Cornerstone No. 188, page 18
Great Scot!
64 + 65: Ladies of Note(s)
Please forgive the terrible pun but the two subjects who figure in this GS
offering were recently chosen to ‘star’ on banknotes issued by the Royal Bank
of Scotland (RBS). We have the gracious ladies, Nan Shepherd on the £5
denomination and Mary Somerville on the £10. Let’s see who they were and
why they grace the GS series.
£5: Nan Shepherd. Anna Shepherd was born on February 11 th 1893 in East
Peterculter (sometimes known as Culter) a suburb of Aberdeen. Soon after her
birth the family moved to Cults (just to confuse the reader) to a house where
our subject was to live for most of her life. After education at Aberdeen High
school for Girls she enrolled at the University of Aberdeen where, in 1915, she
graduated with an MA. Nan Shepherd contributed to Scottish Modernist litera-
ture with three novels, an anthology of poetry and a work of non-fiction. The
novels were
(1928) which portrayed the ‘restricted’ and
sometimes ‘tragic’ lives of women in (her) contemporary Scotland (is this a
possible reason why male subjects in this series well outnumber female
subjects…?) 1930 saw the publication of
, a work covering
the interactions between folk in a small Scottish community (a sensitive subject
if research for the book digs a little too deeply into family relationships). Nan’s
final novel was
, published in 1933. All three plots are
set in small communities in northern Scotland and were republished in the late
1980s.