Changes

|borrow=Yes

|pages=240

|date=March 2023

|isbn=978-1846975752

As explained in her introduction, Glover take's Shepherd's chapter titles from her masterpiece The Living Mountain but uses them in a different order to suit her own purpose. The book is hard to categorise definitively. It is part reverence for the work of Shepherd (hardly critique, she's clearly a fan – cards on table so am I), but also partly an endeavour to understand that work more deeply for re-visiting the area so many decades later. For those who don't know Shepherd – go seek her out – she wrote The Living Mountain in the immediate post-war years of the1940s. She did not find a publisher for it, despite being already a reasonably well-regarded novelist. Damning with faint praise there, but I speak of a time when female writers still had to outshine their male counterparts by many parts per million to get the same accolades, possibly even more so in Scotland. We need also to remember that ''nature writing'' wasn't a ''thing'' back then.

It became one in the 1970s, which is when Shepherd dusted off her manuscript and found the world waiting for it. It is even more so in need of it now. But I'm not here to talk of Shepherd, but of Glover. It's not possible to disentangle the two, however. In her forward to The Living Mountain, Shepherd talks about the changes the Cairngorms had seen since she wrote it. And Glover is well-placed to both analyse those changes in a wider historical context – going back beyond the 20th century, back to the very birth of the land mass – and then also adding in what has happened in the last few decades.

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