boundaries of ethnic groups and cultures. In an era of climate change, toxic leaching, drought, flood and resource conflict, ecocultural understandings of water reveal its power and potency, as well as the ways in which it may thwart its own instrumentalization and control (Chen 4). New materialist approaches to water demand new models of ethics and citizenship, attentive to the ways in which water binds places and people together, but also creates places and makes societies and human lives possible. How can this thinking enlighten a reading of Shepherd? It is clear she finds water a beguiling substance. In her poem ‘Hill Burns’, she describes it leaping from the mountain rock, ‘Living water / Like some pure essence of being, Invisible by itself, / Seen only in its movement’ (IC 9). Water is only really seen in its interrelations with other matters: the granite, air and heath it shapes and waters. Shepherd devotes a whole chapter to the captivating qualities of running water in The Living Mountain, and another to its miraculous changes of state in ‘Frost and Snow’. In these sections, she explores a human dependence on water which is embodied, spiritual, sensuous, imaginative and existential. Alive to water’s capacity to entice and revitalize, Shepherd also recognizes that water exposes our physical and social vulnerabilities, binding lives and processes together ecologically and politically. Some passages on this shape-shifting substance are practically animistic. Following the sound of water in the Lairig Ghru, she notes how ‘[t]hey have no visible means of support, no stream is seen to enter them; but their suppressed sparkle tells that they are living water’ (LM 23). What is witnessed, in the pools, is the secretive operations of matter which create life and are life, connecting matter and conveying life through touch and taste: ‘This water from the granite is cold. To drink it at the source makes the throat tingle. A sting of life is in its touch’ (LM 26). A sense of water’s health-giving properties extends beyond mere hydration. Water is a vital elixir, bringing strength and life: ‘I only know that man can’t live without it. He must see it and hear it, touch and taste it, and, no, not smell it, if he is to be in health’ (LM 28).

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Water epitomizes flow: it is always moving, always changing, even when seemingly captured spontaneously, in puddles and pools, or artificially in bottles and dams. Containing water may be interpreted as an act of dominion, but reflection on an incident from Shepherd’s childhood establishes a relation of humility with this wilful substance which informs her adult approach to the hills: When I was a child, I loved to hold my fingers over the tap at full cock and press with all my puny strength until the water defeated me and spurted over my newly-laundered frock. Sometimes I have had the insane impulse to hold back with my fingers a mountain spring. Absurd impulse! The water is too much for me. (LM 28)

The desire to plug up the tap, charming though it is in a child, can also represent a desire to capture and control. However, whether domesticated or wild water, water is uncontainable: its relentless flow and other-than-human strength push against the body, insisting on its strength. Fording a stream, Shepherd records how ‘my body is tensed with the effort to stand erect against its sweep’ (LM 27). Pushed back by the water, she decides to take another route. In acknowledging water’s capacity to exceed anthropogenic control, Shepherd is brought up against her own vulnerability. Control of water has, however, been vital to the industries and culture of the Cairngorms. Whisky distilleries, forestry and hydroelectric dams are all dependent on the channelling and management of water. Shepherd is sensitive to the ecocultural relations with water established by crofters, and sceptical about attempts to bring the local industries and waterways into official regulation. A crofter secretly distilling the ‘mountain dew’ – illegal whisky – cheats the official gauger with his know-how in operating the river sluices. Sluices were built during the development of the eighteenth-century forestry industry, ‘when the ancient woodland rang with the activity of the fellers’ (LM 55). When the crofter opens the sluice so that the gauger cannot pass by, he subverts a technology of ecological domination, and in the process saves his secret stores from the taxman’s ken. Much like the crofters who make their lives in the mountains, water can only be partially tamed. It is constantly surprising, manifesting in new ways in a tug of power between human control and watery agency. Water has, after all, shaped and created the valleys and plains of the Cairngorms. This power is apparent only when its antiquity is fully appreciated. At Loch Avon, a ‘long gash’ of water is cut deep in the mountains, but ‘[a]s one looks up from below, the agents would appear to be mere splashes of water, whose force

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might be turned aside by a pair of hands’ (LM 12). Where she expects strength and cataclysmic action, she finds a gentle, accretive, temporally extended agency. Once again, the tender and minute touch of the human hand is juxtaposed with this slow-working watery agency in ways that confound expectations about the intensity and strength of forces that shape mountains. Ideas about materiality and flow define the hydrological turn in contemporary new materialism, but comparable ideas were in circulation in Shepherd’s time. In Thomson’s Mountain and Moorland, the movement of the walking and exploring human is paralleled with the movement of lives, processes and matter in and through the land. Thomson begins by describing how [t]he mist on the mountain-tops far ahead of us is a thin cloud, always changing as the air-current flows slowly or quickly on, and many of the minute particles of water suspended in the air sink on to the rocks and lichens and mosses.

The biologist is able to trace the permutations of the watery substance as it soaks into the roots of plants to be converted to starch, or quenches the thirst of a mammal, finding its way into the creature’s breath and sweat. Many stages of the hydrological cycle are apparent on the hillside in pools and streams too. Drops of water ‘escaping all capture by bird or beast, by plant or by mineral matter’ make their way to the sea. In these flows of water between bodies, Thomson sees the movement of materiality and of life itself written large: ‘[s]o, as we set out on our walk over the hills, we start with the big idea of the circulation of matter. As the old Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, “all things flow”; and surely that is above all true of water’ (Thomson 1921: 10, emphasis in original). Water is both a lifebringing entity and a material current exercising agency and purpose, threading through mountain ecology. It is transformed into other kinds of matter and forms of life, meaning nothing is ever lost, but passes from one embodiment to another. Nature is not ‘quiescent’ or in a static state: ‘matter itself must be in motion, and the scenes of life a continued or repeated series of agitations and events,’ as James Hutton put it (209). There are formal and metaphorical parallels between Shepherd’s and Thomson’s writing: for example, the emphasis on movement and the desire to follow material and watery flows up and down food chains and biological systems. This is best seen in The Living Mountain, with the metaphorical confusion of categories. At a moment of surprised perception, light seems like water and snow like sea: ‘There was nothing there but an immense stretch of hummocked snow. Or was it sea? It gleamed, and washed the high hills as the sea washes rock’ (LM 18). The difference is that although Thomson is not reductive

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or hubristic in his writing, nonetheless his biologist’s account exudes confidence and understanding. Every drop of water is accounted for; all matter is caught up in chains of interdependence. For Shepherd, many permutations of water and matter have no obvious purpose, either towards survival or the maintenance of an ecological status quo. Watery flows have a formative capacity, which begs to be interpreted as sheer exuberance: ‘The battle fluctuates, and at the point of fluctuation between the motion in water and the immobility of frost, strange and beautiful forms are evolved’ (LM 29); and later ‘there is no end to the lovely things that frost and the running of water can create between them’ (LM 32). The apparent intention and artistry of some watery forms suggest that if there is agency here, it is creative, rather than a simply functional one: ‘They look unreal, in this world of wayward undulations, too regular, as though man had made them’ (LM 31). What is the function of these fabulous materializations? The decorative ripples she finds in ice, the ‘Prince of Wales Feathers’ (LM 33) created by the interplay of wind and frost, can serve no obvious end. Shepherd does not try to explain them away or prove that they are evidence of some underlying and yet undiscovered process. Neither does she dismiss them as the side effects of matter and forces interacting; to do so would be too utterly disenchanting, and her writing always manages to enchant. For example: At one point (I have heard of it nowhere else) near the exit of a loch, the peculiar motion of the current among ice-floes has woven the thousands of floating pineneedles into compacted balls, so intricately intertwined that their symmetrical shape is permanently retained. 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. (LM 33)

The outcomes of these motions are well in excess of mechanistic explanations of the movement of matter, and even of Thomson’s holistic economy of flow. The shapes of frost and the balls of pine needles are the flourishings of a universe whose movements cannot be captured through rudimentary or complex explanations. Life, like art, is often quite useless. The unknowability of water, and its capacity to exceed our explanations of it, is what impresses her most. ‘We make it all so easy, any child at school can understand it,’ she writes: ‘water rises in the hills, it flows and finds its own level’ (LM 28). The explanation is not so easy to understand, however, and the question – why? – worries at her, proving ultimately unanswerable. Water remains strange, and its otherness introduces a disturbance in the anthropomorphic descriptions

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so customary for Shepherd. Some passages follow the more characteristic use of anthropomorphism, attributing agency to the waterways at the same time as she recognizes their other-than-human strangeness and plurality: ‘[t]hey rise from the granite, sun themselves a little on the unsheltered plateau and drop through air to their valleys. Or they cut their way out under wreaths of snow, escaping in a tumult’ (LM 4). This passage suggests an element of choice, variation, character, continuity and almost a personality to the ‘pure and terrible streams’ of the plateau. At other moments she adopts, and then rejects, interspecies comparisons. For example, she toys with zoomorphism to describe how the water of a mountain stream ‘slips out of holes in the earth like an ancient snake’. However, the mystery of water will not be resolved by attributing mythic origins to it: ‘the more I gaze at that sure and unremitting surge of water at the top of the mountain, the more I am baffled’ (LM 27). In The Living Mountain, Shepherd sets out to know and to celebrate the visible and tangible world. It is clear that this is a material world too, whose properties and secret life she may only get to know partially through a deliberate commitment to observation and sensory and imaginative engagement. While the mechanistic movement in science was built upon a separation of inanimate matter from animate life, neovitalist philosophies proposed theories of life in which all matter is one step away from vitality. In Shepherd’s writing, neovitalism blends with ethics, promoting a view of the generosity, equality and persistence of life. At the present moment, as newer forms of philosophical materialism and hydro-ecology drive discussions of humanity’s integrity with the living world, Shepherd’s writing provides a vivid and prescient account of a world defined by action, movement and interchange, uniting bodies, minds and nature.

6

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When Shepherd came to publish The Living Mountain in the 1970s, she worried whether it was ‘a tale too slow for the impatience of our age, not of immediate enough import for its desperate problems’ (LM 1). The original manuscript had been penned during an era of catastrophically deadly conflict. What value could a slim volume on mountains have in such a moment? How to justify its slowness, its layering of impressions over months and years, in pursuit of a rather esoteric objective: a journey into the mountain’s life, and the author’s own? Shepherd’s writing isn’t at all urgent or outspokenly political. It is sensuous, meditative and subtle in its enquiries. Through the fingers, feet and senses, she feels her way into knowledge of the mountain, and then feeds that knowledge back to ask: What kind of ‘being’ is she, in this place? What does it mean to be human, in such a living world? Reading Shepherd’s oeuvre in our own troubled times, we might well ask the same questions. At heart, her writing meditates on the relationship between the body, world and self, exploring how the human is entangled in ecology, co-present in the unravelling of deep time, and a participant in the world’s vibrant materiality. This last chapter explores the culmination of all these threads in the theme of ‘being’ – the word that is also the title of the final chapter of The Living Mountain. Looking first at diverse theories of ‘selfhood’, and then turning to Shepherd’s writing, it explores that it means ‘to be’ in the world. It considers theories of the self that were part of Shepherd’s intellectual climate, including phenomenology and Buddhism. It also explores modern understandings of the self explored in new animism and ecological selfhood. Attention then turns to Shepherd, and to her distinctive writing of the body-mind. As I will show, sensual, physical and affective encounters produce transgressions of the boundary between self, the more-than-human and the human ‘other’. Unsettling the division between self and world calls for an expanded, ‘ecological’ sense of self, capable of meeting the conditions of an interconnected, disrupted ecosphere. It affects how we relate

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to others – human and more-than-human – and understand and attend to our entanglement with lives and processes near and far.

