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The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Nan Shepherd: Naked and Unashamed review – the poetry, prose and passion of a Scottish modernist
The title comes from a short story about two hikers on a camping trip. They decide to cast off their clothes and walk through the countryside as nature intended, only to be mistaken for poachers. The story's combination of humour, transgression and ear for the Doric dialect of north-east Scotland were characteristic qualities of its author, Nan Shepherd (1893-1981), a writer unashamed by her nakedness and celebrated for her evocations of Scotland's rural environment. Celebrated, that is, once The Living Mountain, her short book about walking in the Cairngorms, was published. That was in 1977, three decades after its completion, but more especially in 2011 when it was republished by Canongate, just as it was slipping back into obscurity. It had not always been that way. As the author of three interwar novels, Shepherd was considered a significant modernist writer in her day. But, having turned her attention to teaching, not to mention roaming the hills, she had been largely forgotten at the time of her death in 1981. As this one-act play by Richard Baron and Ellie Zeegen would have it, she is a woman with little concern for posterity. Played by Susan Coyle, Shepherd is resistant to flattery and modest about her achievements, coming most alive at the sound of poetry; sometimes her own, just as often not. At times in Baron's production, she asks members of the audience to read her favourite passages aloud (which, at my performance, they do impressively). Part of a generation that included the novelist Neil M Gunn and the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, Shepherd enthuses about contemporaries such as Virginia Woolf, to whom she was compared. This literary passion, along with an unconventional private life, is at the heart of a play that swirls around her story, taking us from wide-eyed child, discovering the beauty of pine cones, to care-home resident, refusing to be patronised by the staff. Coyle switches from excitable youth to stiff-limbed old woman and all points in between, while Adam Buksh gamely plays lovers, academics and carers. If the play skims the surface of Shepherd's appeal as a writer, it is nonetheless a warm-hearted evocation of a life led with self-determination in and out of the shadows. At Pitlochry Festival theatre until 14 June
The Herald Scotland
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Review: Nan Shepherd: Naked and Unashamed, Pitlochry Festival Theatre
⭐⭐⭐⭐ The quiet renaissance of Nan Shepherd has been a wonder over the last few years. Once neglected to the point of being erased from the twentieth century canon of Scottish letters, the belated publication of Aberdeenshire born Shepherd's masterpiece, The Living Mountain, a personal memoir of the great outdoors that had lain unread in a draw for thirty years, tapped into a readership who similarly felt the transcendent nature of being alive with the hills. These days, Shepherd is rightly held up as great a writer as her peers, and her image can be found on the back of a Scottish five-pound note. Richard Baron and Ellie Zeegen's studio-sized play rifles through Shepherd's back pages for this dramatic homage that attempts to get to the heart of Shepherd while acting as something of a primer to those perhaps unaware of her life and work. Read more: Flitting back and forth through assorted time zones between 1901 and 1981, Baron's recast revival of his production of his and Zeegen's script after premiering in 2024 opens with Nan the child being introduced to the wonders of nature by her father. This sets the tone for a skip through Nan's life as a schoolteacher, her unconventional amour with philosopher John Macmurray and her relationship with the literary scene of her day, her overdue rediscovery by an American journalist, and her final days in Woodend Hospital, Aberdeen. With Adam Buksh playing all the men in this co-production between Pitlochry Festival Theatre and the Borders based Firebrand Theatre Company, his assorted characters are but feeds for the play's leading lady. Nan is duly played by Susan Coyle with guts and gusto that embodies Nan's passion, freethinking libertine spirit and wilful individualism in the face of artistic neglect. The result over the play's seventy-five minutes is a love letter to Shepherd that can only help her work to be discovered in pastures new.
