Latest news with #TheLivingMountain
Glasgow Times
15-07-2025
- Politics
- Glasgow Times
Dalai Lama given Scottish classic as 90th birthday present
Daydreams Bookshop in Milngavie presented a copy of Nan Shepherd's classic, The Living Mountain, to the Dalai Lama ahead of his birthday, delivered personally by Scottish Green MSP Ross Greer during a visit to India. Ross Greer, Scottish Greens MSP for the West of Scotland, said: "It was the privilege of a lifetime to meet with His Holiness the Dalai Lama ahead of his 90th birthday and to share with him the best wishes of his many friends in Scotland. "I was delighted to present him with a copy of Nan Shepherd's Scottish literary classic, The Living Mountain, from our fantastic local independent bookshop, Daydreams Bookshop. "This book is rightly recognised as the finest ever written about nature here in Scotland. "I know it will resonate with him, given the similarly deep connections that the peoples of Scotland and Tibet have with our natural environments." Elaine Sinclair, owner of Daydreams Bookshop, said: "We were delighted to be able to provide this wonderful Scottish book which has gone on an incredible journey with Ross from our wee bookshop in Milngavie, all the way to the hands of the Dalai Lama in India. "Ross and his staff have welcomed us warmly to Milngavie (with his office just a few doors along from us) and we are very grateful for his ongoing support." Read more: 'We were so impressed': Glasgow communities achieve five-star environmental rating (Image: Supplied) Ross Greer met the Dalai Lama and members of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile in his capacity as chair of the Scottish Parliament's Cross Party Group on Tibet. His visit to Dharamsala, home to the Tibetan Government-in-Exile, included meetings with the President, Education Minister, and Speaker of the Parliament. The Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Government have lived in exile in India since 1959, following China's occupation of Tibet. He used his 90th birthday to announce that the institution would continue after his death and that only his foundation would have the authority to appoint his successor. Read more: 'It's fantastic to see': Glasgow spaces recognised with Green Flag Awards 202 Ross Greer said: "During my trip, I met with figures including the Tibetan Government's Education Minister and with headteachers of their schools for refugee children. "I am now keen to establish partnerships between our fantastic local schools and their equivalents in the Tibetan exile community. "With America cutting the funding these schools depended on, many are now struggling, but I know that kind-hearted and internationalist people here in Scotland would be willing to offer support."
The National
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The National
Nan Shepherd: Naked and Unashamed cements her place in literary canon
The play tells the story of Shepherd as an author, teacher, hillwalker and lover, and explores the 30-years-delay in the publication of her masterpiece The Living Mountain. Now in its second run in Pitlochry, I did not want to miss. Before entering the studio space, we were told the show was 'very clever' by staff and it had sold out the remainder of the performances. The thirst for knowledge about Shepherd has not been quenched since her appearance on Scotland's five-pound note in 2016. She has taken her rightful place among the great Scottish writers of her time, of whom she was friends with, and with that, becoming a posthumous celebrity. Holding the titular role, Susan Coyle effortlessly shifted as a child playing in the woods with her father, to a young woman teasing a married man, a middle-aged teacher relishing in the outdoors, and an old woman reflecting on her life's work, then later in her final days. Around and around, we were carried, spinning through time and Shepherd's life. Along the way, Adam Buksh joined her, embodying several men who played key roles in her life. He transformed into her father, her lover John Macmurray, an American journalist who tracked her down in 1976, and her mentor Neil Gunn. The periods of her life that were played out each helped capture a full-bodied picture of Shepherd. We saw her as a child in the Quarry Wood by her house in 1901, aged eight – which later inspired her first novel, by the same name, published in 1928 – playing with her father and learning about communication between trees. We were then transported to 1981, to see Nan grown and old, in a care home in Aberdeen slightly lost and confused. These two scenes bookend the play, with us returning to them again for the final two scenes. The play makes clear that Nan was closely attached the granite city, with the audience asked to fill in the evident gap: 'I was born in Aberdeen, I went to school in Aberdeen, and so I teach in …' when we meet her in 1938 in a classroom. Again, none of the staging has been moved, and Coyle doesn't change outfits at any point during the 90-minute production. Yet, it is an entirely different time, place and person in front of us. While embodying Shepherd as a teacher, Coyle asks audience members to read passages written by several authors which relate to Scotland and its literary renaissance of the 20th century. We also hear from Charles Murray, Hugh MacDiarmid, Rupert Brooke, James Joyce, and Thomas Hardy, The delivery of these passages by both Coyle and Buksh ensnared the audience and we were hooked on every word. Later, while going through old clippings with Robertson, a review written by Lewis Grassic Gibbon of The Quarry Wood is found, in which he savagely tears apart her work and her use of Scots language. READ MORE: 20 years, 7000 fans, one folk family: Skerryvore's castle show was for them Gibbon would go on to publish Sunset Song four years later, and we are told by Shepherd that his autobiographer said he never read Shepherd's novel. Robertson is aghast that as a student in the US, he was taught Sunset Song and told it was one of the greatest Scottish novels there had ever been but had never heard of Shepherd or her work which embodies the same world as Gibbon's but came first. Shepherd in 1976 notes her novel was written in Scotland, while his was written in England. The audience is left to make their own conclusion, as historians have been also. Instead of holding the audience in a grudge, we explore the deeper impact of what Shepherd was attempting to do at a time when the world was not built for a 'female feminist Scottish writer,' unmarried and uncovering the secrets ready to be shared by the great outdoors in ways that would rival and overtake any male counterpart. So harsh was this backlash, from Gibbon and others, she locked The Living Mountain away. This is the catalyst of the show, with the direction, sound, and writing using this moment to give the narrative a sense of release once the drawer is open. READ MORE: 'Show some respect': Scots hit out at Danish influencer for 'damaging' protected land The relationship between Shepherd and Gunn is also explored but not with conclusion. The journalist pries into whether love letters were exchanged between the two, who had decades-long written correspondence, but Shepherd remains steadfast that he was her mentor. Again, it's not clear whether the pair were intimately involved but both the writing and direction of the show allows the narrative to be explored without making any conclusions about Shepherd's life. The audience is left to read between the lines of all we know about Shepherd. An Aberdonian woman who wrote before her time, saw beyond her reality, and truly understood what the beauty and intricacies of Scotland's landscape and culture could give to this world if seen in its entirety. Her final moments are played out, with a final scene between Shepherd and her father bringing tears to many in the audience who closed the show with a standing ovation.
The Guardian
06-06-2025
- 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
05-06-2025
- 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