Alternative selves The problem of the ‘I’, and the question of what it is to be a ‘self ’, person or subject, is tied up with the idea of the ‘individual’. The ‘individual’ is, as the term suggests, a singular entity. It is human, holds rights and interacts with other equally singular individuals. The individual, therefore, has agency, and this agency is directed by ‘I’ or self: the seat of personality, experience and ‘authentic’ identity. Ideas about what the individual is emerge from the political and philosophical movements of the European Enlightenment: from rights discourse, which was discussed in ‘Environment’ and from Cartesian thought – the belief that our reality is conferred by our status as a thinking, reflective ‘I’. In literature, the Romantics centred the ‘I’ in new ways and gave new shape to the emerging bourgeois self. This both confirmed poetry’s important role as a self-reflexive genre – where the inner workings of the mind, the foundations of personality and memory and the faculties of creativity and imagination are revealed with startling intimacy – and assured that exposure of the individual self would become one of the core tasks of post-Romantic literature. In Shepherd’s moment, beliefs about what it meant to an individual were being restyled by new intellectual movements. She was writing in the wake of Darwin, whose accounts of the selective mechanisms behind organisms’ behaviour land adaptation led to a widespread assumption that selfish, individualistic actions are somehow evidence that ecology operates as a jostling, Hobbesian universe of clashing individual agents, each competing in fatal game of ‘survival of the fittest’. Psychoanalysis was also hugely influential on Shepherd and on other literary Renaissance writers (like Willa Muir, for example, who folds Freudian ideas into her writing of Scottish women’s lives in Mrs Ritchie). Freud’s theory of the unconscious and the instinctual drive of the ID promoted an image of the self as multilayered and complex, and hence proved rich picking for modernists. However, it also reinforced a notion of the self as an internal system of desires, self-critique and repressions. As Patricia Waugh puts it, psychoanalysis ‘elaborates the essentially defensive and inhibitory nature of consciousness, emphasizing its solipsistic tendencies, its withdrawal from, rather than engagement with, the world’ (Waugh 76). It is no wonder, then, as inheritors of these long traditions, modern Western understanding of the ‘self ’ is so intensely individualistic: that

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is, intensely competitive, private, solipsistic and weirdly resistant to thinking about the social and ecological contexts of our being. As Burkitt puts it, ‘the view of human beings as self-contained unitary individuals who carry their uniqueness deep inside themselves, like pearls hidden in their shells’, is highly persistent (p. 1). Alternative theories of what it means to be a ‘self ’ are, however, manifold, and many were being debated in the same years as Shepherd was studying and writing. The American philosopher William James (1842–1910), for example, developed theories of mind that were hugely influential on modern literature – like the ubiquitous stream of consciousness – and ensured psychologies of selfhood became a core concern of modernist literature through association with American poet and innovator Gertrude Stein and his novelist brother, Henry. In Principles of Psychology, James proposes that the ‘self ’ isn’t a closed-off entity – fully equipped with an inbuilt personality waiting to ‘be’ – but instead emerges in a dynamic relationship between body, mind and environment. The self is both embodied, meaning that we experience the world as a living organism, and extended, meaning that we become ourselves by constantly forming new connections with the world. Developing Darwin’s ideas about adaptation, James promoted an adaptive theory of the mind, in which the ‘self ’ is not just created by the brain but the mind and body interacting, and responding, to stimulus from the environment in which it is situated. ‘[T]he essence of mental and outer life are one,’ he writes: ‘the adjustment of inner to outer relations’ (James 26). This model of consciousness, radical in its day, now finds parallel in modern neurology, as Waugh contends: this suggests that ‘our tacit sense of being in the world is also dependent upon a continuous flow of more indeterminate but pervasive existential feelings that provide for an ontologically secure sense of world and self ’ (Waugh 83). We are endlessly responding to our environment, and it is this presence in the world that guarantees our sense of self and reality. At the same time as Shepherd was writing, the importance of the body and the senses also was being affirmed in the new school of phenomenology. This radical account of being brought the moment-by-moment experience of consciousness to the attention of philosophy, attempting to understand lived experience by looking at the ways in which we actually perceive and experience the world. According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61), older schools of reasoning had spoken as if the philosopher was above the body and the world, like ‘a ray of knowing that would have to arise from nowhere’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 113). Instead, he explored how consciousness rested in the living body, interactive and interdependent in the material world. Central

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to phenomenology was a kind of innocent, direct observation of experience. As another significant phenomenologist Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) put it, the philosopher should put aside what they think they know about the world, and instead pay attention to the ‘pre-theoretic, unobjectified experience-stream’ (Mildenberg 5). This broke away from older traditions in philosopher, with their pre-formed theories about how perception worked. Instead, philosophers could learn from their direct conscious experience. In this way, one might achieve a radically different perspective: ‘what happens is my habitual way of regarding the world is changed: that which was taken for granted now becomes the object of examination’ (Mildenberg 6–7). Husserl was interested in consciousness, but Merleau-Ponty turned attention to the body. This body, he argued, was itself ‘a form of consciousness’ with which we feel our way into knowledge, in ways that precede the cognitive, reasoning processes of mind (Romdenh-Romluc 107). We shouldn’t even think of ‘the mind’ as a separate entity: ‘I’ am not in my body, but I am my body, experiencing the world through a subjectivity which is embodied and incarnate. It is the lived body that ‘perceives objects, knows its way around a room, senses the sadness in another’s face’ (Leder 7). In making these claims, Merleau-Ponty radically extended understanding of what the body was. Not simply a physical mass but a living entity, the body looks at the world through constantly changing positions. This relentless movement means we never see the world entirely, but only through a succession of views and partial glimpses. But because the body is living, we can move and adjust perspective in order to see around and beyond objects of our perception. Knowledge gained through sight and touch is therefore always grounded in a body-in-motion and a body-in-the-world, rather than a ‘ray from nowhere’, or a body settled in a fixed and finite position. As shall be seen, this notion of the body-in-motion has particular resonance with Shepherd’s writing of perception, and her interest in the ‘body mind’. What about the world that holds the body-in-motion? Instead of observing the fixed division between the perceiver and the world, subject and object, Merleau-Ponty made a leap to claim that we are one with the ‘flesh’ of the world. Biologically, of course, we are made of the same stuff as the world and return to it eventually. But more than this, when we sense the world through the body, we also sense the body itself, and know that our body is sensible to others. Visible to others, we are also able to look out from our material bodies as witness and perceiver, toucher and touched. We are at once object and subject, within a fleshy world, looking at that same world from our individual lens. Other perspectives,

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other subjects, ‘have the power to decentre me, to oppose [their] centering to my own’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 82). The flesh of the world is non-hierarchical, and non-anthropocentric and most crucial: there is no one fixed position from which to look. Although we are all part of the flesh, we are not all collapsed into one another, in a kind of consciousness-soup. Creations within the flesh of the world are not identical with it: there is ‘differentiation even as the intertwining of things and creatures ensures their kinship’ (Westling 130). The notion of the ‘fold’ captures this sense of how the perceiver is distinguished from the world, like a fold in a single piece of fabric. ‘I’ experience, according to Merleau-Ponty, the ‘doubling up of my body into inside and outside’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 130). The ‘folded’ self is not the small circle of consciousness ensconced in the shielding body, as in Cartesian thought, but a living body-in-the-world, part of and responsive to it as a corresponding element.

Shepherd’s phenomenology It is no surprise that Shepherd has been compared to the phenomenologists. The body and senses are her ways in to discovering the mountain, but they are not just tools of the mind but forms of consciousness in their own right. As Shepherd explains, in the mountain one may live ‘a life of the senses so pure, so untouched by any mode of apprehension but their own, that the body may be said to think’ (LM 105). To Macfarlane, ‘her philosophical conclusions concerning colourperception, touch and embodied knowledge now read as arrestingly similar to those of Merleau-Ponty’ (2011: xxix). Macfarlane even notices a similarity between their expression and diction (p. xxx). So, is it possible that Shepherd could have read Merleau-Ponty’s work? Unfortunately, it seems unlikely. The Phenomenology of Perception was first published in French in 1945, then in English in 1962, so Shepherd is unlikely to have encountered it while writing The Living Mountain. Her MA degree featured one year of study in French (between 1914 and 1915), but this is a weak foundation for the study of a challenging new work of philosophy published thirty years later (Sabiston). Unlike Driesch, Merleau-Ponty never lectured in Aberdeen; I have come across no works of phenomenology in Shepherd’s scattered library, and no quotes are recorded in her commonplace books. There is, in short, no evidence to suggest she had any contact with Merleau-Ponty’s work.