New Statesman
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Robert Macfarlane: 'Come and meet this incredible tree'
Photo by Peter Flude In middle age and closing in on national treasure status, Robert Macfarlane is as close to greatness and far from death as he has ever been. It's a far cry from his perilous youth of solitary mountain summitting. Climbers, he wrote in his first book, Mountains of the Mind, are 'half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion'. That book's hero was George Mallory, the explorer who died on his third attempt at climbing Everest. Macfarlane read Mallory's letters home, and traced the slow drift of his heart from wife to mountain, life to glory. In his imagination, Mallory's frozen corpse seemed inhuman and immortal, like a Grecian marble sculpture. For a moment in what he now calls those 'selfish' days, Macfarlane expected that he too would die in the mountains: 'They were my first love, and they will be the last.' They weren't. Mountains turned out to be his 'resignation letter from danger'. His wife is his 'rock' now, and they have three children. By his third book, The Old Ways, about ancient paths, published nine years later, he was relieved to see a peak and feel no desire to climb it, instead being 'glad only to have seen it in such weather and such light'. Now he is happier adventuring with friends than alone. On a recent trip to a 'fabulously precipitous mountain', he told me, 'I found myself very happy to take the path that worked around the danger, rather than over the pinnacles.' As with his role model Nan Shepherd, author of The Living Mountain (1977), 'Circumambulation came to replace summit fever… plateau substituted for peak.' His new book is 'the one I've been learning how to write all this time'. He knew he wanted to 'write about life', and in 2020 had three questions in a notebook: 'Can a forest think?', 'Does a mountain remember?', and his eventual title, 'Is a river alive?'. By now Macfarlane has covered a lot of ground, and gathered many admirers. I came to his books through his friendship with the late swimmer and writer Roger Deakin. But others reach him through his conservation work, the music he makes with the actor Johnny Flynn, or his vastly popular children's book The Lost Words. We met at Cambridge's Emmanuel College, where he teaches English. I had been informed he was something of a heartthrob to students. 'It seems very unlikely, pushing 50 and balding,' he laughed, and led me into the college gardens. 'Come and meet this incredible, incredible tree… The branches come down, they root, they reroot, they draw, and they surge back up. You see all the power they draw from the earth… If you cut those branches, they would be trees. So it's now fully self-supporting but also absolutely part of the original singular organism. The other incredible thing it does, if you start to notice, is it melts into itself. It's called inosculation, or in-kissing. Can you see one of the branches is starting to basically snog the other and then there are places where that merging is complete, like there? It's one of the best trees, and it's a good friend.' Macfarlane takes his students to this tree to conduct the first supervision of their first year. It is a 220-year-old Oriental plane: only two in the world are known to have branches that reach the ground then climb back up in this way. He offered me homemade lemon and ginger tea from his Thermos. Sitting together at the stump, the effect was like sharing an umbrella in beautiful rain. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Macfarlane was born into a medical family in 1976, to a mother with an 'astonishing sense of wonder' and a father of 'huge integrity', who were both 'always jumping into cold water'. They lived at the end of a country lane in Nottinghamshire, and for holidays visited his grandparents in the Cairngorms. It was 'a life filled with animals and with space'. Macfarlane went to Cambridge, then Oxford, and has not stopped teaching or writing since his PhD. Now, his publications are major occasions: in this magazine, the poet John Burnside declared him 'our finest nature writer'; John Banville praised his 'poet's eye, and a prose style that will make many a novelist burn with envy'. As well as mountains and paths, his books have covered wilderness (The Wild Places) and subterranean landscapes (Underland). Is a River Alive? is billed as Macfarlane's most political book to date. In the years he was writing it, Britain's river crisis rose in the public consciousness. Headlines reported that every river in England was polluted beyond legal limits, Thames Water almost went bankrupt, and the summer drought of 2022 moved the source of the Thames nine miles downstream. The disaster, Macfarlane said, 'is born of a failure of imagination… We have come to envision water in this country as a privatised deterritorialised resource, and not as the life force, lifeline, history-maker, life-giver that it is.' He would like for us to see rivers as living things, and to give them rights. The book describes journeys to three rivers that have generated 'revolutionary thinking', and which run through a cloud-forest in northern Ecuador, contaminated lagoons in south-east India, and the wilderness of Quebec. Flowing through the narrative is the small, nameless chalk stream that has its spring by Macfarlane's house, just outside Cambridge. The government's draft Planning and Infrastructure Bill was published in March. 