Jenny Sturgeon, Nan Shepherd and The Living Mountain
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By Paul Scraton:
Sometime around 2011 or 2012 I was in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, browsing the shelves of the Grove Bookshop. There, in a section devoted to nature writing and the outdoors, I found a slender volume called The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd. This book, written around the end of the Second World War and first published in 1977, has become a touchstone of landscape and place writing in the decade or so since Canongate published it in a new edition with an introduction from Robert Macfarlane. It has been translated into a number of different languages and its author, who died in 1981, now graces the Scottish five-pound note. Quite the result for a book that had sat, quietly in a drawer, for more than three decades after Shepherd wrote it.
In the Canongate edition, The Living Mountain is only just over a hundred pages long, and yet within that short space Shepherd creates a richly detailed portrait of a place that was so important to her throughout her life – the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland. If I remember correctly, I read it in one evening at my mum’s house in Menston, and as so often happens with a book like this, it became connected in my imagination not only to the place it is actually about, but also the place where I read it.
I don’t know the Cairngorms very well. I have only been to that corner of Scotland a couple of times, both in childhood, and so I cannot be sure if my memories of the landscape are real, or based on other sources, not least Shepherd’s wonderfully descriptive prose. But picking up the book again this week, I found myself reminded not only of the Scottish landscapes I have known, but also the moors above my mum’s house and the walks we took during that visit nearly ten years ago, with Shepherd’s words still echoing around my head.
Indeed, it is perhaps the greatest compliment I can give to The Living Mountain is that a piece of writing so deeply connected to and rooted in a specific place, can have such resonance with someone who has nearly no personal experience of it. Perhaps it is because all of us who love the outdoors have our own version of what Shepherd felt when she walked out once more into the Cairngorms. For us it might be the Welsh hills or the Baltic coast, a Yorkshire moor or a Brandenburg forest, but we understand Shepherd’s depth of feeling because we feel it too.
The cover artwork of ‘The Living Mountain’, the new album by Jenny Sturgeon, photo by Hannah Bailey
What is true of books is even more true of music. There are so many songs and albums that are connected in my brain to a certain moment, a time of my life and a particular place. A youth hostel room in Slovenia, the snow falling at the window. A border-crossing in Switzerland, in the middle of the night. A road trip through Spain and the volcanic landscapes of Cabo de Gata. Of course, these songs are not about those places, but they became forever linked with them in my imagination. So I was intrigued to see what happened when I listened to a new album by the singer-songwriter Jenny Sturgeon, who has written and recorded her own The Living Mountain, a collection of songs inspired by Nan Shepherd’s book.
As well as the album, released earlier this month, there will also be accompanying films by Shona Thomson which will be hopefully toured next year, and Sturgeon has also found time to record The Living Mountain Podcast, a series of conversations with artists, writers and ecologists about their own connections with the mountains, outdoor places and how they inspire and influence their work.
It often feels, with projects like this, that the great test of the work of art inspired by another is whether it can stand up on its own right. And while it is certainly true that, listening to Jenny Sturgeon’s songs with Nan Shepherd’s book at your elbow, it is easy to hear the conversation between them, the strength of The Living Mountain (the album) is that the songs work in and of themselves. It was a long time since I’d read the book when I first listened to Sturgeon’s album, and what I heard was something poetic, beautiful and haunting, and I think this would have been the case even if I had never read Shepherd’s work at all.
At the end of Sturgeon’s podcast episodes she asks her guests if they have a piece of music that connects them to the landscapes and places they have been talking about in their conversation. The greatest compliment I can give The Living Mountain as an album is that I have continued to hear it, echoing in my head as Nan Shepherd’s prose did before, long after the album has finished and I’ve left the house to go for a walk by the river or in the woods. Something tells me that Sturgeon’s voice and songs will be with me for a long time, and will take me back to these autumn days in Berlin and Brandenburg, forever linked to this particular time and these particular places. It’s quite a way from the high plateau of the Cairngorms to the flatlands of northeastern Germany, but for this listener at least, they are now connected through the words and music of Jenny Sturgeon.
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You can find out more about Jenny Sturgeon and the Living Mountain project, including the podcast, on her website. The album was released in October 2020 by Hudson Records. Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain is published by Canongate. Order it through your local independent bookshop.
Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) as well as the Berlin novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019). His next book, In the Pines, is a novella about a lifelong connection to the forest and will be published by Influx Press in 2021.