An uphill struggle

‘It’s a grand thing to get leave to live’, perhaps the most famous line Nan Shepherd wrote, is carved in the slate paving of the Writers’ Museum’s Close in Edinburgh. But many who read it, either there or on the new Scottish £5 note, will be surprised to learn that it is not actually taken from The Living Mountain, the work that brought Shepherd posthumous fame beyond her native Scotland.

Published in 1977, just four years before its author’s death, this book about the Cairngorms — part spiritual memoir, part nature writing — was written decades earlier, in the 1940s, but failed to find a publisher. Even then, however, it was to be Shepherd’s last book, though she would compose occasional pieces in the decades of literary and educational activity that followed. Had The Living Mountain never appeared, she would be remembered, if at all, for this cultural ‘civic’ activity, and for the three novels and a poetry collection that she published between 1928 and 1934.