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Nonetheless, Shepherd can be seen as a literary phenomenologist, who developed her own nuanced understanding of mind–body relations and embodied subjectivity which coincided with Continental theories and accounts of embodied experience developed in literary modernism. After all, phenomenological interest in bodily consciousness overlaps with the experiential and introspective approach developed in the pre- and interwar years by the likes of Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson and James Joyce. These writers, and many others, explored the radical empiricism of experience and ‘the evanescence of the self, its sensational make-up, and the life of its streaming consciousness’ (Matz 28). Jesse Matz describes Woolf ’s fiction as a form phenomenology, with its privileging of the ‘myriad impressions’ that make up the ‘varying . . . unknown and uncircumscribed spirit’ of life itself (Woolf 9). For Mildenberg, phenomenology, modernism and modernity are inextricably interwoven. The new formal and linguistic techniques pioneered by modernists answered the same crisis of modernity and the problem of reality as phenomenology. By attempting to bring readers back to pre-reflective contact with the world, the new aesthetic models of modernism portrayed a relationship with ‘reality’ which was not objective or stable but situated and impermanent. Modernism, like phenomenology, rejects the fantasy of the detached human observer and the stable subject of observation. Places become continuous and transitional with the human, ‘dramatizing the involvement of the perceiver within what is perceived’ (Cantrell 34). Such depictions urge consideration of the materiality of the body and the environment that holds it, as well as the myriad other forms of human and non-human life with which we are intraactively involved. Shepherd, like many other modernists, is fascinated with the shifting perspective. Returning to the mountain again and again, she shares the aesthetic experimentalism of the French Impressionists, who returned repeatedly to the same sites to capture them in different lights and moods. She also evokes Cubism, which twisted perspective to reveal aspects of objects and forms disguised by bodily bounded vision: ‘Half-closing the eyes can also change the value of what I look upon,’ she writes, noting that a ‘scatter of white flowers in grass, looked at through half-closed eyes, blaze out with a sharp clarity as though they had actually risen up out of their background’ (LM 101). In literature, she found fellowship with MacDiarmid who, under the influence of Joyce and Proust, explored the inexhaustibility of impressions – both as they hit the senses and as they are returned to in the mind’s eye – and which beguile with a sense of mental infinitude: ‘Was it like the difference between the actual solid shape of a mountain

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and the different views obtainable from different sides?’ asks MacDiarmid (then writing under his own name, C. M. Grieve) in his Annals of the Five Senses: but ‘none of these outlines were final, and the ultimate content remained behind and eluded them all’ (Grieve 1923: 24). The Living Mountain’s experiments in perspective create fleeting pictures which show angles on the thing itself, but never the thing in its entirety. These pictures, or impressions, cannot be simply reduced to surfaces, illusions or fragments, however: ‘surfaces show depths, . . . fragments suggest wholes’ (Matz 1). Impressions and tricks of perception recall us to our presence in the world, within the living body. Depending on how the eye is placed and used, [illusions] 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. (LM 101)

According to Shepherd, one is ‘unmade’ by the shock of this co-dependence, but steadied again in heightened awareness of the limitlessness of new ways of seeing and positioning ourselves, and changing ourselves in the process: ‘It’s queer but invigorating. It will take a long time to get to the end of a world that behaves like this if I do no more than turn around on my side or my back’ (LM 101), as Shepherd puts it. Her writing is intensely phenomenological, grounded in the direct experience. Moving her head slowly, she realizes that ‘changing of the focus of the eye, moving the eye itself when looking at things that do not move, deepens one’s sense of outer reality. Then static things may be caught in the very act of becoming’ (LM 10). All the senses are important, but it is the eye that gives access to life, not as a transparent window but as part of a responsive body-inmotion in the world. Common to both Shepherd and Merleau-Ponty, then, is the conviction that we are co-present with the world; we are not distinct objects on a static backdrop but part of an ‘intersubjective world composed of a plurality of anonymous subjects, i.e. subjects which are at the same time a self and an other’ (Lau 135). This intersubjectivity is expressed, in Shepherd’s work, through experiences of empathetic identification with other living things. We are not ego cogito, she suggests, but body-subjects, and consequently sensitive to the experience of other perceptible bodies. Remarking on swifts in flight, Shepherd finds herself in empathetic syncopation: ‘It seems odd that merely to watch the motion of flight should give the body not only vicarious exhilaration but release. So urgent is the rhythm that it invades the blood.’ This is what she describes

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as the ‘power of flight to take us into itself through the eyes as though we had actually shared in the motion’ (LM 61). Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the flesh of the world finds further affinity with Shepherd’s notion of bodily oneness. For Merleau-Ponty, the body is able to experience the world because of our mutual fleshiness: the hand knows how to move in relation to the world because both are Flesh. In these moments of identification, we are able to be both within and without of ourselves, able to experience ‘the sensible flesh of the world’ and to experience our bodies as objects of perception: ‘The act of perceiving introduces a division into Flesh, cleaving it into the perceiver and the perceived. In perception, the Flesh becomes self-aware’ (Romdenh-Romluc 103–12, 111). Shepherd also writes of human as both perceiver of and part of the mountain. In sleep, the body becomes like a stone: One is as tranquil as the stones, rooted far down in their immobility. The soil is no more a part of the earth. . . . And after – ceasing to be a stone, of the earth, opening eyes that have human cognisance behind them upon what one has been so profoundly a part of. That is all. One has been in. (LM 92)

Human/environment distinctions have collapsed, and the ‘fold’ has become a little looser. Coming-to involves a re-awakening of bodily cognizance and the senses, as if it is the stone itself that is coming to consciousness, becoming a semi-discrete entity again. Bodily manipulation collapses binaries of self and other, revealing that one is simply part of the braid, a fold in the flesh. The body is an essential vehicle for achieving this new perspective, but paradoxically the body also limits what we can know. As Shepherd states, It is nonsense to suppose, when I have perceived the exquisite division of running water, or a flower, that my separate senses can make, that there would be nothing more to perceive were we but endowed with other modes of perception. (LM 105)

The human body is richly, but incompletely, endowed, and thought cannot go to places that outstrip its sensory-motor capacities: we cannot see what we cannot see, or imagine that we cannot sense. Objective views are impossible, and although Shepherd insists that through meditative practices the senses can be ‘keyed’ (LM 106), the human body is constrained in its quest for knowledge about nature because it is a part of nature. The perceiving human is a creature with a small array of senses, and lacking in many others.

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The Living Mountain is therefore a book about the art of overcoming hubris: the arrogant assumption that humanity can entirely know the living world, or engineer and control it for our own ends. As she explains, her tale ‘has its own rare value. It is, for one thing, a corrective of glib assessment: one never quite knows the mountain, nor oneself in relation to it’ (LM 1). With this humility, and the recognition of our limitations, comes a more various understanding of what it means to know a place: as there is no perfect or complete way in, there is no ideal ‘able’ body to conduct the task. This openness to a variety of ways of perceiving has made her work particularly accessible to writers interested in nature and disability. In an essay on the relationship between the body, illness and walking, Alice Tarbuck describes the comfort and direction The Living Mountain brought to her during a period when illness limited her ability to walk, seeming to sever a relationship with the natural world. Shepherd, she writes, ‘does not lionise walking as an end in itself ’ but ‘understands walking as a means of facilitating other forms of sensory engagement’, including activities which ‘do not require athletic prowess’ or ‘an able body’ (Tarbuck 2018: 20–1). Understanding of the mountain is acquired as much with the hands, through the intimacy of touch, sight and sense as with the feet.

Against individualism Phenomenology emerged as a critique of European philosophy, but alternatives to individualist theories of selfhood are fundamental features of diverse global perspectives and traditions. Many of these critiques have important ecological dimensions and can aid in the final excavation of Shepherd’s account of ‘being’. A direct influence, of course, comes from Buddhism, as interpreted by the British writer Lafcadio Hearn. In contrast to what Hearn calls the European or ‘Occidental Self ’, Buddhism reveals the phantasmagorical nature of identity. The European self is defined by ego, memory, identity and individuality, but in Buddhism, selfhood is seen as a collection of fragments of experience which block the immediacy of the present. This challenges objective and subjective accounts of reality. ‘[W]hat we perceive’, Hearn claimed, ‘is never reality in itself ’, and even ‘the Ego that perceives is an unstable plexus of the aggregates of feelings which are themselves unstable and in the nature of illusions’ (Hearn 126). Hearn kept up to date with developments in evolutionary science and noticed a relationship between Buddhist understanding of Self as a ‘sensuous illusion’, and accounts of Mind given in scientific psychology. Mind is composed of

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‘feelings and the relations between feelings’, which, neurologically speaking, are ‘units of simple sensation’ coincident with ‘minute nervous shocks’. These all have their points of origin in the senses, which are all in effect forms of touch: ‘all the senses are modifications of touch’ which have their point of origin in the skin. All knowledge derives from this physical sensation, experienced moment by moment. This accounts for the Buddhist position ‘that what we call Self is a bundle of sensations, emotions, sentiments, ideas, memories, all relating to physical experiences’ (Hearn 128, emphasis in original). The rejection of the ego intrinsic to Buddhist thought is not a rejection of physical sensation in itself but the ‘self ’ that has been produced through this ‘bundle’. Selfhood is impermanent and illusory, and at the same time, each experience of selfhood is not final. Instead, each mind is capable of participation in the ‘All Self ’. Simply by ‘Being’ (a term Hearn uses extensively), we are part of the ‘Unity’ underlying all things: there is no ‘I’ and ‘Thou’ distinction, not least because sentience is passed down, entity to entity, through the enlivening capacity of matter which makes the minds with which we think and feel (Hearn 125, 130–1). Hearn’s writing emerges from Buddhism, but his idea of a greater ‘unity’ leads us back to phenomenology again, and to further reflection on the importance of bodily experience in Shepherd’s writing. In The Absent Body, Drew Leder investigates the richness and variety of bodily experience, looking at the times the body becomes painfully noticeable (as in disease and injury), and also times we forget the body (in certain kinds of immersive work, meditation or ecstatic worship). As we go about our daily lives, the body ‘is perpetually outside itself, caught up in a multitude of involvements with other people, with nature’ (5–6). Leder even suggests that the experience of communion – moving between individual self and whole – is common to both phenomenology and worship. In this movement, an existential bond with other people, with god/s and with the earth is realized through an ‘experiencing-with’ (Leder 161, emphasis in original). Such communion, Leder continues, underpins a belief in a sacred domain that is shared by numerous world religions. Experiencing communion might involve rituals, songs and dance to promote trance, meditation and stillness, or even ingestion of stimulants or hallucinogens. Indeed, closer inspection reveals that ‘[a]lmost all spiritual traditions use posture and gesture as a means whereby we enter into relation with the divine’ (Leder 173). If we get there, absorption into the sacred realm involves ‘an aesthetic sensitivity to things’ which makes both oneness and compassion possible. It is also this experience through which the boundaries of the self stretch and blur.

