Get the latest tech news

Remembering Nan Shepherd


The novels weren’t the point. The point of Nan Shepherd was herself. My mother described what a thrill it was to be...

In September the same year, a random horror shook our village: a taxi driver called George Murdoch was robbed of £21 of takings and garrotted with a cheese wire just up from the old station at the east end of Cults. Outdoor gear had evolved from green waxed cotton to pink Gore-Tex, protecting our bodies from rain and sweat while introducing to them a cocktail of per and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAs) – the forever chemicals. ‘In that disturbed and uncertain world,’ she wrote in the foreword, ‘it was my secret place of ease.’ It’s easy to see the contemporary resonance, but I don’t altogether trust this return to the 1940s and to some prehuman essence of nature: light and form, naked birches, elemental forces, feyness of body and spirit, gaunt corries, the churr of ptarmigan, white cumuli low on the horizon.

Get the Android app

Or read this on Hacker News

Read more on:

Photo of Nan Shepherd

Nan Shepherd