The Shepherd’s Life: A Tale of the Lake District . by James Rebanks . (Allen Lane £16.99) When, in 2002, my family and I moved from busy North London to bucolic north Herefordshire, we found that our new neighbours were, overwhelmingly, sheep. I didn’t want to be one of those townies who moves to the country but remains ignorant of rural ways, so I made sporadic efforts to get to know them, or at least, to get to understand life on a sheep farm. When my children were small, I asked the obliging farmer whose land abuts our garden if they could watch his ewes lambing. And I still often tell him that I’d like to spend some time alongside him, to see how his days unfold. To which he always smiles, no doubt wondering, metropolitan softie that I still really am, how I’d cope with the early starts and the relentless physical graft. This wonderful book has filled in most of the gaps in my education, without any 4.30am alarm calls. James Rebanks studied at the University of Oxford before returning to his roots in the Lake District, he is seen here with his sheep on his farm outside of Penrith in Cumbria . It is the enlightening, exquisitely written account, give or take a few autobiographical tangents, of a year in the life of James Rebanks, whose family has been farming in the Lake District for at least six centuries. He was born into a job from which, now in his 40s, he takes infinite pride. All the same, it is no life for the faint-hearted. Every year, spring and autumn feel like flimsy bookends to a long, harsh winter, and his Herdwick sheep — descended, he thinks, from animals that arrived with the Vikings — are built for the fells in ways that even the hardiest shepherds are not. Making hay, linked by an old proverb to images of glorious sunny days, can be ‘a bitch of a job’. And while working with livestock is a series of small, predictable daily challenges, sometimes the challenges are bigger, and not at all predictable. With starkly effective prose, he brilliantly evokes the horror of the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak. After police snipers had arrived on his farm, ‘the fields were speckled with our dead cattle . . . Strangely peaceful, they lay in all sorts of mangled and contorted ways. I knew those cattle, so it was like seeing old friends dead’. As for the sheep, 95 per cent of the world’s Herdwicks live within 20 miles of Coniston, and were in danger of extinction. ‘But an essentially urban government didn’t understand. To them, a sheep was a sheep, a farm simply a farm. The idea that something precious was on the edge of destruction was never really grasped.’ It is a farmer’s lot, adds Rebanks, to depend on the whims of others: of bureaucrats, supermarket buyers, shoppers. Alas, most of them have no understanding of the proud, beleaguered culture he comes from, just like the secondary school teachers who told him that farming on the Lakeland fells was a dead-end business, a waste of brainpower. Anyone with even a sliver of ambition and character, they suggested, would seek a life elsewhere. And although one teacher talked rhapsodically about the Lakes, it was in terms the disdainful teenage Rebanks simply could not comprehend. ‘The Lake District in her monologue was the playground for an itinerant band of climbers, poets, walkers and daydreamers . . . people who, unlike our parents, or us, had “really done something”. Occasionally, she would utter a name such as Wordsworth, or Wainwright, ‘and look in vain for us to understand’. Rebanks loathed school, and left at 15, able to write only in block capitals. But his book does not undermine the importance of education — far from it. Toiling on the farm, he found himself at odds with his decent, hard-working but obstreperous father, and escaped by reading, which he had resisted so strongly during his schooldays. One day he pulled off a shelf A Shepherd’s Life, written in 1910 by W.H. Hudson, just knowing ‘it was going to be lousy and patronising’. It was the exact opposite. It was about families like his, and it inspired him to read more, learn more. At 21, he took his A-levels at evening classes in nearby Carlisle, where in due course they told him that he might actually be Oxbridge material. On his application form for Oxford he described himself as a ‘drystone wall builder on the Lake District fells’. Natural charm and a certain northern pugnaciousness helped him breeze through his interview, but in ‘every conversation for the next three years’ he had to suffer someone saying what a big change Oxford must represent after life on the farm. One professor ventured that he would miss his old existence, after graduating. ‘I told him that I hadn’t stopped doing it, that I was going back. He seemed quite confused by this.’ Rebanks never contemplated not going back. He applied his brain and brawn to running the farm that had belonged to his grandfather and father, and lives there today with his wife and three children. That Oxford degree is not wasted; in a fleeting, almost throwaway paragraph, he tells us that he is also an ‘expert adviser’ to the Unesco World Heritage Centre in Paris, helping them understand how tourism can benefit host communities. But then, nor is it wasted in the work he does on the farm, a job more reliant than most on skill and judgment. Breeding from the best rams, or ‘tups’, he suggests, is more intellectually challenging than much of what he did at Oxford. At sales, he adds, everyone tries to get their tup to stand correctly, broad and thick-set and with their heads up, giving an impression of arrogance, ‘like Russell Crowe in Gladiator’. I was beguiled by this book, such an eloquent love letter to a cherished way of life, and more specifically, to his grandparents and parents, to whom he was born not with a silver spoon in his mouth, but a wooden crook in his hand. Perhaps above all it is a love letter to the Lake District, which I know well from my own Lancashire childhood, but only as a place to visit, not to live in. As Rebanks makes abundantly clear — not least with his effusive praise for a famous children’s author, whom he thinks of not as the creator of Peter Rabbit, nor even as Beatrix Potter, but as Mrs Heelis, doughty champion of Herdwick sheep — there is, between the two, all the difference in the world.
This book is an exquisite account of what farming life is really like .
The stark prose brilliantly evokes the horror of the foot-and-mouth of 2001 .
Rebanks studied for a degree at Oxford before returning to his rural roots .