The Living Mountain: A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland

four decades, until Aberdeen University Press finally and quietly published it in 1977. That same year, Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts and John McPhee’s Coming into the Country appeared; a year later came Peter Matthiessen’s Zennish mountain epic, The Snow Leopard. To my mind, The Living Mountain stands equal t

Shepherd – like Neil Gunn and like the Scottish explorer–essayist W.H. Murray – was strongly influenced by her reading in Buddhism and the Tao.

It hasn’t always been this way, though. Patrick Kavanagh (1904–67), the great poet of the Irish mundane,