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The final piece in the puzzle is the connection to landscape or nature. Religious ecstasies are one way in which people experience the loss of bodily sensation that immerses us intensely in the world, but another form is immersion in living environments: what psychologists interested in the restorative capacities of nature describe as ‘being away’. According to Leder, ‘When we become deeply absorbed, as in a natural landscape, it is as if we are swallowed into a larger body. At the same time, this landscape is swallowed into our embodiment, transforming it from within’ (Leder 162, 165). The senses, consciousness and somatic sensations intra-act to promote an experience of the spaciousness, rhythms and life of world, a feeling of ecstasy in which the ‘boundaries between inner and outer become porous’ (Leder 165). The connection between the kinds of experiences Shepherd describes in the mountain, and these sensations of oneness, should be already becoming apparent. One final word, then, before we turn to Shepherd’s writing of selfhood and her interest in ‘oneness’ between people and place. As awareness of human entanglement in the living world deepens, philosophical models of selfhood have developed in order to accommodate an altered sense of what personhood and self-other relations might look like, or need to look like, to generate truly ecological behaviour. One key school of thought looks to trends in physics and ecological science to find new scientific and metaphysical groundwork for an ‘ecological selfhood’. Freya Mathews, for example, explores how theories developed by Albert Einstein and J. A. Wheeler demolish the principles of Newtonian atomism, with ramifications for science and experiences of personhood. Newton’s view of physical pluralism held that substances, like atoms, were ‘ontologically autonomous entities’, held together in causal relations, though ultimately demarcated ‘in space and time, enclosed within a physical boundary, discrete from all other physical things’ (Mathews 91). In the geometrodynamics J. A. Wheeler developed during the 1950s, an alternative account of reality emerged: one concerned with an ‘indivisible, holistic, and intrinsically dynamic’ physical world, bound together as a ‘single, extended, universal substance’. In order to describe the phenomenological as well as the physical experience of individuation, Mathews points out how substances gather in knots of matter, or how ripples in waves of electromagnetic and gravitational activity produce seemingly discrete physical events in ‘space-time’ (Mathews 59– 60). The individual, within space-time, is akin to a ‘complex ripple propagating in its depths’, akin to the fold in the flesh of the world described by Merleau-Ponty. The suggestion is that ecological selfhood may lead to behavioural change, urging a radical identification with non-human beings, environments and earth

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processes. Mathews describes selfhood as a ‘self-maintaining [vortice]’ which, like the ripples and eddies observed on the water’s surface, are both autonomous systems and dependent on the wider structures, processes and conditions ‘in which they are embedded’ (Mathews 107). Separated from the general flux, the ‘self ’ realizes itself for a time within a unity of which it is also a part. We are ‘selves-within-wider-selves’, and other people, more-than-human creatures and processes are not merely parts of the ‘world around us’, but the world with us, to whose existence and flourishing we cannot be indifferent (Mathews 158, 160). In quite different ontologies, ideas of selfhood arise from social relations themselves. In The Gender of the Gift, Marilyn Strathern compares European philosophies of being to the multiple ‘selves’, or ‘dividuals’ of Melanesian culture. In place of the ‘unique entities’ of the individualist self, ‘Melanesian persons are as dividually as they are individually conceived’. Dividuality means that selfhood is negotiated and expressed through social relationships, as the person carries the relations of the community within them, as a ‘plural composite site of the relations that produced them, and as internal “social microcosm”’ (Strathern 12–13). This idea of the dividual as ‘a person constitutive of relationships’ has subsequently been adopted by Nurit Bird-David to describe the personhood experience of the Nayaka people of southern India (Bird-David 40). Dividuality, according to Bird-David, describes a relational model of personhood where a human being is not individuated as a ‘single separate entity’ but is dividuated, meaning: ‘I am conscious of the relatedness with my interlocutor as I engage with her, attentive to what she does in relation to what I do, to how she talks and listens to me as I talk and listen to her, to what happens simultaneously and mutually to me, to her, to us’ (Bird-David 72, emphasis in original). In Nayaka culture, dividuating others ‘facilitates and reproduces’ sociality, for example, underpinning practices of sharing and communal living, in which a person is understood as ‘one whom we share with’ (Bird-David 73). Dividuation also supports an animistic world view in which ‘superpersons’ – devaru – are seen as objectifications of social relations. A hill devaru, for example, is not the spirit of the hill, but an objectification of Nakaya relations with the hill. This relational mode of engagement and collaborative sociality presents an alternative mode of animism, with profound consequences for Nayaka ecological perception. Bird-David’s work offers a significant critique of anthropological accounts of animism. As one of the discipline’s first concepts, defined by Edward Burnett Tylor in 1871 (1958), animism was classed as a ‘primitive’ belief that inanimate, animal and non-human entities have a soul or spirit. This explanation was, however, misleading, based as it was on a nineteenth-century division between

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matter and spirit which is not representative of most indigenous world views (Bird-David 69). Many forms of indigenous animism, in fact, describe worlds in which beings and elements are not inert objects or enlivened by ‘spirit’, but ‘approached as communicative subjects rather than inert . . . objects’ (p. 22). Emily Cousins notes how most Native American nations ‘have a tradition of entering into relationships with the land’, which is composed of living, interrelated nonhuman beings, a ‘relatedness . . . rooted in the perception of a shared spiritual reality that transcends physical differences’ (1997). This expanded sense of personhood undercuts modern Euro-centric philosophy, in which personhood is granted only to individual human subjects. Nayaka devaru, by contrast, might be animals, plants or what modernist classifications might term environmental features, such as hills and rivers. Bird-David describes Nayaka relations with stones, which in specific instances have been named as devaru because they had ‘come towards’ people, and hence come into a relation with them. At the same time, certain entities might not be devaru; an elephant, passing by a village and alone, might not be devaru at that moment because of a lack of mutual engagement between entities (Bird-David 74–5). In recent years, multiple expressions and understandings of animism have become more prominent in environmental scholarship and in connected legal debates. Environmental collectives have demanded legal recognition of the rights of cetaceans and of waterways, explicitly because they are living entities, deserving of personhood privileges akin to those granted to humanity (The Helsinki Group; Earth Law Centre). Writer, botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation Robin Wall-Kimmerer writes of a world that is living, braided, where plants and animals have ‘counsels, and a common language’, showing a ‘capacity for concerted action that transcends the individual’ (Kimmerer 19). After Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Isabelle Stengers has argued for a new animism, and a way of knowing the world organized like a ‘rhizome, connecting heterogeneous practices, concerns, and ways of giving meaning to the inhabitants of this earth, with none being privileged and any being liable to connect with any other’ (Stengers). Another influential text in ecocritical scholarship and the academic interpretation of animism is David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous. The healers he describes do not engage with spirits, but the powers and intelligences immanent in the animated and sensuous world: in the life of plants, animals, insects, waters, even sunlight. Modern, Western and industrial societies have, according to Abram, become physically detached from these intelligences. Philosophical and religious traditions have privileged spirit and reason over

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matter and sense, promoting a ‘philosophical or rational dissociation of the human intellect from the organic world’ (Abram 95). Writing, too, bears only traces of the sensory and animate world from which cultures drew their first character marks and symbolism. Our primary means of communication, of tracking sense and interpreting signs, has become as abstracted as science, which reinforces an impossible-to-maintain divide between the objective, disembodied observer/ reasoner and the material phenomena which is the object of analysis. Life in cities and insulated houses, coupled with work that increasingly hypnotizes with machinery, technologies and abstractions, has led to a dulling of those senses through which we are awake to the ‘subtle changes and patterns’ of an ‘expressive and sentient landscape’ (Abram 22, 26). In various ways, then, these expressions of what might be called new animism are concerned not only with changing how people understand the life of the wider world. Through close observation, sensuous engagement or simply learning about alternative ontologies, new animisms are concerned with the central question of what makes a self, and how do we recognize and value life beyond our own.

Selfhood in Shepherd’s writing Shepherd’s writing is fairly obsessed with the question of the self. How do we relate to living nature, what are the kinds of experiences that might transform us, and make different kinds of selves possible? Looking first to her antiindividualistic stance, explored through the metaphor of climbing mountains, I then turn to her understanding of the relational self, reading her work in the context of new animism before investigating her attitude to the oneness of life and the notion of ‘self-dissolution’. One of the most striking and often-remarked-upon qualities of The Living Mountain is the fact Shepherd resists the egoism so often associated with mountaineering narratives. Her book is not about a valiant ascent, and she refuses to frame her walks in terms of conquest and mastery. Trying to beat other climbers to the top reduces ‘to the level of a game what is essentially an experience’ (LM 4). Instead of a race-against-all charge to the summit, Shepherd advises walkers to ‘take time to explore the recesses’ (LM 9), and to focus the relations with other walkers, with animals, and the mountain itself. Even on the summit, the yearning for an expansive and total view, the ‘moment of glory’ is thwarted by the distinct geology of the Cairngorm group: after a long toil up a hill, one is often greeted not with ‘spaciousness for reward,

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but an interior’ (LM 16). This joke is just one of many in which Shepherd undercuts the heroism of mountaineering. While admitting that the peaks can be deadly, she pricks at any arrogance about surmounting them: ‘Given clear air, and the unending daylight of a Northern summer, there is not one of the summits but can be reached by a moderately strong walker without distress’ (LM 4). As Macfarlane puts 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’ (2011: xvii). Climbing and walking are not pitting the body against the mountain, but a series of transformative encounters that unite the body, senses and mind. Carter has also explored Shepherd’s rejection of the egotistical sublime. She ‘does not promote a dissociated, detached view of the world’ as ‘promoted by landscape aesthetics and scientific language’; instead, she undermines ‘the traditional authority of . . . the “Monarch-of-all-I-survey” scene, typical of European romanticism’ through a transgression of discursive boundaries, including those of the self (Carter 2001: 29–30). In the passage in which Shepherd’s looks at the world upturned the legs, she alters the position of the head so ‘a different kind of world may be made to appear’. The ‘Monarch-of-allI-Survey’ perspective falls flat as details refuse to resolve themselves into any panoptic panorama. Instead, the looker opens themselves up to vulnerability and ridicule. Anyone who has tried to follow Shepherd’s steps will realize what an unstable way of standing it is, and how childlike and strange the posture appears. Her approach to the mountain is defined by humour and humility, not arrogant detachment. Reaching one of the peaks of the Cairngorms – Creag Dhubh – she feels ‘like a child stealing apples’, and at the top, ‘jumped up and down . . . laughed and shouted’ (LM 107). Then in the final chapter of The Living Mountain, where she reflects on the culmination of her discoveries, she says the journey was ‘always for fun, with no motive beyond that I wanted it’ (LM 107). While narratives of conquest reduce the mountain to obstacle and object, Shepherd resists self-gratifying modes of approach. She recounts how in her earliest climbs her desire for the mountain was based on a distinction between herself as active subject and it as inert resource: at first I was seeking only sensuous gratification – the sensation of height, the sensation of movement, the sensation of speed, the sensation of distance, the sensation of effort, the sensation of ease: the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life. I was not interested in the mountain for itself, but for its effect on me, as puss caresses not the man but herself against the man’s trouser leg. (LM 107)

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The mountain, in this overtly erotic description, is an object against which the walker quite unapologetically stimulates herself. But as she matures, Shepherd discovers a mode of approach which appreciates the intrinsic value of the mountain: ‘as I grew older, and less self-sufficient, I began to discover the mountain in itself. Everything became good to me, its contours, its colours, its waters and rock, flowers and birds. This process has taken many years, and is not yet complete’ (LM 107–8). With age and intimacy, a new relationship forms, and loss of self-sufficiency makes way for experiences of both dependence and, crucially, interdependence. We know Shepherd was influenced by Hearn’s writing on Buddhist understandings of self. This, in part, explains her fascination with describing a self that is both formed in reciprocal relations and is always a work-in-process. The world, as Shepherd describes it, is ‘one kind of reality’, and the self another, ‘though overloaded with a good many crusts of falseness and convention’. As an observer of any kind, our grasp on reality is limited and situated: ‘we are conscious of the universe as a vast play of forces only’, the meaning and laws of which are unknown to us, as Hearn puts it (Hearn 127). The self that is meeting the world could not expect to see its reality clearly. Still, Shepherd believed some kind of meeting of the two realities is possible: ‘it is the fusion of these two realities that keeps life from corruption,’ she notes (LM 93). And so, The Living Mountain is rich with moments in which perception is tricked, illusions confound and the ‘secret nature’ underlying things is revealed in a brief, glimmering vision. This is both Buddhist in tone and comparable to the phenomenological practice of forgetting all you think you know about perception. Putting perceived ways of seeing to the side for the moment, the direct experience of perception and bodyconsciousness can be registered anew. The particular atmospheric nature of the Cairngorms makes them an ideal playground for insights into the illusory quality of perception, and the instability of the perceiving subject. The astonishingly quick changes of light and weather on the plateau mean it is impossible to predict one’s safety or to ever feel completely in command: ‘the place has as many aspects as there are gradations in the light’ (LM 2). Fog rolls in suddenly, clouds descend in a matter of moments (LM 18). The place itself has no fixed and immediately graspable nature – and neither does the individual who is attempting to know and grasp it. Hidden reality remains unknowable, and awareness of its existence reveals the transitory nature of feelings and thoughts, as well as the thing perceived. Each entity is constantly undergoing transformation, losing sense of its self and the personal ‘I’, which is always unstable and impermanent. What persists is the integrity of the living world.

