The Living Mountain

by Nan Shepherd

  I had driven to Derry Lodge one perfect morning in June with two gentlemen who, having arrived there, were bent on returning at once to Braemar, when a car came up with four others, obviously setting out for Ben MacDhui. In a flash I had accosted them to ask if I might share their car back to Braemar in the evening: my intention was to go up, the rag-tag and bob-tail of their company, keeping them in sight but not joining myself on to them. The request was granted and I turned back to say farewell to my former companions. When I turned again, the climbers had disappeared. I hastened after them, threading my way through the scattered pines that lie along the stream, but failing to overtake them and hurrying a little more. At last I got beyond the trees, and in all the bare glen ahead, I could see no human being. I could not believe that four people could have walked so fast as to be completely out of sight, for my own pace had been very fair. Prudence—I had only once before been on a Cairngorm—told me to wait; I had begun to suspect I had out-distanced my company. But I couldn’t wait. The morning was cloudless and blue, it was June, I was young. Nothing could have held me back. Like a spurt of fire licking the hill, up I ran. The Etchachan tumbled out from under snow, the summit was like wine. I saw a thousand summits at once, clear and sparkling. Then far off to the south I saw a wall of cloud like a foaming breaker. It rolled on swiftly, blotting out a hundred summits a minute—very soon it would blot out mine. I threw a hasty glance around, to fix my bearings, and pelted down towards the ruined surveyors’ hut, from which the path downwards by Coire Etchachan is clearly marked by cairns; but before I reached it I was swallowed up. The whole business, from my first glimpse of the cloud to the moment it washed over me, occupied less than four minutes. Half a mile down, drinking tea in the driving mist by the side of the path, I found my lost company still ascending. On another occasion, seated by a summit cairn, gazing through a cloudless sky at peaks and lochs, I found myself unable to name some of the features I was looking at, and bent close over the map to find them out. When I raised my head, I was alone in the universe with a few blocks of red granite. This swiftness of the mist is one of its deadliest features, and the wreckage of aeroplanes, left to rust in lonely corners of the mountains, bears witness to its dreadful power.

  Man’s touch is on the beast creation too. He has driven the snow bunting from its nesting-sites, banished the capercailzie and reintroduced it from abroad. He has protected the grouse and all but destroyed the peregrine. 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.

  These crofts and farms and gamekeepers’ cottages breed men of character. They are individualists, gritty, tough, thrawn, intelligent, full of prejudice, with strange kinks and a salted sense of humour. Life here is hard and astringent, but is seldom kills grace in the soul. The best of them are people of many skills, inventive at supplying their needs, knowledgeable on their own ground and interested in a number of things outside it. They are not servile but avoid angering the laird; upright, though ’the Birkie up yonder’ comes near enough to the thought most of them hold of God; hospitable, but never ‘senseless ceevil’, keeping a cool sense of proportion over what matters: though there are exceptions, to be sure, as where wouldn’t there be?—a man who ‘wouldna part wi’ a yowie (fir cone) off his grun’’, or a woman who has ‘put her eyes on my lustre jug’, or again a generosity that will have sugar in your cup whether you want it or not, ‘to take the wildness off the tea’.

  Life has not much margin here. Work goes on from dark to dark. The hay is brought in in August, the oats (with luck) in October: but at Christmas they may still stand, sodden and black in the tilted fields. And one night, before you know it, stags may have broken in and ravaged the growing crops. The crofter’s wife can’t go to her brother’s funeral in January, because the cows are beginning to go dry and if a stranger milks them they may cease to yield altogether, and there’s the income gone and milk to be bought for-by. The water must be carried from the well, through drifted snow or slush, unless the crofter himself has ingenuity and useful hands, and has brought his own water supply from the hill to the house; and even then it must be watched and tended through the rigours of a mountain winter.

  Sometimes there is no well—no spring rises within reach of the house, but all the water to be used must be carried from the burn, up steep and toilsome banks. Then the washing is done in the centuries-old fashion, down at the foot of the banks in the burn itself—sometimes on a windy day I have seen smoke rising, and caught the wink of fire, and coming near seen a great cauldron in a sheltered nook beside the burn and figures of women moving around it.

  In these crannies of the mountains, the mode of supplying elemental needs is still slow, laborious and personal. To draw your water from the well, not even a pump between you and its sparkling transparency, to break the sticks you have gathered from the wood and build your fire and set your pot upon it—there is a deep pervasive satisfaction in these simple acts. Whether you give it conscious thought or not, you are touching life, and something within you knows it. A sense of profound contentment floods me as I stoop to dip the pail. But I am aware all the same that by so living I am slowing down the tempo of life; if I had to do these things every day and all the time I should be shutting the door on other activities and interests; and I can understand why the young people resent it.

