Merryn on Nan

 I mentioned podcasts a little while back.  One of those I had listened to was from Paperboats; and in particular Merryn Glover.  Anything that starts with, born in Kathmandu, and ends up walking in the Cairngorms, has to be worth listening to.  And it was, deliciously so.

The Hidden Fires, is Merryn's most recent publication, and what a read that is.  She set out in the footsteps of that other quine from the hills, Nan Shepherd, and her unique writings in The Living Mountain.  I might just go back and read that one again soon.

 

Decades later, finally accustomed to the unfamiliar climate of Scotland's mountains, learning how to work with crampons and ice axe, how to survive, Merryn takes us to haunts and the high tops, the hidden corries and the lochans, of Nan Shepherd's earlier work.

She read's the book and reads the land, the range of mountains, adding her own eyes and words, to all that Nan Shepherd set out.  We dip in and out of Shepherd's essays and poems, as well as her seminal volume on the hills.  And it works.  It works so well. 

Merryn Glover looks again at the wildlife, the trees and the undergrowth.  She finds the eagles soaring, the black-cock lekking.  And she swims in the chilled waters, where Nan bathed.  Inching in, adjusting to the cold gradually, wise enough to dispense with youthful frivolities of the reckless dive and the shock to the brain.  Common sense used just as much as the others, as she listened and scented and felt her away among the mountains.

We find again those loggers, sending timber down mountain torrents to the shipyards at Kingston.  We walk in the path of wartime regiments, from Glover's well kent territories on the Sub-Continent, to tragedy in the Cairngorms.

Such a good read ; so much so that half way through I stopped and listened to the podcast again, to hear Merryn chat about it all; then returned to read on.  It is a gem of a book, and goes straight on to those lists I keep.

This is a volume that deserves to be in first edition hardback on the shelf, rather than a download to an e-reader.  If only there were a first edition of The Living Mountain for it to rest beside. I'll have to settle, at least for now, in digging out the old paperback.  For I will be reading that again, with fresh eyes, before too long.