Jenny Sturgeon, Nan Shepherd and The Living Mountain

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.

Wiesenburg: A spring diary

By Paul Scraton:

Field notes from Brandenburg:

We walk across the fields to the old village just before tea, and we see that the stork has returned. The nest is on top of the brick chimney above a workshop that is now an art and community hall between the supermarket and the Schloss. But the stork is in the fields, taking languid strides across the rutted ground, while a hooded crow watches on from a safe distance.

Another returnee to the village: the artwork that stands in the middle of the pond, part of a 42-km walking route that links Wiesenburg with Bad Belzig. The artwork represents all the lost and abandoned villages of High Fläming. Those destroyed in the Thirty Years War or left as ghost villages as industry shifted, swallowed by the forest. Each winter the artwork is taken away to protect it in case the pond waters freeze, and each spring it is brought back. The lost villages found once more. 

In the Schloss gardens, the anglers sit along the banks of the ponds, easily maintaining social distance with their umbrellas and low stools, trailers pulled by bicycles and plastic bottles of water and beer. 

At dusk I watch the bats dance between the houses above the gentle orange glow of the street light. I stand on our driveway and look up and down the street. A number of houses are empty. Shuttered and waiting for someone new. A generation change, our neighbour said. 

The new house that we pass on our walks is beginning to take shape. Walls and and a roof. Windows and doors to come. The old tumbledown shack that was the only structure on the once-tangled and overgrown property now has a shiny new big brother. 

The path through the forest follows the old dry valleys formed by the last Ice Age and leads us to the next village. It is there we spot the first swallows of spring, pinging this way and that as we walk down past the houses with their neat gardens to the sandy track out the other side. We’ve never been this far before, and the path leads up to a lookout point that offers as close to a view as you’ll get in Brandenburg without climbing a castle tower or a wooden walkway high above the trees. 

Our neighbouring house has been gutted, the remnants of the old lives lived between those walls piled up in the garden. The things that were left behind when they sold it. Old travel cases and trunks. Hunting trophies. Garden gnomes. The new neighbours are working on it around their jobs, on evenings and weekends, working hard and making good progress. The kids play on piles of sand as the adults pause for a beer and we say cheers across the top of an overgrown hedge. 

In the window of the village library, closed since March, there is a line-up of books: Albert Camus’ The Plague. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. David Wallace Wells’ The UnInhabitable Earth. The librarian has a sense of humour.

In the garden the cherry blossom comes and then the cherry blossom is gone. 

On a walk along the art trail we come to an open door on the edge of a field. In the middle of the 19th century the village of Groß Glien had 42 residents. Now all that remains of the village are the ruins of the church foundations a few steps from the work of art, enclosed in a tangle of brambles and young trees.

At the top of the Hagelberg, a five kilometre run from our house, I’m at the highest point in Brandenburg and the smallest Mittelgebirge in Germany. Or perhaps it is the second highest. It seems that there is a debate, involving places on the borders with other states and rumours of earth movers in the middle of the night in order to take the crown. No matter. It’s so peaceful on the hill it is hard to imagine this is the site of a bloody battle that, in 1813, took 3,000 lives. 

Outside the supermarket the asparagus stand is erected. Beelitz is not far away. They sell white and green asparagus, offcuts for soup and punnets of strawberries. A plastic screen stands between us and the friendly woman who weighs our purchases and takes our money through a small gap at the bottom of the barrier. 

On a run out from the village I see what I think might be wolf droppings, but there’s no internet connection on my phone to check so I take a photograph for later. The results of the research are inconclusive. 

We hear the sirens first. Then see the first engines passing by quickly on our road. Over the fence we hear our neighbour say that he should go down to the station and see what’s what. There’s barely been any rain for months, and the forests are dry as a bone. Twenty minutes later the engines return, slower now, as does our neighbour, ringing his bicycle bell as he turns into the drive.