  Not all the young want to run away. Far from it. Some of them love these wild places with devotion and ask nothing better than to spend their lives in them. These inherit their fathers’ skills and sometimes enlarge them. Others are restive, they resent the primitive conditions of living, despise the slow ancient ways, and think that praising them is sentimentalism. These clear out. They take, however, 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. An unfortunate proportion want white-collar occupations, and lose their parents’ many-sidedness. For the young are like the old, various as human nature has always been, and will go on being, and life up here is full of loves, hates, jealousies, tendernesses, loyalties and betrayals, like anywhere else, and a great deal of plain humdrum happiness.

  To the lovers of the hills whom they allow to share their houses these people extend the courtesy that accepts you on equal terms without ceremonial. You may come and go at your own times. 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. They respect, whether they share it or not, your passion for the hill. But I have not found it true, as many people maintain, that those who live beside the mountains do not love them. I shall 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. 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 time or energy?) they do look at them. It is not in this part of the Highlands that ‘views is carnal’. ‘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 something of their wildness is still in her speech. But even within fam
ilies there are differences. Of two sisters, brought up on the very precinct of the mountain, one says ‘None of your hills for me, I have seen too much of them all my days,’ while the other had spent weeks on end in a small tent on the very plateau. One of the truest hill-lovers I have known was old James Downie of Braemar, whose hand-shake (given with a ceremonial solemnity) sealed my first day on Ben MacDhui. Downie had once the task of guiding Gladstone to the Pools of Dee, which the statesman decided must be visited. Now the path to the Pools, from the Braemar end, is long though not rough, shut in except for the mountain sides of the Lairig Ghru itself; and the Pools lie beneath the summit of the Pass, so that to see the wide view open on to Speyside and the hills beyond, one must climb another half mile among boulders. Gladstone refused absolutely to stir a step beyond the Pools. And Downie, the paid guide, must stop there too; an injury which Downie, the hillman, never forgave. Resentment was still raw in his voice as he told me about it, forty years later.

  But while they accept mountain climbing, and are tolerant to oddities like night prowling and sleeping in the open (‘You would think you were born in a cart-shed, where there wasna a door’—and when one rainy summer night we did actually set our camp beds in the cart-shed, what fun they had at us, what undisguised and hearty laughter), yet for irresponsibility they have no tolerance at all. They have only condemnation for winter climbing. They know only too well how swiftly a storm can blow up out of a clear sky, how soon the dark comes down, and how terrific the force of a hurricane can be upon the plateau; and they speak with a bitter realism of the young fools who trifle with human life by disregarding the warnings they are given. Yet if a man does not come back, they go out to search for him with patience, doggedness and skill, often in appalling weather conditions; and when there is no more hope of his being alive, seek persistently for the body. It is then that one discovers that shopmen and railway clerks and guards and sawmillers may be experienced hillmen. Indeed, talking to all sorts of people met by chance upon the hill, I realise how indiscriminately the bug of mountain feyness attacks. There are addicts in all classes of this strange pleasure. I have talked on these chance encounters with many kinds, from a gaunt scion of ancient Kings (or so he looked), with eagle beak and bony knees, descending on us out of a cloud on Ben MacDhui, kilt and Highland cloak flapping in the rain, to a red-headed greaser, an old mole-catcher, and an errand boy from Glasgow.

  Many forceful and gnarled personalities, bred of the bone of the mountain, from families who have lived nowhere else, have vanished since I first began climbing here—Maggie Gruer, that granite boss, shapely in feature as a precipice, witty, acrid when it was needed, hospitable, ready for any emergency, living with a glow and a gusto that made porridge at Maggie’s more than merely food. Day or night, it was all one to Maggie—no climber was turned away who would sleep on a landing, in a shed, anywhere where a human body could be laid. Nor did she scruple to turn a man out of that first deep slumber of the night, the joyous release of an exhausted body, to give his bed to a lady benighted and trudging in at one in the morning. James Downie—short, sturdy figure, erect to the last, with a hillman’s dignity in his carriage; teller of stout tales—of a prince, a statesman, a professor, measuring themselves against his hill-craft; the first women to climb under his guidance, in trailing skirts and many petticoats; the hill ponies he hired for them from a taciturn shepherd who hid in his shanty and gave no help in seating ‘the ladies’—‘I likit fine to see you settin’ them on the shalts’—the stern discipline he exacted from his lady climbers. Indeed there was a stern and intractable root in this old man. Some of his stories were very funny, but he did not laugh much. The stern grandeur of the corries had invaded his soul. There was nothing tender or domestic about him; unmarried, he bothied by choice in the bothy of his own croft, leaving the house to his sisters. ‘He’s nae couthy wi’ the beasts,’ his nephew’s wife confided to me once. ‘’Deed, he’s real cruel to them whiles.’ The last time I stayed on the croft, during his lifetime, he insisted on carrying my bag all the way to the bus. I remonstrated, but was treated as I suppose he treated his lady climbers long before. ‘I shall not do it again,’ he said. ‘I shall not see you again.’ He was dead a few months later.

