Are a fire of blue, a pulse of power, a beat
In energy, the sea dissolves,
And I too melt, am timeless, a pulse of light.
from ‘Achiltibuie’, Nan Shepherd
The Sir Duncan Rice Library appears as an intrusion in the landscape, or at least as an intrusion on my imagining of what the landscape of Old Aberdeen is meant to be: all ornate medieval monuments with parapets and belfries and buttresses carved from granite. Eight storeys high, the building sits on its own, on the western edge of King’s College, and appears to be constructed entirely of glass. Defiantly modern—futuristic even—its shape is meant to evoke a carbon molecule. It is one of those structures that is designed, as so many modern buildings are, to be looked out of not into. From the inside, the building disappears; instead, from every level, you become part of the landscape, the North Sea on one side and the foothills of the Cairngorms on the other.
It was here, within this elemental structure, in the first few days of what was to be a year-long stay in Aberdeen, that I first discovered the writing of Nan Shepherd. I had heard of her, of course. But I knew very little about her, or her writing, at that point. I certainly hadn’t realised that she had lived most of her life in Cults, then a village on Aberdeen’s outskirts, now a suburb of the city, or that she had studied at the University of Aberdeen, instructed teachers at the Aberdeen College of Education, then upon retirement from teaching edited the Aberdeen University Review. I was not familiar with The Living Mountain, the long nonfiction essay about her beloved Cairngorms, nor its legendary back story—that although Nan Shepherd completed the manuscript in 1946 it was not published until 1977, after Shepherd, who was by then in her eighties, rediscovered it while “tidying out my possessions”1. I didn’t know that, since 2016, her image has adorned the Royal Bank of Scotland £5 note.
And so, the first book of Nan Shepherd’s I read was not The Living Mountain, nor the three critically-acclaimed novels published early in her career, but Wild Geese. First published in 2018, Wild Geese is a book of anomalies, or B-sides—a short story, a nonfiction essay, selected criticism and other prose, and a series of poems. Most of the poems within the collection are previously unpublished, and none were published in Shepherd’s lifetime. Charlotte Peacock, author of Into the Mountain (2017), the first and only biography of Shepherd thus far, included three of the lines from one of those poems in her Introduction to the collection. These three lines, from the poem ‘Achiltibuie’, were my first direct experience of Nan Shepherd’s writing. As Peacock writes: “Echoing the rhythm of the waves, like many of Shepherd’s lines, they linger long in the ear”.2
I felt them in my gut.
‘Achiltibuie’ first appeared in print in 1996, fifteen years after Shepherd’s death. It was published in The Grampian Quartet, an omnibus edition of Shepherd’s four works of prose: her three novels The Quarry Wood (1928), The Weatherhouse (1930) and A Pass in the Grampians (1933), and The Living Mountain, her single work of nonfiction. Poet and scholar Roderick Watson, who edited the book, wrote separate introductions to each work. Introducing The Living Mountain he writes that it “takes us to the wellsprings of her imagination and her sense of what it is to be a living being at large in the world, precariously balanced between the mysterious realms of organic and inorganic matter.” Shepherd, in her foreword, which Watson placed ahead of his own words, calls it a “traffic of love”.3
Of ‘Achiltibuie’, which is reproduced in full within his introduction to The Living Mountain, Watson writes: “Here again we experience her characteristic experience of how the organic and the inorganic can meet and mingle at the moments of heighted mental and physical exertion”.4 Here, again, is the poem in full:
Here on the edge of Europe I stand on the edge of being.
Floating on light, isle after isle takes wing.
Burning blue are the peaks, rock that is older than thought,
And the sea burns blue—or is it the air between?—
They merge, they take one another upon them,
I have fallen through time and found the enchanted world,
Where all is beginning. The obstinate rocks
Are a fire of blue, a pulse of power, a beat
In energy, the sea dissolves,
And I too melt, am timeless, a pulse of light.
‘Achiltibuie’ was one of a series of four poems that Nan Shepherd wrote in early October 1950, during—or perhaps shortly after—a visit to Achiltibuie (Aichillidh Bhuidhe in Scottish Gaelic), a village on the edge of the Atlantic,not far from Ullapool in the remote western Highlands. We know they were written in October 1950 because as Peacock tells us the poems were dated as such. Three of them, the first of which is ‘Achiltibuie’, appear to have been written on successive mornings. As far as anyone knows, Shepherd never sought to publish these poems; they were left as they were written, longhand on loose leaf pages within her poetry journal, and only discovered later within her archives, which are held at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh.