'At the heart of it,' Macfarlane explained, 'is the idea of 'offset'. The idea that you might offset the harm you're going to do to a fragile and ultra-globally-limited chalk stream network in the name of growth – and to make it good through some kind of water work somewhere else – fundamentally fails to recognise the non-fungible nature of nature.' He led me to what looked like a pond. In fact it was a surfacing of the book's chalk stream. He dropped to his knees and tapped the water. A large black fish swam up, sort of belched its mouth out beyond its lips, and bit Macfarlane's finger. I realised, with horror, that it was now my turn. 'Hold your nerve,' he said, as I extended a tremulous digit towards the fish, who thankfully was no longer interested. I withdrew my arm the moment I was told I had passed 'the great carp test', but Macfarlane's hand lingered. On his wrist was the red cloth bracelet given to him by a healer named Rita, one of many eccentric characters who feature in the book. What Macfarlane never foresaw, he said, was how each trip would bring him to someone who had come very near to death, then found their way from grief, 'back towards life by water', by sharing a river's life with others. Some of these people were present at the book's launch party in London the following week. The author arrived by canal boat, leaping from its roof into the party. The room was packed with readers, students, children, beer, pizza, sandals and bits of tree in people's hair. Later, Johnny Flynn led a singalong. In a speech, Macfarlane described the launch as a 'second-order wedding. I am astonished with delight at every face I see. Beloved family, dear friends. I thank you so much.' Conquering mountains in his adolescence, he drew exhilaration from the chance of death. But happiness is better found, he now feels, in the hope of joining life. I recalled his description of the plane tree in Cambridge, equally a forest of trees and one individual tree: 'The whole thing is this great affront to singularity, and it's this incredible community.' Under that tree, he told me: 'It's been the work of many hands and many years to create this crisis, and it will be the work of many hands and many years to undo it.' [See also: The brain behind Labour's EU deal] Related
Press and Journal
16-05-2025
- Lifestyle
- Press and Journal
Aberdeen author Nan Shepherd's former home on the market for £490,000
This beautiful house in Cults was once home to the late Aberdeen author Nan Shepherd. While living at Dunvegan, she penned her most celebrated work, The Living Mountain, alongside her various novels and poetry. For the last 24 years, it has been home to Gráinne Cullen, Dan Ryan, and their family. It still retains many period features today, including high ceilings, bay windows, traditional fireplaces, and moulded ceiling cornices in some rooms. The 'quirky charm and individual character' initially drew the couple to the five-bedroom house. But they soon realised the location on North Deeside Road suited them both. Gráinne grew up in a big city, while Dan's childhood was spent on a farm, and this house offered both a gateway to Royal Deeside while only being 20 minutes from the city centre. A wrought iron garden gate leads directly to the Old Deeside Railway Line and the 'great outdoors'. Meanwhile, on the other side of the house is a direct road and bus route to the city centre. The short walk to Cults primary and secondary schools was another plus when raising their three children. But now that their kids have 'flown the nest', the retired couple has decided it's time for them to downsize and they have put their home on the market. The Victorian house, which dates back to 1875, is striking to look at from the outside, bolstered by beautifully maintained gardens. While the many shrubs and trees provide a haven for wildlife, they also give the property some privacy. There is a fruit garden filled with redcurrants, raspberries, gooseberries, rhubarb and apple trees – perfect for anyone with green fingers to take on. 'We've so enjoyed our gardens, the stunning views and the double garage which has provided space for our various hobbies, and those of our children, over the years,' Gráinne added. The inside of the Victorian property is just as impressive. While the elegant lounge is cosy, thanks to the traditional fireplace and slate hearth, the large bay windows and ceiling cornices brighten up the space. And the well-appointed family/dining room is designed for entertaining guests or enjoying a family meal. 'The open plan living areas blend seamlessly with the Victorian character of the property,' says Gráinne. Meanwhile, the bright and airy dining kitchen is well equipped, with a gas hob and double oven which is perfect for whipping up family feasts. Gráinne and Dan added a kitchen and utility room extension in 2009, which they say has brought space and light into the back of the house. Other key features include a cloakroom with mosaic splashback tiling and a stained glass window plus a store that has part-glazed double doors leading through to a porch. But one of the more striking features is the conservatory, complete with French doors leading out to the front garden. Not only does this bright and colourful spot provide stunning views, but it is also home to a 94-year-old grape vine. Gráinne says they will miss their annual grape harvest when they move from their North Deeside Road home. 