Nan Shepherd
Anna (Nan) Shepherd was born in 1893 and died in 1981. 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. An enthusiastic gardener and hill-walker, she made many visits to the Cairngorms 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.
“So there I lie on the plateau, under me the central core of fire from which was thrust this grumbling grinding mass of plutonic rock”
‘Nan Shepherd’s prose is as bracing as water from a mountain stream’
Nicholas Lezard
The Guardian
Nan Shepherd: How one woman saw the Cairngorms in a different light
Steven Brocklehurst
The BBC