‘Achiltibuie’ is dated 4th October 1950, sixty-nine years to the day before I arrived in Aberdeen. This fact—this coincidence of timing—made the poem seem like a portal. In the days and weeks that followed, I read and reread the poem, and many others. I read Peacock’s biography, Into the Mountain, in full, found it comprehensive and insightful but also wanting; lacking both the daring and the liveliness of Shepherd’s prose. I conjured up stories of the lives and experiences that might have existed beyond the page. I dreamed of digging deep into the archives Peacock had based her work upon, the handwritten notes and letters Nan Shepherd wrote within her lifetime, to herself, and others.
I wanted to go to Achiltibuie and stand there, on the edge of Europe, feeling Shepherd’s words in the place that had inspired them. I wanted to write about it. But I had multiple deadlines before the end of October, and upcoming travels would take me further afield—to York and London, Bordeaux, Bavaria, and Portugal. I would not return to Aberdeen until a too-warm winter’s evening, a few days before Hogmanay. I was due to go back to Australia for a month in early February. I would go to Achiltibuie upon my return, I thought. In the spring, perhaps, or summer.
In the meantime, I borrowed or bought every edition of The Living Mountain I could, studying them as objects as much as works of literature.The book itself is short—just 120 pages with a six-page glossary at the end. Shepherd’s foreword, which she wrote in 1977 upon rediscovering the manuscript, is a mere three pages. Watson’s introduction in The Grampian Quartet appears after the foreword, allowing Shepherd to speak first about her own work. Yet every edition published since 2011, including the one I own, the 2019 hardback with its dreamy cover—purple mountain peaks rising from a river of green, mauve and gold—places Robert Macfarlane’s introduction at the front, before Shepherd’s. His introduction is twenty-five pages long, eight times the length of hers and a fifth the size of the text itself. Shepherd’s preface, which follows Macfarlane’s introduction, is not quite three pages.
I began to rage at the way that Macfarlane seemed to have stood over and in front of Nan Shepherd, how he had covered her words with his own. Worse, I realised, in claiming to have rediscovered her—or at least allowing the claim to be attributed to him—he cast a shadow where he had intended to shine a light, not just on Shepherd but on those who had been reading and contemplating Shepherd’s writing for years—never acknowledging that she had not really been lost, that she had no need to be found.
I read. Sitting in the cosy, first-floor cafe in Old Aberdeen, which had become my second office, feeling mildly self- conscious at my table for one in the middle of the room, I felt Shepherd’s words move through me; sparking like flint, they kindled, and then spread. How did she do it? I wondered. It’s as though she put her whole self in: every word, every syllable, every sound, is alive. I wrote in my journal: the life in The Living Mountain is in the words. Yes, those words are about the Cairngorms, but the words are where the power is.
In The Living Mountain, Shepherd writes about seeing, and re-seeing, the Cairngorms in different ways. Allowing the eye to travel slowly over the surface of a loch “deepens one’s sense of outer reality.”5 Standing with legs straddled, then bending over and looking through her legs she discovers: “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 ”.6 When I read these words I had already, for some time, been aware that the book I was writing, which was nominally about surfing, was less about the act of surfing and more about the way surfing had altered my sense of place. Reading Shepherd’s words gave me the means to articulate this: that through surfing, and writing about it, I hoped to capture in some way how the ocean sees itself.
In those first few months in Aberdeen, winter dark encroaching, when I wasn’t reading or writing or talking via Facetime to Ben, the man I had left behind in Australia—late morning for me, just before bedtime for him—I walked and walked. Sometimes stravaiging and sometimes striding with purpose, I walked as much to shrug off the cold as to distract myself from strange feeling of being awake while my loved one slept. Between the Dee and the Don, I walked, always looking, always trying to see the city as it sees itself.
I had been warned by multiple people on multiple occasions that Aberdeen was grey. The Granite City. I am susceptible to SAD, and accustomed to brightness: a sun that burns within minutes and a sky that melds at the horizon into the hazy, dreamy blue of the Pacific so that it appears, as often as not, that they are one. Two days after I arrived, still dizzy with jetlag, I walked from where I was staying in Old Aberdeen to the beach—a long, uninteresting route made even longer and less interesting on account of the dead-ends I encountered as I tried to locate a short cut. On approach to the beach, my eye was drawn to the wind farm that sits just off the coast, flanked by a series of oil tankers. The sea that day was wild, the surf turbulent and turgid. The wind was bracing, Arctic, the sky pallid.
I stood there, hugging my jacket to my chest. I looked down. I saw then, for what was to be the first of many times that the shoreline is lined with stones. Uncovered by the tidal shifts, they sit in eye-catching formations, all intricate patterns and earthy hues as varied as the hydrangeas that flourish in Aberdeen gardens—not only grey but also pink, red, orange and purple. Over the next few weeks, as I strode the cobbled streets of Old Aberdeen, and down to the River Don through Seaton Park and across the Brig’o’Balgownie, I saw that the bricks—on the university’s older buildings, and in the old town square, on footpaths, and garden walls—were also multicoloured, laid in patterns that appear to replicate the way the stones have settled at the North Sea tideline.