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Thanks to early readings in Theosophy and later readings in Hearn, Shepherd was fascinated by the possibility of gaining access to a metaphysical Unity. This is the oneness of which she so often speaks. Hearn’s Buddhism is not explicitly concerned with nature, but in Shepherd’s adaptation of his ideas, ‘unity’ becomes explicitly ecological, geological and concerned with relations with the living world. The sensation-seeking, individualistic self must be overcome through intense relaxation and fixation on natural features. These passages in The Living Mountain are akin to modern ‘mindfulness’ practices, and like the zazen meditations they are based on, attempt to achieve absolute stillness of body and mind. Absorbed in the body, in sensation, she becomes un-self-consciously present: ‘For an hour I am beyond desire’ (LM 108). Shepherd also writes of ‘walking the flesh transparent’, and how: when the body is keyed to its highest potential and controlled to a profound harmony deepening into something that resembles trance, that I discover most nearly what it is to be. (LM 106)

This oneness is definitive of being. Not a dulling disembodiment but a meeting of the world through the body. Controlled to harmony, but lacking selfconsciousness of focus, Shepherd experiences a fundamental embeddedness and co-continuousness with the living world. Chance encounters with animals affirm this oneness. On watching deer, she notes that ‘there are times when the earth seems to re-absorb this creature of air and light. Roes melt into the wood’ (LM 72), while a flock of geese flying in ‘perfect symmetry . . . melted into the darkness of a cloud’ (LM 70). Confusion and tricks of perception hint at underlying ecological integrity, like the bird described as ‘two great wings joined by nothing’. The impression is misleading, and soon she realizes that it is ‘a duck and a drake, following one another in perfect formation . . . each following every modulation of the other; two halves of one organism’ (LM 69). Glimpses of creatures melting and flowing exemplify grace, perfection and beauty precisely because they express their interdependence. Shepherd also builds affective bonds with the world, insisting that the mountain should be approached with love, as ‘love, pursued with fervour, is one of the roads to knowledge’ (LM iv). When she sleeps and wakes on the plateau, ‘the mind grows limpid, the body melts. . . . One neither thinks, nor desires, nor remembers, but dwells in pure intimacy with the tangible world’ (LM 90). Moments of still and moving meditation allow her to ‘let go [her] self ’ (LM 91) and to loosen boundaries between herself and the earth: ‘there is nothing between me and the earth and the sky’ (LM 90). Shepherd often describes

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these moments of extension and transformation as ‘dissolution’. In moments of dissolution, she transgresses spatial and temporal boundaries, and also the boundary of self, becoming ‘part of a life beyond myself ’ (1940). This is an enlarging process which sees the self disperse and then reform through sensual, physical and affective encounters (Carter 2001: 25). Like Proust’s impressions or Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time’, these experiences are mesmerizing, memorable and absolutely ‘impossible to coerce’ (LM 91). This ‘intimacy with the tangible world’ Shepherd so prizes, and is lucky to sometimes experience, comes close to religious ecstasy. Certainly, Shepherd’s journey into the mountain is concerned with realizing a relationship to the whole. She uses the language of mysticism, often describing ecstasies, leaps of the spirit, trances and altered states of perception. Her poetry and her commonplace books are dotted with devotional poetry, and there are resonances with the opening passages of Genesis in The Living Mountain: ‘The many details – a stroke here, a stroke there – come for a moment into perfect focus, and one can read at last the word that has been from the beginning’ (LM 106). Although she had lost her faith by the time she came to write The Living Mountain, unusual attention to the world reveals an oneness and purpose coherent with the motions of a creator-God (Peacock 61). The iconography of the sacraments could be read into her engagements with the mountain: plunges into water evoke baptism, while tasting berries and water allude to the Eucharist. Through physical practices – ritual, trance, sleep and waking, walking, touch and scent – the lived body enters into a communion, an experiencing-with things. This is ‘not ecstasy, that leap out of the self that makes man like a god’ (LM 108), but a feeling of immersion and involvement, both in the body and the world, that makes one a ‘manifestation of [the mountain’s] total life’ (LM 106).

Oneness with the world Beyond phenomenology, approaches like neo-animism and ecological selfhood urge consideration of distinct experiences of oneness and a sense of holistic presence in the living world. We know Shepherd believed a vibrant ‘life’ animated matter, and that the mountain, creatures, plants and humanity ‘all are one’. What might these insights reveal about Shepherd’s writing of the body and self in the living world? If Shepherd knew of animism, it was most likely the Western kind: a degraded form of spiritualism and projection of human personality into the world.

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However, her work reveals a latent animism more in keeping with the relational approach to personhood described by Bird-David. In such ontologies, mindlike qualities of matter are not the result of an enlivening ‘spirit’, but guaranteed through the relations formed between entities in a shared physical reality. BirdDavid calls this relation which guarantees personhood ‘devaru’ and describes it as an inherent feature of societies capable of seeing themselves both as individuals and as dividuals. There are parallels between Shepherd’s own description of the relationship between a person and mountain: A certain kind of consciousness interacts with the mountain forms to create this sense of beauty . . . 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. (LM 80)

Personhood is a product of relation, and presence with the mountain assures and deepens Shepherd’s own ‘sense of outer reality’, and her own self-identity in the process. This is a multidirectional movement, whereby selfhood is guaranteed by engagement in the world. Rejecting spiritualist dichotomies between mind and matter, Shepherd recognizes forms of personhood distinctive to the mountain. This deeply undercuts individualistic models of selfhood, both expanding classifications of what it means to be human and what it means to be a ‘self ’. That doesn’t mean that she projects human-like qualities onto nature. Reflecting on powerful experiences of ‘oneness’, she writes: It would be merely fanciful to suppose that some spirit or emanation of the mountain had intention in thus absorbing my consciousness, so as to reveal itself to a naked apprehension difficult otherwise to obtain. I do not ascribe a sentience to the mountain; yet at no other moment am I sunk so deep into its life. I have let go myself. (LM 91)

What actually occurs, and why, remains mysterious, and though Shepherd shies from attributing intention to the mountain, she still raises it as a possibility that is difficult to dismiss. The mountain seems to call something forth from her, and to that extent, becomes person-like. Although she avoids it here, Shepherd can be accused of anthropomorphism at other moments. Animals, plants and even waterways are described with undeniably human qualities. However, these often descriptions coincide with an awareness that she is subject to the scrutiny of animals: that her existence is, in a fashion, guaranteed by her relationship with them. She prefers ‘living encounters’ with creatures, ‘moments of my life that have crossed moments of theirs’ (LM 67),

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to information gleaned from books. When animals are described like persons – Crested Tits chase her away from their nest like squabbling fishwives (LM 56) or squirrels jeer at her ‘in triumph’ (LM 74) – it is precisely because they are being treated as persons in an expanded sense. Shepherd, like Abram, was concerned that the relationship between humanity and nature needed to be constantly renewed. The sense of life beyond the self could not be ignored if we are to experience our ‘full and complete self ’, as she puts it (1931a). Although not as effective as walking, writing can also be a way of achieving this vital contact. Shepherd outlines this theory of writing in a letter to Neil Gunn, where she celebrates her friend’s latest book: 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 – yes, that is a secret life one has and knows that others have. But to be able to share it, in and through words – that’s what frightens me. The word shouldn’t have such power. It dissolves one’s being. I am no longer myself but part of a life beyond myself when I read pages that are so much the expression of myself. (1940)

Shepherd does not just praise Gunn’s ability to communicate these experiences in his writing; she is in awe of his ability to actually produce the same effects through language. ‘The word shouldn’t have such power’, she writes, even though the natural world does. Experiences of hill walking, changes of light and the use of bodily sense to overcome the spirit all have transformative effects, connecting the self to life beyond the self and, to use one of Shepherd’s favourite words, ‘dissolving’ it. In Gunn’s work, she saw the ideal form and purpose of literature: to transform these moments of experience into language and to produce that same effect on the reader. Why did Shepherd see the work of the writer as so vital? In large part because the conditions of modernity were, she felt, anathema to the kind of deep sensory awareness that she experienced in the hills. Commending Gunn’s, she states that such writing is well to be insisted on in this age of crowded streets and cities, when so many of us are losing – perhaps have never had – the sense of life beyond man’s life, influences in air and earth and water, that man does not ignore if he is to be his full and complete self. (1931a)

Technology and urbanity dull the senses and dissociate humanity from morethan-human otherness. Without fuller sensory awareness of influences from without, Shepherd fears the human becomes a sealed and diminished entity, a monad unable to grasp one’s place in relation to the living world. In the city, she notes in her letters, people ‘live on the asphalt’ (Shepherd 1951) and are

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‘sated with noise’ (LM 97), but in the mountain, the ‘senses must be used’ (LM 96). Each sense is ‘a way in to what the mountain has to give’, and scents are there ‘to be smelled’ (LM 97, 98). Pleasure in life suffers when the connection is lost, as the person ceases to engage in communication with life, to be alert to its presences and displays of sentience. This is more than a case of diminished experience; it’s a withdrawal from the world that reduces our very experiences of ‘being’, turning a possible ‘dividual’ into a mere individual. Like Abram, Shepherd explores how this awareness can be rekindled. For Abram moments of encounter with more-than-human life – spiders weaving webs in a cave, an inquisitive condor, the gesture of a bison who mimics his own stance – reveals an intelligent, communicative, solicitous and densely patterned world. This world was made tangible by the senses, as he realized his body ‘could, with practice, enter sensuously into these dimensions’ (Abram 19). Walking in the mountains corrects this loss of sensitivity for Shepherd too, reminding her of ‘the innocence we have lost, living in one sense at a time to live all the way through’ (LM 105). The body thinks as part of a seeking sensory world, moving outside of the confines of the enclosed self and into an intersubjective realm. Perceiving is participation in the world, and like Abram, for whom the body is an open loop that is only completed through the things we perceive, total experience is guaranteed through engaged senses.

