Wild Geese, Nan Shepherd
Wild Geese is a previously unpublished collection Nan Shepherd’s nature writing, poetry and prose. In the chapter The Colours of Deeside, Shepherd looks afresh at the shades of the landscape describing everyday elements such as grass, moss and them in her inimitable way, otherworldly and completely relatable — putting into words what us mere mortals never can. In particular this page begs for an immediate run out to the nearest birch tree to see its endless spectrum for ourselves.
We also want to share a brilliant line from the previous page which is just one of the many things Nan Shepherd says and makes us wish we could sit down with her and talk about colour and water and heather:
“Grass-green: a colour intolerable in anything but grass”
Nan Shepherd (1893-1981) was a Scottish writer and poet best known for The Living Mountain, a luminous account of her experiences hill walking in the Cairngorms. Her writing asks you to brighten your senses — looking closely and widely and discover the pleasure of acutely experiencing the landscape around you. Closely attached to Aberdeen and her native Deeside, she graduated from her home university in 1915 and for the next forty-one years worked as a lecturer in English. Hill walking was Nan Shepherd’s greatest love and she made many visits to the Cairngorms, along and with students and friends. She also travelled further afield – to Norway, France, Italy, Greece and South Africa – but always returned to the house where she was raised and where she lived almost all of her adult life, in the village of West Cults, three miles from Aberdeen on North Deeside. To honour her legacy, in 2016, Nan Shepherd’s face was added to the Royal Bank of Scotland five-pound note.