In February 2020, four months after I arrived in Aberdeen, I returned to Queensland to attend a conference, and be with Ben in the same place, the same time zone. At the end of what was to be a five-week stay drew near, I watched closely as the number of global Covid cases escalated. The Australian borders were not yet closed, the pandemic not yet declared. I thought of the four flights I needed to take in order to return to Aberdeen, the five airports I would walk through, the thirty- two hours in compressed recycled air, being neither here nor there. I decided to stay.
I think about those walks I did when I first arrived in Aberdeen, between the Dee and the Don (but mostly by the Don), as the leaves on the trees turned red, then brown, and began to fall, gathering around the pathways. As the sun slanted, and the shadows lengthened. As the air grew crisp and the hydrangeas browned around the edges but held on.
I made it to the Dee, finally, on a sunny day in late January. I had planned to walk to Cults where Shepherd had lived, but had slept in, then lingered too long in Temperate House at the Duthie Park Winter Gardens. By the time I reached the river,
there was only three hours of daylight left. I had hoped to be able to follow the Deeside path all the way to Cults, but lost it at the Bridge of Dee and found myself, instead, on Garthdee Road weaving my way through shoppers driving out of the Sainsbury carpark, cars laden with their weekly groceries.
Disappointed but determined, I cut through the back of a gymnasium, as the light pixelated, and found my way back to the Dee. Half-jogging along the muddy riverside track, I made it to Cults by nightfall. I turned back at the edge of town, so as to make it back to Garthdee Road in time for the last bus.
In May 1940, in a letter to her friend Neil Gunn, Nan Shepherd likened reading Gunn’s most recent novel, Second Sight, to “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.” She continued: “The word shouldn’t have such power. It dissolves one’s being. I am no longer myself but a part of a life beyond myself when I read pages that are so much an expression of myself.” 7
The word shouldn’t have such power. And yet, thankfully, it does.
It is October again, a year since I left for Scotland. I am still here, not there. The sun is setting in the same place as it was when I left, golden light radiating through the salt-stained bedroom window, above the desk that Ben built for me so that I could continue to work while I am here. In the open doorway behind me sits a caged cockatiel, which Ben bought for his daughter but has become my constant companion, as I have become his—he screeches whenever I am out of view. From where I sit, in our second-floor apartment on Kirra Hill, the sun will disappear from view when it sinks below the fifteen-storey highrise, aspirationally named as these buildings are: the Iconic.
I know that at this time of year, so close to equinox, the sun will set in Achiltibuie at a similar time. How does it glow? Where, on the horizon, does it sink? What landforms or structures might stand in its way? How long does the light linger? Does the sea dissolve? Do the isles take wing?
Many years ago, as a confused yet ever-whimsical twenty- four-year-old, I set off from the overcrowded London doss house I was living in, and travelled solo to Edinburgh and on to the Isle of Skye. Wanting, always, to go further, I teamed up with a likeminded young woman from New Zealand, took the ferry to North Uist, then Berneray, then to Harris and Lewis. We stayed in crofters’ cottages converted to hostels, sang to seals and spoke to strangers for hours, by peat fires burning in the cottage hearth, or outside under stars. I stood at the Clachan Callanais, brushed a hand across the face of an ancient megalith, and gathered mushrooms sprouting at its base. I don’t remember the ferry ride from Stornaway to Ullapool, whether I stood on the portside deck and set my gaze northwards to the Summer Isles, but if I had done I might have seen Achiltibuie then, already, in the distance. It may yet be the closest I, or at least my physical body, will get. My belongings—my winter clothes and the meagre collection of things I took with me to Aberdeen, or bought while I was there, to forge some semblance of home—are still sitting in a locked office on the university campus. Many of my books are there as well. I brought my copy of The Living Mountain with me. It remains unfinished. My bookmark is folded in between the first two pages of the penultimate chapter ‘The Senses’. I can’t remember why I didn’t read to the end in the first place, but now it seems like superstition, a way of keeping it, and Nan Shepherd, and Scotland, living breathing
growing being, until I can return.
1. Shepherd, Nan (2019) The Living Mountain. Canongate Books.
2. Peacock, Charlotte (2018) Wild Geese: A Collection of Nan Shepherd’s Writing. Galileo Publishers.
3. Shepherd, N., & Watson, R. (1996). The Grampian Quartet . Canongate Books.
4. Ibid.
5. Shepherd, Nan (2019) The Living Mountain. Canongate Books..
6. Ibid.
7. Peacock, Charlotte. Into the Mountain: A Life of Nan Shepherd. (2017). Galileo Publishers.
First published in Causeway Cabhsair A Journal of Scottish and Irish Writing, Edition 11.2, 2021.