Nan Shepherd understood this. In The Hidden Mountain she said of her Cairngorm home range, “… it arches its back and each layer of landscape bristles”. In The Old Ways, Robert MacFarlane calls landscape a “volatile subject”, which “arches and bristles” at us – and into us. For Shepherd, Abram and MacFarlane, the words ‘landscape’ and ‘mountain’ are not just nouns, describing something fixed and distinct, they are esoteric verbs. MacFarlane says, “Landscape scapes, it is dynamic and commotion causing, it sculpts and shapes us not only over the course of our lives but also instant by instant, incident by incident… [It is the] bristling presence of a particular place at a particular moment”.