The limits of oneness So far, writing about oneness with the earth has been considered in a positive light. Moving the body in space enables Shepherd to experience the oneness of flesh, while experiences of ecstasy blur the boundaries between self and world. However, are there limits to the experience of oneness? At what point might it be essential to experience ourselves as individuals again? Even before she wrote The Living Mountain, Shepherd was exploring this problem in her fiction. In A Pass in the Grampians, she celebrates the experience of loss of self and commingling with place. Early in the novel, Andrew and Jenny Kilgour light a fire on the moor to control the growth of heather. The wind picks up and sends the fire spiralling the wrong way, and they must down tools to try to control the blaze: in labour with these elemental things [‘fire, earth, space, the wind’] they became as it were dissolved into their own elements. Memory was gone, and consciousness of selfhood, and all the intricate coils of living. (PG 18)

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In this moment of intense activity, loss of consciousness has a rhapsodic quality, bringing them out of their individual selves and into the world through flowing, mutual activity. However, as the novel progresses, the life she has known on the farm holds Jenny, but there are draws beyond the local too. On the one hand, she has the example of her father. He has long since ‘made his covenant with the moor’, and after a life of toil and presence, ‘a large part of his nature was so interpenetrated with its nature that apart from it he would have lost reality’ (PG 20). On the other hand, there is Dorabel, their neighbour freshly returned from a wild, fabulous life in London where she has made her life as a singer. The draw of Dorabel is not just that she tests Jenny’s tethering to place – as discussed in Chapter 1 – but that she tests her very understanding of what kind of ‘self ’ she is: one that is part and parcel of the moor, or one that can change and develop subject to new influences? Neither of these possible selves is exactly individualist: both are created in relation with place, people and myriad influences from without. But as Jenny spends time with Dorabel, singing, drinking, rushing around in cars and dancing late into the night on the hill, she feels a thrilling reshaping of possibilities: Utterly she had forgotten the farm. Their movement was the one reality. The black shapes of hills, the rutted road, changing subtly under their lights, the unfathomable sky, were no more that the framework that held this exhilaration, gave it position in space and time. (PG 62)

Much as she does in The Living Mountain, Shepherd explores how repositioning oneself in space, in this case by car, unsettles fixed and stable realities. This is a movement in which both self and world shift and change: ‘Jenny had the sense of life at flood. Universes not yet fully realized disturbed her brain’ (PG 64). What it means to ‘be’ – the novel ultimately determines – is not to be fixed in place, or to stand out bold against your environment like a cardboard cut-out, but to be able to constantly change in relation with the world. Leaving the farm will not untether Jenny from her reality altogether, but enable her to ‘find a new self seeking its nurture in places unauthorized by the tradition of her people’ (PG 112). Another story is told in The Weatherhouse, when Garry Forbes returns from the trenches of the First World War on medical leave. As Chapter 5 discussed, he is arrogant when he returns and feels a sharp sense of division between himself, the community and the land. It began with the traumatic experience he had on the front line. After a heavy bombardment, Garry finds himself trapped in a

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shell-hole, thigh high in filthy water, with an injured soldier. Eventually, the man dies, bleeding from a wound that was out of sight. Horrified, Garry pushes the body under the water’s surface. But after excruciating hours of waiting for the bombardment to end, he begins to feel a strange identification with the dead man. Deliriously, he tugs the corpse out and addresses him: “Come out, you there. Myself. That’s me. That’s me. I thrust him in – I am rescuing myself.’” After the battlefield has gone quiet, Garry rises from the water with the corpse in tow and ‘was found towards morning in a raging fever, dragging a grotesque bundle at his heels’. His traumatic identification with the corpse of coincides with a terrible loss of a sense of self: ‘In some queer way he was identified with this fellow.’ When Garry is found, he is muttering: ‘Don’t take him from me, you chaps. It’s myself. I have been wounded – here, in the abdomen’ (WH 54). Much of the confusion arises from the indeterminate state of the corpse. When Garry identifies with the other soldier, it is as matter, an abject thing between object and subject, human and humus: ‘a shapeless rigid mass’, with ‘glaring eyes’ and an ‘open mouth out of which slime was oozing’ (WH 54). Pulling the corpse from the mud can be read as a delusional act of re-embodiment and a reverse creation myth. However, Garry’s clumsy identification with the corpse is also a pathway to awareness that he is not transcendent above the living world and the community, but a part of it. Reflecting on the event later, Garry says, ‘Queer, isn’t it, about oneself? Losing oneself like that, I mean, and being someone else’ (WH 55). As an engineer, Garry has been trained in a way of seeing the world that is rational and instrumental, making a clear division between subject and object, self and world, life and matter. However, as Alison Lumsden states, this experience of ‘being someone else’ poses ‘a challenge to Garry’s sense of identity and the very boundaries of the self ’ (Lumsden 2000: 62). Trauma ruptures egotistical selfhood, and while it is undoubtedly a hideous experience, it is also the first step in a transformation that makes more loving encounters with life beyond the self possible, the ‘encounter with someone else’s needs and reality’, as Carter puts it (Carter 2001: 51). A non-hierarchical encounter with that which is not ‘I’, but neither is wholly separable, is a fundamentally ethical discovery, with ecological implications. But experiences of oneness and wholeness may not always be experienced as ecstatic communion. First, Garry tries to repress the experience and to distinguish himself from the community. However, as the novel progresses the so-called individual is revealed to be dependent on and materially entangled with other lives. In Garry’s case, this means realizing that his actions ripple out and cause

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effects that are unpredictable and often unknown. Garry also recognizes that others are not just the supporting cast in his psychodrama but have complex interior lives as fascinating, and important, as his own. ‘[T]hey too are men’, he realizes; ‘It’s such an obvious thing to say, isn’t it? . . . they too are men. As much a part of things as I am’ (WH 175). This realization proves transformative: decentring him as the perceiving subject and perplexing the distinction himself and the men he has treated as objects. He experiences an epiphany when he realizes the world is composed of people ‘divinely different from oneself ’ (WH 55). This recognition moves him beyond a kind of individualistic solipsism, and beyond the trauma that set him on this path, ultimately enabling him to recognize his kinship and entanglement with other lives. It is a realization that is generous, flourishing and self-expanding – and most importantly, it is not confined to Garry alone. Much like the house at the centre of The Weatherhouse, with its strange, multiply shaped windows, the novel offers a prism of differentiated perspectives and consciousnesses, without elevating, separating or collapsing any one of them. The purpose is not absolute disintegration, which is death itself, or a kind of psychosis, but a living sense of what it means to be both subject of your own experience and object in other people’s experiences in the shared texture of the world. What does it mean to be both subject and object in the world, and how is this experience of selfhood ultimately ecological? Although writing about ecological selfhood can often celebrate the rupturing of boundaries between self and world, experiences of trauma and psychosis tell us that maintaining a sense of self matters. It is not possible or indeed desirable to always feel oneself at one with the world. In Shepherd’s writing, absolute loss of self is not the desired end, and immersion in the living mountain is counterbalanced by an experience of altered selfhood, never wholly discrete from place, and never wholly absorbed by it. Although she invites self-dissolution through sleeping, walking and then plunging into cold water, she is also thrilled when the self is ‘folded’ back into place again: ‘This plunge into the cold water of a mountain pool seems for a brief moment to disintegrate the very self; it is not to be borne: one is lost: stricken: annihilated. Then life pours back’ (LM 104). Perhaps it is best, in the end, to approach Shepherd’s writing of the self and the world as a kind of triangulation. Carter has described the land–human relation in Shepherd’s prose as ‘reciprocal’, noting how her ‘representation of landscape centres on the understanding that this is a land which shapes its people as they shape it. . . . each shapes and changes the other’ (Carter 2001: 31–2). More elements seem to be at stake in much of her writing: self, another human and

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the world all bounce back and forth in lively interrelation, making new selves and new kinds of relations between people and places, possible in moments of expanded understanding and experience. At the start of The Living Mountain, Shepherd wrestles with the suspicion that her love for the peaks might be based on physical factors over which she has no control. Describing mountain feyness – ‘that joyous release of body that is engendered by climbing’ (LM 6) – she reflects that ‘feyness itself seems to me to have a particularly physiological origin’. Hers is not, she realizes, ‘a universal reaction’, as others feel unwell or exhausted by heights, but are content in the low valleys she found oppressive. This contrast spurs the worrying suspicion that love of the mountain is a product of ‘physical peculiarities’: a trick of biology (LM 7). This niggling doubt undermines the quality of the experience itself, and the foundations of self and identity. The self flickers as a contingent and spectral entity produced by the body, while the body is reduced to a mechanical entity responding in predetermined ways to the atmospheric and climactic conditions of the physical world. A biographical detail sheds light on why Shepherd might have been preoccupied with the subtleties of mind–body relations. In the early summer of 1947, she had an operation for a thyroid condition, after which she was laid out for nearly two months. Writing to Neil Gunn in February the following year, she reflects on the experience of her convalescence: ‘The interest has lain in odd things I have discovered about the relationship between body and mind. Unexpected things – not quite what one had supposed they were going to be.’ The experience of illness has contradicted her deeply rooted assumptions about the mind’s division from the body. As Shepherd wrestles doubts about surgery, she fears that tampering with the body will indefinitely alter her personality: [T]he crux lay in a profound fear that my essential self had altered – that there was a stranger living inside me. . . . But deep down there was a real fear (that only once was able to come to the surface) that this tampering with the odd gland about which in spite of all their knowledge they really know so little, may mean an assault on the essential me. And when I was beginning to recover, to go about again and try to live with my new self, I had two bouts of panic, when for days on end I couldn’t find myself. All I knew was that I had lost my poise – my inner serenity – the balance that is the precarious all that separates us from non-being, and could not retrieve it. And . . . I had to face the question whether my former poise had not been a matter of the spirit at all but merely the result of a generous supply of thyroid – an accident of matter. To find I couldn’t believe in mind anymore – in something that was independent of the flesh and its mysteries –

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shook me very badly. And like your Nan I saw a whole earth dominated by an order for which spirit had no reality. (Shepherd 1948, emphasis in original)

