GROUND-BREAKING Scots poet and novelist Nan Shepherd has been chosen as one of the first women to feature on Royal Bank of Scotland main issue bank notes.

She is to appear on a new batch of RBS polymer £5 notes, joining Scots scientist Mary Somerville who was chosen for the new £10 note in a public poll.

Shepherd was an English lecturer at Aberdeen College of Education but also wrote novels, poetry and non-fiction, with the Scottish landscape and weather a major influence on her work.

Her book The Living Mountain detailed her love of hillwalking and the Cairngorms, which feature in the background of the £5 note.

The writer died at the age of 88 in 1981 but found a new generation of readers in recent years after The Living Mountain was republished in a special Canongate collection.

The choice of Shepherd to feature on the £5 note was taken by the RBS Scotland board.

Chairman Malcolm Buchanan said: “The Royal Bank of Scotland has never before featured a woman on its main issue bank notes. It gives me enormous pleasure that we are able to celebrate the fantastic, and often overlooked, achievements of two great Scottish women. Both made huge contributions in their respective fields.”

Robert Macfarlane, writer and Fellow of Emmanuel College Cambridge, said he was “thrilled” to see Shepherd commemorated.

“Nan was a blazingly brilliant writer, a true original whose novels, poems and non-fiction broke new ground in Scottish literature, and her influence lives on powerfully today,” he said. “Nan’s book The Living Mountain is a slender masterpiece that has brought many thousands of readers to see the Scottish landscape with fresh, astonished eyes. In person as in language, Nan followed her own path – she was a woman of fierce independence and inspiring vision.”

The £5 notes will come into circulation later this year, with the £10 notes Somerville was chosen earlier this year in an online poll that also featured physicist James Clerk Maxwell and engineer Thomas Telford.

She lived from 1780 until 1872 at a time when women’s participation in science was strongly discouraged. She was jointly nominated to be the first female member of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1835.

RBS said the reverse of the new notes have a nature theme with two mackerel displayed on the £5 note and two otters on the £10.

Hamish MacPherson: Influential writer’s talents were not confined to her works 

IT’S a fair bet that the majority of Scots are probably not aware of Nan Shepherd, more’s the pity.

Her published output consisted of just three novels, one non-fiction work, and a single volume of poetry. Indeed the latter, entitled In The Cairngorms, was out of print for decades before it was reissued in 2014.

Shepherd’s influence, however, far exceeded her published word count. Born in 1893 in Peterculter, then a small village south of Aberdeen near to the River Dee, Shepherd’s father was a civil engineer, and the family soon moved to the nearby suburb of Cults where she stayed for most of her life.

Shepherd graduated from Aberdeen University in 1915 and spent the rest of her working career as a lecturer in English, training student teachers.

Her fame, limited though it has been in the past, rests on her three novels, The Quarry Wood, The Weatherhouse and A Pass in the Grampians, all published between 1928 and 1933, and her inspirational poetry collected in a book that was published in 1934 called In The Cairngorms.

Her love of her surroundings and her feminist principles are found in her influential novels which are often compared to the Scots Quair trilogy of her contemporary Lewis Grassic Gibbon, although all three of her novels stand alone. Shepherd organised a trust to benefit the family of James Leslie Mitchell, Gibbon’s real name, after he died of peritonitis caused by a perforated ulcer in 1935 at the age of 33.

That kindness, one of many she did for fellow writers, was proof of how important she was to the Scottish Modernist movement in which her friend Hugh MacDiarmid was the leading figure.

Incredibly, Shepherd’s only non-fiction book The Living Mountain, though written in the 1940s, was not published until 1977, four years before her death. It was immediately hailed as a masterpiece.