Nan Shepherd

Anna Shepherd, always known as Nan, was born on 11 February 1893 at Westerton Cottage in Peterculter, a few miles west of Aberdeen, the second child of John Shepherd, a civil engineer, and Jane Kelly. A month later the family moved to Dunvegan, a house on the North Deeside Road in Cults, and she lived there for almost the whole of her life. She went to Cults School and the Aberdeen High School for Girls, then to the University of Aberdeen, where she wrote poems for the student magazine Alma Mater and graduated in 1915. She then began teaching English at the Aberdeen Training Centre for Teachers, later the College of Education, and stayed for forty-one years. Her first novel, The Quarry Wood, about a farm girl hungry for learning, appeared in 1928, the summer she first walked in the Cairngorms. The Weatherhouse followed in 1930 and A Pass in the Grampians in 1933, all three set among the people of rural Aberdeenshire; In the Cairngorms, her only book of poems, came in 1934, and after it she wrote no more novels. She kept walking the plateau, often for days at a time, travelled to Norway, France, Italy, Greece and South Africa, and always came home to Cults, where she nursed her invalid mother and stood by younger writers such as Jessie Kesson. In the last years of the Second World War she wrote The Living Mountain, a short book about knowing a range of hills by going into them rather than up them. It reached print only in 1977, when she was eighty-four. She retired in 1956, edited the Aberdeen University Review until 1963, and took an honorary doctorate from the university in 1964. She died in Aberdeen on 27 February 1981, aged eighty-eight. Canongate reissued The Living Mountain in 2011 with an introduction by Robert Macfarlane, giving her a readership she never had in life, and in 2016 her face went onto the Royal Bank of Scotland five-pound note.

In the summer of 1945 Shepherd sent her finished book on the Cairngorms to her friend the novelist Neil Gunn. He admired it, and warned that a publisher would want photographs and a map. One publisher turned it down. She put the manuscript in a drawer, and for more than thirty years Gunn remained its only reader.