The latest coronavirus information is posted outside the town hall. The number of new infections, of those who have died, useful telephone numbers and relaxations to contact restrictions. Other notices include planning permission for an extension to the supermarket, and on which days the military will be conducting live fire exercises in the restricted zone. 

In the remnants of the old GDR factory on the edge of the village, the police find two thousand cannabis plants in an old warehouse. Three men are arrested. 

Most mornings a red kite hovers over our garden and most mornings I wonder if it is possible that there is a more beautiful bird. 

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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).  

Swimming in the city and country: Turning - by Jessica J. Lee

IMAGE: Katrin Schönig

Read by Paul Scraton:

Early on in the pages of Turning, a swimming memoir about taking a dip in 52 lakes in Berlin and the surrounding Brandenburg countryside, Jessica J. Lee admits to fears and insecurities in the water. This is something I share. I have never been a massive fan of swimming, whether in the sea or the swimming pool, and especially when out of my depth. It has only been in the past couple of years, swimming in some of the very same lakes that Lee visits in this excellent book, that I began to conquer those fears.

It was then that I began to understand what people were talking about when they - like Lee herself - quoted Roger Deakin and his description of the ‘frog’s eye view’. As Lee describes being in the water in Brandenburg, surrounded by the pines and the sky, I can picture it exactly as I have experienced it as well. You do get a different view from the water, a different understanding of place. And that, for me at least, is ultimately the story of this book: as well as personal history sensitively and bravely told, Turning is about a person gaining a feeling for the history and the stories of the places she visits, deepening her knowledge of the geology, ecology, communities and political history of the city she lives in and the surrounding countryside, each time she takes to the water.

As someone who both shares these interests about place in general, and about Berlin and Brandenburg specifically, it is not surprising that I found myself nodding in agreement and recognition as I read. There were other elements of the story that resonated as well: the loneliness of being new in a big city and of building a personal connection to the place by getting to know and to love the landscape, the forests, the suburban S-Bahn lines and the gruff owners of rural snack kiosks.

Lee is an elegant writer; precise in her description, thoughtful in her observation, and most of all interested in the world that surrounds her. This is not always the case when it comes to memoirs, which can sometimes become so tied up in the internal emotions of the writer that there is no space for any exterior, for the world around them, and therefore context to the story they are trying to tell. In Turning, Lee’s personal journey is deeper and richer for the reader because the lakes and their surroundings are characters in the story. As is the weather. As are the seasons. The plan was to explore the 52 lakes over the course of a year, and so Lee was swimming at the height of summer and in the depths of the winter, breaking the ice with a little hammer in order to clear enough room for her to have a swim.

Indeed, one of my favourite lines in the book - one that had me reaching for a pen in order to scribble it down for later - concerned the shifting of the seasons: “It’s all too easy,” Lee writes, “to be sucked under by sadness in the autumn.” I understand that emotion only too well, even if I haven’t (yet) tried a plunge in an autumnal pool to try and alleviate the October blues.

And then, a few pages later, more recognition: “I’ve become divided, stretched across places.” At the very time I was reading this book, I was working on my own project about walking the outskirts of Berlin. One of the motivations for these walks was to try and gain a better understanding of the city I live in a time when my feelings about place, belonging and identity had been thrown into turmoil by referendum results and a series of trips “home” that made me wonder, more than I ever had before, where “home” actually is. I too have felt stretched and divided. The only question, is whether it matters. Each walk, each swim, can help the clarification process.

Walking or swimming. Building our connection and understanding of a place by interacting with the landscape, the history and the people, can be done in different ways. The strength of the book is, I believe, that it not only is a good story very well told, but that it will make readers think about their own places, their own feelings of home and belonging, of their own lakes, forests or city streets, and think a little deeper about them. Jessica J. Lee’s is a trip to the lake well worth taking, inspiring even this reluctant swimmer to reach for his swimming shorts (if not the ice hammer).

Support your local bookshop! Go and get your copy of Turning by Jessica J. Lee there. Meanwhile, here is Jessica's website.