Before her illness, Shepherd had assumed that the mind was transcendent from the body: distinct, dualistic and elevated above its mysteries. Surgery and sickness disrupt this certainty, and though she later recovers her ‘poise’, doubts have been sown. Prompted, perhaps, by this experience, Shepherd went on to examine and test mind/body dualisms in The Living Mountain. Was the extraordinary release she experienced on the mountain simply a symptom of a physiological shift? As scientifically plausible as this explanation is, she ultimately rejects it, moving beyond a crude mechanism to propose a more responsive understanding of mind-body-environment interrelations and interdependencies: ‘No, there is more in the lust for a mountain top than a perfect physiological adjustment. What more there is lies within the mountain. Something moves between me and it’ (LM 8). In this triangulation between body, self and world, the body is an active participant in the construction of the self, but not its sole or determining stimulus. Mind, body and environment interact in ways that alter the nature of each. In a striking scene in The Living Mountain, this triangulation between self, other and nature is perfectly and spontaneously coordinated. Shepherd recounts how she and a friend were bathing in Loch Avon, a stretch of water high in the Cairngorms: ‘This narrow loch has never, I believe, been sounded. I know its depth, though not in feet’ (LM 9). The methods of an engineer or geographer are of no use here: she does not come to chart and measure the loch, but has another way of encountering it and glimpsing its ‘own secret nature’: when the noonday sun penetrated directly into the water, we stripped and bathed. . . . Then I looked down; and at my feet there opened a gulf of brightness so profound that the mind stopped. We were standing on the edge of a shelf that ran some yards into the loch before plunging down to the pit that is its true bottom. And through that inordinate clearness we saw to the depth of the pit. . . . I motioned to my companion, who was a step behind, and she came, and glanced as I had down the submerged precipice. Then we looked into each other’s eyes, and again into the pit. I waded slowly back into shallower water. My spirit was as naked as my body. It was one of the most defenceless moments of my life. (LM 12–13)

The moment of looking into the depths of the loch is reflected in the moment of looking into the eye of her companion. The eye perceives the depth, turns to

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the friend; they look together, then eye moves again from friend to Loch. Self, other, nature: this is a moment of proximity and distance in which the self is experienced in a reciprocal relation with others and the world. In looking into the loch, into its true depth, Shepherd is not looking with a detached gaze, but in reciprocal nakedness of spirit and body. When she reflects on the moment in a later passage, the defencelessness has been supplanted with a feeling of new strength: That first glance down had shocked me with a heightened power of myself, in which even fear became a rare exhilaration: not that it ceased to be fear, but fear itself, so impersonal, so keenly apprehended, enlarged rather than constricted the spirit. (LM 14)

The depth of the loch does not diminish her, but extends her: the moment in which the eye apprehends a depth that exceeds itself is terrifying but also expanding. By approaching another with love we expand them, and ourselves, widening ‘the domain of being in the vastness of non-being’. The self is transformed and increased in the process. This is an understanding of ‘being’ developed in relation. ‘Being’, to Shepherd, is the capacity for transformation in relation to an other – human or nonhuman – and the achievement of a perspective that is fluid, multiple and liable to be repositioned once again. Encounters with the environment in Shepherd’s work provide models for ethical encounters with people, but of course so too do they suggest ways of relating to ecology. This is why The Living Mountain mattered in her own age of conflict, and why, when she published it in the 1970s, it was still such a vital book. Human relations form the model for encounters with the living world, while the self remains a locus of ethical agency, choice, experience and love. This is what it means ‘to be’.

Conclusion

When I first read The Living Mountain, I had no idea what ecocriticism was and had never studied literature from any kind of environmental perspective. I was interested in other kinds of questions: the relationship between mind and world, the experience of consciousness and how that is captured in literature. The Living Mountain, and then Shepherd’s novels and poetry, opened up new vistas, forcing me to look at these questions from entirely new perspectives. The mind, in her writing, wasn’t a sealed, closed thing, but a reaching entity, meeting and responding to the world, and being transformed by it. There was an experimental quality to her writing of the relationship between mind and a place that was wholly new to me. Lessons I had learnt about modernism – its approach to perception, the way the senses fire and come alive in new places and richly textured locations – made absolute new sense. The world she wrote was different to others I had seen in literature, too. It was animated, visceral, abundant and colossal, and at the same time spectral and fluid, mysterious, changeable and light as air. But most importantly, the world Shepherd wrote was alive. From the fields of Fetter-Rothnie to the knots of root mass buried deep under the snow and rock of the Cairngorm massif, the land, water, rocks, air, even light itself, was all pulsing with beauty and with life. The purpose of this book has been to explain why this is, how a writer could come to see the world as so vibrant and what this vitality might mean. Digging into Shepherd’s archive and looking at the meaning behind the words she uses to describe life has turned up a richness of influences from geology to biology, philosophy to early twentieth-century spiritualism. Across this book, I have tracked Shepherd’s influences and explored the works of the writers with whom she was in dialogue. But her genius is in the fusing of these ideas, and their transformation into a new philosophy of being: a world of life, a rare humility, a boldness of perception. The fact that no book has yet been written about Shepherd continues to astonish me. Apart from Charlotte Peacock’s excellent biography, readers and scholars of Shepherd have had to make do with articles and introductions

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which – however detailed and enthusiastic – can only give partial insights to her work. The decision to write a book about Shepherd was an easy one, and the perspective of ecocriticism suggested itself at once. Reading Shepherd urged me to ask inherently ecological questions about humanity’s place in the world, about the relationship between self and nature, how we live with deep time and what role literature might play in resituating us in a terrifyingly transformed and transforming planet. It was only after reading Shepherd that I discovered ecocriticism and realized that thinking ecologically is the intellectual, political and moral challenge of our time, intersecting with every other struggle for social and political justice. This discovery might at first seem very distant from Shepherd’s literary moment and intellectual concerns, but I hope this book has suggested otherwise. Reading The Living Mountain, and exploring Shepherd’s fiction and poetry, has not only helped me understand Shepherd better but helped me make sense of problems we worry at within the environmental humanities and wider ecological justice movements. Her writing has given life and meaning to the concerns of environmental philosophy, turning new materialism from a rather befuddling academic debate into a living question, and making the enmeshment of the ecological thought into a vibrant and convincing material reality. As a reader of Shepherd, I am better prepared to think in deep time scales about earth history and our future in the Anthropocene, and to weigh up competing demands in environmental struggles, striving for both ecological and multispecies justice. While I wrote this book, I was invited to speak about Shepherd at mountaineering festivals and universities, poetry libraries and art galleries. Over questions, or in discussions after the event, I have heard from people who have also been touched by her writing. Some have never been to mountains before, and now have an urge to see them. Others have been walking in high places for decades and have had their experiences turned, quite literally, upside down. Artistic events, like Simone Kenyon’s Into the Mountain performances and collaborations, have sought to capture and share these experiences, turning the distinctive perspectives Shepherd took on nature into practices that can be made tangible and accessible to anyone – seasoned mountaineers and complete novices alike. There are more intimate and private stories too – like the climber and guide who told me she has changed her perception of what a ‘good hike’ is after reading Shepherd, and has set aside her lust for the summit in order to attend to the minor experiences: the ecstasy of walking, the emptying of the mind, the surge of pleasure that can make us laugh and jump for joy. These experiences are often

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dismissed as the side effects of a climb. What Shepherd’s writing does is to bring them into focus and put them under a lens that is not penetrating, but both tender and completely unsentimental. Reading Shepherd, I have found, has given many people a whole new language to talk about nature and their experiences of it. Understanding how the living world moves us may be key to appreciate that we are a part of it. This is not just an aesthetic achievement but an ecological and environmentalist one. Shepherd’s revival is having impact in publishing too. In 2019, Canongate launched a new prize for nature writers, the Nan Shepherd Prize. An attempt to ‘find the next voice in nature writing’, it aimed ‘not only to celebrate nature writing but provide an inclusive platform for new and emerging nature writers from underrepresented backgrounds’ (Canongate). Shepherd was one of a handful of early twentieth-century women writing about walking in the mountains, and it makes sense to name a prize seeking greater diversity of representation and perspective after her. It is also fitting to connect her work with the increasing representation of marginalized voices, specifically because her work deals so often with the multiplicity of perspectives, and the resistance of place and landscape to a singular, homogenous view. The award has already highlighted new work by authors of colour, disabled writers and queer voices, all doing vital work to decolonize and diversify a genre that for too long has been dominated by a narrow range of voices. It is a legacy that, I would like to think, Shepherd would be immensely interested in, and quietly proud of. For myself, I know I don’t look at the world the same after having read Nan Shepherd. A great part of the writing of this book took places over the summers of 2017 and 2018, two of the warmest on record, against a backdrop of climate change protest and political inaction. Its final edits were completed under the coronavirus lockdown of spring 2020. Setting a table up in the shade of my small, east Bristol garden, I wrote about the cool, high places of eastern Scotland. Fat, furry bees bounced from flower cup to cup, and flicking my eyes between book, screen, and plant and insect life, I fantasized about a world of snow and ice, ‘colder than mou’ could thole’, as Shepherd wrote it. Writing about Shepherd from the perspective of ecocriticism, and using close reading as a tool to sink deeper and deeper into her writing, has forced me to be to patient, and to be critical. I have looked at her writing from one perspective, then another, as if through a crystal. I have settled with an idea and got used to it, and then looked at it again upside down. But reading Shepherd also forces me out into the world too. She urges you to think with the body, as well as the mind, to experience

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sensation and to become alive to influences that it is too easy to close down. A good writing afternoon has been spoilt by the irrepressible urge to plunge myself in cold water. No mountain lochs are to hand. It is not always safe, or possible, to go out. This action, this dialogue with the world, seems to distil Shepherd’s ecological thought, for me. After reading Shepherd, I am returned to the world differently. And I am ready to fight for it.

