Small Enchantments: Walking, Reading, and Writing Mountains

This article was contributed by Nora Kirkham in the spring issue of The Magazine of Gordon College.

On a summer walk in the Scottish Cairngorms, a stream draws me to itself. I hear it gurgling first, then notice it reflects the light that gives the trees their sparkle. I didn’t realize how often I would walk along these streams. When I follow them, I stravaig or wander through Aviemore, Rothiemurchus, Glenmore, Loch Morlich, Loch Uaine, struck by the scent of hot pine. I meet a herd of reindeer. Their backs brush against my waist as they walk, their hooves click along the path. The fields are aflame with heather—transfiguring the land. 

Mountains move as we shift our gaze. Offering privileged vantage points, mountains alter ways of seeing, experiencing, and representing the world. Viewing a mountain as traveling releases it from its assigned role as a steady fortress in our imaginations, but something that hides behind clouds or reveals itself in fragments of light. 

My recent doctoral research at the University of Aberdeen explores encounters with mountain landscapes in the works of Anglo-American poet Denise Levertov (1923–1997), Japanese writer Michiko Ishimure (1927–2018), and Scottish writer and poet Nan Shepherd (1893–1981). I hope this research will help to chart a path for future interdisciplinary scholarship that considers the long, ongoing story of women and mountains. This project was made possible through the generosity of the University of Aberdeen’s New Kings’ studentship and the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation. 

Over the course of my program, I traveled to Switzerland, Japan, and the Cairngorms. I also conducted this research at lower elevations, on the cold North Sea, between Fife and Aberdeenshire, where I lived for several years, and eventually completed this project on the other side of the Atlantic, on Boston’s North Shore. 

Mountains tell the stories of our lives. For many of us, mountains represent that which is aspirational, sublime, or even beyond our comprehension. The Bible abounds with references to mountains as sites of triumph, temptation, and transfiguration. Mountains are imagined as landscapes that test our physical and emotional limits. At Gordon, we can experience this firsthand through the La Vida Expedition and Discovery programs, where ventures into the Adirondacks or White Mountains invite us to practice courage and curiosity, plus challenge us to cultivate deeper awareness of our relationships within creation. This physical awareness of our bodies in the mountains cannot be fully disentangled from spiritual experience.  

While the writers I study generally appreciate the act of walking, climbing, and observing mountains, their shared emphasis on mystery and the sacred decentralizes conquest and ascent as the ultimate concern. Instead, their writings consider both the visible and invisible world of the mountain, inviting us to remain open to new experiences in a landscape that cannot be reduced to its physical summit. In their poetry and prose, Levertov, Ishimure, and Shepherd draw upon the material conditions of their environments, as well as their own religious beliefs and practices, as a way of settling or unsettling their sense of place. Their work is united by a shared interest in the nature’s hiddenness, permeability, and the potential for rupture, as well as a capacity for creation, transfiguration, and regeneration.

From her kitchen window in Seattle, Levertov observes, but does not climb the volcanic Mount Rainier-Tahoma, recording it in her later poems as a “witnessing presence” that witnesses her, even as it retreats into clouds and mist. Levertov’s Christian faith, along with her itinerant lifestyle, shapes her relationship to the mountain, which often functions as a metaphor for a life of geographic and spiritual pilgrimage. 

Ishimure’s environmental activism and love of Japanese folklore and local traditions in her native Kumamoto Prefecture provide the material for her novel Lake of Heaven (1997), in which a fictional village has been submerged under a man-made lake following the construction of a dam. For Ishimure, the mountains represent proximity to the gods and ancestors, offering a footpath to a new sense of home during a period of rapid urbanization and industrialization. 

Moments of transfiguration abound in Shepherd’s The Living Mountain (1977), which charts her “traffic of love” with the Cairngorms. While walking and stravaiging in the hills, encounters with sparkling lochs and bursts of sunlight illuminate a “dark and stubborn” Scotland. 

Through writing and reading the mountains, these texts have the potential to transfigure our own imagination of the natural world, allowing us to see and experience places in unexpected ways, whether we find ourselves on a sidewalk, a subway, or on the beach. 

Walks in the mountains mark me long after I leave, even as the mountains melt off my skin with each swim in the salt distance of the sea. The high realm of heather begins to fade like a myth until I lift my head above the water. Beyond the rocks crusted in barnacles, I might see a line of blue hills. 

Nora Kirkham, Ph.D. is an instructor of English at Gordon College where she teaches The Great Conversation, literature seminars, and creative writing. She holds an M.Litt. in Theology and the Arts from the University of St Andrews and an M.A. in Creative Writing from University College Cork. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Landing (2025).