  Then Sandy Mackenzie, the mighty gamekeeper on the Rothiemurchus side, already a done old man when I knew him, warming his body in the sun; and his second wife, Big Mary, surviving him for many years, dying at ninety, half-blind but indomitable. Tall, gaunt and stooped, her skin runkled and blackened from the brook of her open fire, her grey hair tousled in the blowing wind, she had a sybilline, an eldritch look on her. When I saw her last, a step-daughter had taken her from the lonely cottage, that I had shared so often—had tended her, washed her grey hair to a pure fleece of white, scrubbed her nails and her hands that were soft now because she could no longer heave her great axe or rug fir-roots from the ground, and dressed her in orderly black, with a lacy white shawl on her shoulders. It took my breath away; she was too exquisite—a spectacle; but the earthy and tempestuous was her truer element. She belonged there, and knew it. ‘I was never one for the housecraft,’ she told me once. ‘I liked the outdoor work best, and the beasts.’ Alone there with her ageing husband, she talked to the hens, to the old horse and to the cow, in the Gaelic that was her mother tongue. When the old man died, the cow was taken to the farm across the moor. ‘May there be no more Whitewell cows here,’ said the woman who milked her. ‘We have not the time to be speaking to them, and will she let down the milk without you speak?’

  Sometimes, as her sight failed on her, the loneliness oppressed her, for she had an avid interest in other people’s lives, and books could no longer fill her need. ‘The news will be sour on me before I will be hearing it,’ she would complain. And she turned the news about upon her tongue—of one, ‘she’s a bad brat’; of an infatuated man, ‘he doesna see daylight but through her’; of a widower, ‘it put the quietness on him, losing Mary.’ For the few weeks of the year that we over-ran her cottage, she was as full of glee as we were ourselves—teased us and joked with us, though her passionate interest in every detail of our lives was never ill-mannered: she understood reticence. And the morning we left, while we collected ‘meth’ stove and frying-pan, and stuffed the sleeping bags and folded the camp-beds, she would send the flames crackling up the great open chimney to boil the kettle for our last ritual cup of tea; and the tears were standing in her eyes. Her hunger for folk, all the waywardness and oddity of their lives, was unappeasable. Yet, when the laird offered her a couple of rooms in another cottage, shut in and low-lying, but among people, she would have none of it. The long swoop of moor and the glittering precipices, the sweep of air around her dwelling, held her in spite of herself. I am glad that she died in her own house, between a winter with one friend and a winter with another. One blustering late September day I stepped off the train at Aviemore, to be met at once by my friend Adam Sutherland the guard. ‘Do you know what has happened now? They are burying Big Mary at one o’clock.’ I was in time to walk the two or three miles to the ancient kirkyard, dank among trees by the river, and to follow the men who carried the coffin down the long wet path from the road. Someone (whom I bless) had made a wreath for her, from heather and rowan berries, oats and barley and juniper, the things she saw and handled day by day. Close by lies Farquhar Shaw, survivor of the famous fight on the Inches of Perth, who troubled the neighbourhood so that when he was dead they set five heavy stone kebbucks upon his flat tombstone, to keep him under. I like to think that she lies near him, who was of as strong and stubborn an earth as he.

  For, yes, she troubled her neighbourhood, as he did his, if on a smaller scale. Not in an evil way: there was no malice in her. But she was salt and salt can be harsh. She was thrawn as Auld Nick, and only God (so they tell me) can turn him aside from what he wants to do. That she set problems for those with whose lives hers was interlaced, I can well believe. But she had her own integrity, rich and bountiful. I feel that I
want to say of her, as Sancho Panza, challenged to find reasons for continuing to follow his master, of Don Quixote: ‘I can do no otherwise … I have eaten his bread; I love him.’

  For the living—those who have instructed me, and harboured me, and been my friends in my journey into the mountain—there are some among the many1 whom I must name: the other Mackenzies of Whitewell, old Sandy’s family, and the Mackenzies of Tullochgrue; and most especially Mrs Sutherland, Adam’s wife, herself a Macdonald rooted in the place, a woman generous as the sun, who has cherished my goings and my comings for quarter of a century; and James Downie’s nephew Jim McGregor, and his wife, friends to thank heaven for, who on the Dee side of the mountain, as the Sutherlands on the Spey, have given me the franchise of their home.