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

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

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.