'Not only is the fruit delicious, but we have never grown tired of the spectacle of the vine laden with fruit,' she added. 'We've spent many memorable summer evenings with friends, sitting in our conservatory under the grapevine, sharing a meal and enjoying the magnificent views in the long twilight.' Ideal for growing families, this home has five generously sized bedrooms on the upper floor. The bedrooms either feature bespoke furniture or built-in wardrobes, meaning space and storage are no issue. And they all have beautiful views, with two rooms overlooking Lower Deeside. There's a family bathroom complete with a roll top corner bath with an overhead shower, as well as a separate shower room – perfect for a busy household. And there's even another room on the ground floor currently used as an office, but could be transformed into a sixth bedroom if required. 'It's a wonderful family home, suitable for anyone who would like to work from home,' Gráinne says. Dunvegan, 503 North Deeside Road, Aberdeen is on the market for offers over £490,000. To arrange a viewing contact Peterkins on 01224 428100 or check out the website And if you liked this story, you may also enjoy: Who was Nan Shepherd, the Aberdeenshire writer on our banknotes?
Scotsman
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
New York director 'obsessed' with 'visionary' Scottish writer Nan Shepherd to make film about her life
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... She was a 'visionary' writer dubbed the Scottish Virginia Woolf, who became the first woman to appear on a five pound note. Now a New York-based film director who became 'obsessed' with the work of Nan Shepherd while studying in Edinburgh is to make a film about her life. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Antony Crook, working with Glasgow production company Tiger Lily, is in the pre-production stage of a film based on both Ms Shepherd's life and her best-known novel The Living Mountain. Scottish band Mogwai is to write and perform the score for the film - and plans to perform live at some screenings when it is released. Collaborations with other Scottish musicians are also underway. Mr Crook last year attended a performance of a play about Ms Shepherd's life, written and directed by Richard Baron, Nan Shepherd: Naked and Unashamed, which is due to play its second run at Pitlochry Festival Theatre later this year. Watching the performance has helped inspire Mr Crook to push ahead with the film. Nan Shepherd was the first woman to be featured on a five pound note. Born in 1893, Ms Shepherd, who was an author, teacher and keen hillwalker, put aside her ground-breaking masterpiece, The Living Mountain, in the 1940s, after it was rejected by one publisher. It lay forgotten in a drawer for decades. But in 1978, it was finally published, translated into multiple languages and hailed recently as 'one of the finest books ever written on landscape and nature in Britain'. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Ms Shepherd later worked as a school teacher and taught teaching at the University of Aberdeen. She was known for her unconventional methods in the classroom, earning her comparisons to Miss Jean Brodie in Muriel Spark's novel. The life and legacy of writer Nan Shepherd has inspired a new film. Mr Crook, who last year made a critically acclaimed film about Glasgow band Mogwai, plans to film in Scotland, in the area of Aberdeenshire where Ms Shepherd lived. He said: 'I've loved the book for years. I've been obsessed with it and managed to persuade the family and estate of Nan Shepherd to allow me to have the film rights. Antony Crook is to direct the film. | Antony Crook 'We're in early pre-production on the film and in the process of building a team. We're still doing research at this point. The music is going to be really interesting and we're in talks about casting.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad He added: 'To think that Nan Shepherd's book was a small run initially and that it has become the cult classic it is today is amazing. Last year, I went up to the Cairngorms and retraced her steps. She was very progressive and very avant-garde. She wrote in secret, she was a bit of a legend, which makes it even more magical.' An audiobook version of The Living Mountain is read by actress Tilda Swinton. Mr Baron, who came up with the idea of writing his play about Ms Shepherd during lockdown, said he was 'delighted' that a film was to be made. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'The director came to see the play last year and they're now making a film about her,' he said. 'There is huge interest in her. The run [of the play] was completely sold out last year, which just shows that she really does capture the public imagination. It's extraordinary how her fame has spread well after her death in 1981. She was quite a visionary writer.'