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Index Abram, David  71, 179–80, 186–7 agriculture  5, 22, 31, 35, 38, 40–3, 45, 52, 85, 87, 89–91, 94, 97, 107, 130, 134, 137, 188 air  15–17, 19, 38, 56, 59, 65–7, 71, 75–6, 78–80, 83, 110, 113, 117, 124–5, 154, 160–1, 163, 165, 181, 183, 186, 195 Angus, Marion  6, 23 animism  167, 178–80, 184–5 Anthropocene  2, 27, 107–8, 133–9, 196 anthropocentrism  62, 72, 78–81, 84, 98, 100, 102–3, 115, 122–3, 129–31, 171 anthropomorphism  101, 131–3, 145, 158, 164–5, 185–6 anti-pastoral 37 aristocracy  32, 45, 48–9, 85–7, 89, 98 Aviemore  10, 30, 95, 100, 138 Barad, Karen  156 Bennett, Jane  144, 152, 157–8 Bergson, Henri  142–4, 147, 149, 157–8 Bird-David, Nurit  178–9, 185 birds  14, 17, 50, 52, 61–2, 66, 77, 79, 86–7, 91, 96–7, 101–2, 113, 122, 124, 159–60, 163, 182–3 botany  48, 63, 68–9, 77, 131, 179 bothies  10, 138 Braemar  10, 30, 48, 86 Brooke, Rupert  4, 11 Brown, George Douglas  37 The House with the Green Shutters  37 Buddhism  11–13, 17, 72–3, 141, 167, 175–6, 182–3 Burns, Robert  6, 13–14, 23, 25, 39, 133 Caledonian Antisyzygy  24, 26 capitalism  3, 81, 86, 91, 95, 102, 130, 135 Carruth, William Herbert  118–19 Carson, Rachel  95

Carswell, Catherine  6 Carter, Gillian  7, 32, 35, 78, 89, 181, 184, 189–90 Cather, Willa  5 Cavendish, Margaret  141–2 Celtic Twilight  22 Chen, Cecilia  160–1 Christianity  12, 17, 19, 28, 46, 59–60, 62, 71, 79, 98, 109–11, 115–18, 132–3, 137, 144–5, 153, 184 Christianson, Aileen  7, 23 Clark, Timothy  108, 135–6 class  4, 9, 39, 43, 45, 48–50, 86–7, 98, 152, 158 clearances, Highland and Lowland  21, 85, 88, 90–1, 97 climate change  2–3, 8, 9, 105, 129, 134–5, 139, 161, 197 Cocker, Mark  9–10 colonialism  21, 33, 46, 64, 86, 110, 157 conservation  9, 32, 49, 67–8, 85–9, 93–101, 105, 138 Coole, Diana  156, 159 crofts  6, 10, 31–2, 35, 37–8, 42, 80, 86, 89–91, 103, 138, 162, see also farming Cruikshank, Helen  4 Cubism  28, 172 Darwin, Charles  11, 60–2, 67, 73, 81, 111, 121, 142, 144, 168 Darwinian, see Darwin, Charles Darwinism, see Darwin, Charles deer  30, 48, 53–4, 57, 76, 86, 88–91, 99, 103, 105, 158–9, 183 deforestation  2, 44, 53, 83–4, 94, 134 Deleuze, Gilles  152, 179 devil 132–3 Dickinson, Emily  11 disability  98, 175, 191–2

212

Index

Driesch, Hans  142–4, 146–7, 149, 151, 157–8, 171 dwelling  26, 33–5, 42–7, 51, 64

Grosz, Elizabeth  143, 157 Guattari, Félix  152, 179 Gunn, Neil  6–7, 67, 83, 91, 186, 191

ecocentrism  72, 80, 98, 103, 122 ecophobia 80 elan vital  142–4 Eliot, T.S.  11, 23 embodiment  12, 19, 22, 27, 56–7, 60, 68–70, 76, 81, 100, 119, 123, 163, 169–72, 177, 189 Emerson, Ralph Waldo  15–17 entelechy  142–4, 146, 151 Evergreen, The  21–2 evolution  12–13, 61–2, 67, 103, 110–11, 115, 118, 129–30, 136, 141–2, 144, 175 extinction  9, 13, 86, 101, 134

Haeckel, Ernst  60, 62, 145 Haraway, Donna  10, 70–1, 75–6, 103, 135 Hardy, Thomas  4, 11, 107, 117 A Pair of Blue Eyes  117 The Well-Beloved  117 Hearn, Lafcadio  12–13, 175–6, 182–3 Heidegger, Martin  34, 46–7 Heise, Ursula  34, 41, 45–6, 52, 54, 56–7, 72 hiking, see rambling Housman, A.E.  11 Humboldt, Alexander von  54–6 hunting  85–6, 88, 91 Husserl, Edmund  170 Hutton, James  48, 108–11, 116–17, 121, 163 hydroelectricity  86–7, 134, 160, 162

farming, see agriculture fascism  47, 151–2 feminism  1, 4, 6–7, 75, 107–8 Findlater, Jane Helen  6, 43 Findlater, Jane Helen and Mary  6 Fitzgerald, Edward  11 flower, see plants Fraser Darling, Frank  85, 93–5, 101, 105 Freud, Sigmund, see psychoanalysis Frost, Samantha  156, 159 Gaelic  21, 24, 31 Gaia  80–1, 110 Gairn, Louisa  14, 22, 31, 55, 64–5, 110 Garrard, Greg  33–4, 41, 46–7, 102, 131 Geddes, Patrick  21–2, 26, 55, 63–5, 67–8, 85, 92, 95 geology  19–20, 26–7, 54, 57, 61–3, 78, 96, 100–1, 107–27, 132–8, 180, 183, 195 geopoetics  107, 120–2, 127, 130, 134 georgic  33, 41, 46–7 Gifford Lectures  144–5 Glasgow, Ellen  5 Glen Tilt dispute  48 Grassic Gibbon, Lewis  4, 7, 37–8, 43, 91 Sunset Song  38, 91 Grieve, Christopher Murray, see MacDiarmid, Hugh

imperialism 63, see also colonialism Impressionism 172 individualism  3, 11, 24, 27, 46, 52, 69, 72, 76, 94, 99–104, 116, 123, 135–6, 141, 145, 152, 168–70, 175–80, 188–90 Industrial Revolution  36, 71, 94 insects  14, 33, 61, 63, 65–6, 77–8, 91, 93, 113, 124, 129, 153, 179 Irving, R.L.G,  17–18 Jacob, Violet  6 James, William  169 Jamie, Kathleen  9, 97–8 Joyce, James  78, 172 Kailyard  22, 36–7, 39, 44 Kesson, Jessie  6, 7 Kinder Scout mass trespass  49–50 Kipling, Rudyard  11 kosmos 54 Land Ethic, The, see Leopold, Aldo Leder, Drew  170, 176–7 Leopold, Aldo  27, 85, 94, 99–100, 105

Index lochs  13, 19, 31, 39, 59, 86, 114, 162, 164, 192–3, 198 Lovelock, James  80–1, 110 Lumsden, Alison  7, 25, 189 Lyell, Charles  108, 110–11, 116, 124 Mabey, Richard  9 MacDiarmid, Hugh  6–7, 22–5, 37–43, 55–6, 64–5, 68, 74, 78, 119–20, 126, 172–3 ‘On a Raised Beach’ 119–20 ‘Tam O’ the Wilds’ 65 Macfarlane, Robert  8, 10, 32–3, 44, 78, 81, 84, 110, 112, 171, 181 Macpherson, James  18, 86 maps  20, 29, 37, 53, 63, 65 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice  169–74, 177 Miller, Hugh  116, 132 Testimony of the Rocks  116, 132 Mitchison, Naomi  6, 94 modernism  5, 23–4, 35–7, 41, 78, 137, 150, 168–9, 172, 195 modernist, see modernism Moon, Lorna  6 Morton, Timothy  45, 70–3, 76–8, 104, 135 mountain summits  19, 39, 57, 69, 96, 138, 180–1, 196 Muir, Edwin  23, 36 Muir, John  18, 29 Muir, Willa  1, 6, 23, 168 multispecies justice  85, 102–3, 123, 196 Munro, Robert  84 Mure Mackenzie, Agnes  6 Murray, Charles  4 national parks  87–8, 90, 97, 105 new materialism  155–66, 196 Oliphant, Margaret  6 pastoral 9 Peacock, Charlotte  4, 11–12, 63, 69, 184, 195 phenomenology  27, 32–4, 129, 167, 169–77, 182, 184 photography  50, 54 plantations  44–5, 85, 105, 135

213

plants  8, 17, 29, 33, 61, 63, 65, 69, 77, 80, 91–2, 96, 108, 110, 124, 128–32, 139, 146–8, 153, 155, 166, 172, 174, 182, 197 Plato 98 Playfair, John  108, 115 pollution  3, 83, 134–5 positivism 143–4 Proust, Marcel  113, 172, 184 psychoanalysis  24, 159, 168 rambling  18, 30, 48–50, 88, 96 Richardson, Dorothy  172 Rigby, Kate  46, 51, 156–7 Ritchie, James  85–6, 92–3, 95, 101 Romanticism  2, 11, 13–18, 20, 25, 45–6, 168, 181 Russell, George William ‘AE’ 11–12 Scott, Walter  21 Scottish Chapbook, The 22–3 Scottish Literary Renaissance  21–6, 35, 37–8, 43, 55, 60, 64, 78, 91, 119, 122, 168 senses  15–16, 52, 56, 65, 68–71, 76, 81, 101, 105, 113, 119, 122–8, 146–8, 154, 161, 163, 167, 169–77, 180–1, 184, 186–7, 195 Shelley, Percy Bysshe  21–1, 25, 115–16, 118 Shepherd, Nan, A Pass in the Grampians  5, 7, 39, 43–4, 74, 90, 187–8 commonplace books  11–12, 118–19, 144, 171, 184 In the Cairngorms  10, 25, 38–9, 59, 114, 153, 159 Letters  10, 24–5, 67, 154, 186–7 The Quarry Wood  4, 5, 7, 25, 39, 52, 65, 120 The Weatherhouse  5, 27, 141, 149–55, 188–90 sight  16–17, 21, 56, 123, 127–8, 154, 159–60, 163, 169–75, 181–3, 192–3, 195–7 skiing  19, 96 sleep  10, 51, 74, 183–4, 190 smell  105, 147–8, 154, 161, 184, 187

214 Smout, Thomas  18, 32, 48, 63, 86–8, 91–7 snow  42, 59, 68, 113, 116, 124, 139, 148, 161, 163, 165, 195, 197 Soper, Kate  41, 71 sound  35, 76, 87, 125, 148, 161, 192 Stein, Gertrude  169 Stengers, Isabelle  179 sublime  14–15, 18, 20–1, 65–6, 86, 89, 115, 125, 128, 137, 181 Tarbuck, Alice  175 taste  127, 154, 161 Tennyson, Alfred Lord  107, 116 theosophy  11–12, 17, 183 Thompson, D’Arcy  87 Thomson, James  116–18 Thomson, John Arthur  26–7, 55, 62–3, 65–7, 92, 120, 144–9, 163 Thoreau, Henry David  17–18, 99 Walden 99 touch  52, 56, 68, 71, 76, 81, 101, 123, 127, 146–7, 161, 163, 170–1, 175–6, 184 transcorporeality 156

Index trauma  38, 141, 150, 188–90 Tsing, Anna  134–5 Tuan, Yi Fu  34 Veitch, John  90–1 vernacular revival  21–3 Wall-Kimmerer, Robin  179 war  1, 5, 19, 29, 38, 40–1, 52–4, 91, 149–51, 167, 188–9, 193 water  3, 15, 19, 28–9, 33, 39, 41, 44, 59, 61, 65–8, 73–5, 78–9, 94, 99, 105, 109, 113–14, 117–18, 123–7, 137, 146–8, 156–65, 174, 178–9, 182, 184–6, 189–90, 192, 195, 198 Webb, Mary  5 Weil, Simone  11 wilderness  90, 92–5, 137 Williams, Raymond  9 Woolf, Virginia  5, 24, 172 Wordsworth, Dorothy  14–15, 29 Wordsworth, William  14, 18, 49, 50 yoga  12, 17