James RebanksReseñas

A beautifully written intellectual contemplation on the changes in farming in Britain over the course of a recent lifetime. I found this particularly interesting as a contrast to the book by his wife -- which sometimes puzzled and frustrated me because their relationship is very much one where the husband/farmer/shepherd is out on the land and not at all engaged with home life, cooking, children. Their relationship clearly works for their family, and is somewhat fascinating to me.

Anyway, this book is also about relationships -- between Rebanks and his grandfather, father, community, land, animals. I love where his observations and thoughts have taken him. I found his arguments for the rewilding of cultivated land compelling -- that farming is meant to be part of the natural web and is also always going to be a compromise as we struggle with burgeoning populations and the demand for cheap food. Still, he is developing his land to incorporate more biodiversity, to encourage the natural run of rivers, to restore hedges and wetlands. It's a beautiful thing, and somehow having the crushing amount of constant work to balance against his wife's point of view explains a lot. They work as a team to nurture different part of their lives. I am so inspired by this book to try and understand and nurture the small land that is in my care. It's a powerful message, and I hope that many farmers see and embrace it as well in whatever capacity they can.

This is a book to savour. It's the story of a man raised to expect to live his life as a shepherd in the Lake District, as his father, grandfather and ancestors did. So he does. But in his case, he has episodes elsewhere: as an Oxford undergraduate; as someone who works for the UNESCO World Heritage programme. These are interesting, worthwhile experiences. But they serve to confirm for him that shepherding in a traditional community, with all its difficulties and privations is all that he really wants to do in life, and it matters very deeply to him. He writes lyrically about the seasons, about winter days when he bursts open the haybales to offer his sheep the smells and tastes of the long-forgotten summer. He talks of the complexities of breeding, nourishing and bringing on his stock, always with his family by his side. His writing isn't always faultless - I became irritated at hios frequent misuse of the term 'disinterested'. But on balance it's a lyrically-written though realistic look at a way of life that's tough, unremitting in its demands, but ultimately important and worthwhile. To see if it's for you, just look at the last page- it won't spoil the plot - and in reading it, you'll discover that this book is in fact a love story by a man who loves the place where he lives, and his own place within it.

A frank and non-sugar-coated view of modern shepherding in northern England. The highs, the lows, the challenges, and the rewards conveyed in often-lyrical descriptions.

This read just as good as "Pastoral Song," but focuses more on the rhythms of shepherding as a way of life. It isn't wandering fields and sitting with sheep, it's a much more involved process for modern farmers to both care for and improve their flocks as a livelihood. James' pride in his work comes through in every chapter.

This was a fantastic memoir of living on the land in rural England. Rebanks draws a clear picture between the health (and heartache) of traditional framing methods and the harm industrial, modern farming has on the land and the people living on the land. He writes like James Herriot - personal stories that make it clear to the reader the love he has for his farm.

I read this on a visit to the Lake District for my cousins wedding - it seemed appropriate for the trip. Its an interesting book which makes sheep farming sound like a complete nightmare! I quite enjoyed it whilst also finding the voice a little annoying at times.

I loved this book. Every time I picked it up to read, I realized I was happy and excited to continue with it. The subject matter is close to my heart. There were plenty of things and ideas that resonated with me as I have lived my life taking care of livestock albeit on a much smaller level. For example I have to continually defend my dislike of winter snow and over abundance of unseasonal rain to my non farm type friends. Here I could say ' yes! Exactly.' The book itself is very well written. I felt like I could see the landscape described and could envision each scene as the author described it.

The story encompassed much more than a story about sheep. There was a lot about family and history and the importance of tradition. I recommend this book!

I loved this book. Every time I picked it up to read, I realized I was happy and excited to continue with it. The subject matter is close to my heart. There were plenty of things and ideas that resonated with me as I have lived my life taking care of livestock albeit on a much smaller level. For example I have to continually defend my dislike of winter snow and over abundance of unseasonal rain to my non farm type friends. Here I could say ' yes! Exactly.' The book itself is very well written. I felt like I could see the landscape described and could envision each scene as the author described it.

The story encompassed much more than a story about sheep. There was a lot about family and history and the importance of tradition. I recommend this book!

I picked up this memoir the second time I saw it in Bent Books (Brisbane) and glad that I did, notwithstanding the reviews I have read since are very mixed.

Rebanks tells of his life as a shepherd in England's Lake District. This is not a memoir of a long ago time but rather of the current time and recent past, with Rebanks starting with his final years of schooling in the late 1980/ early 90s (ok, it may be 30-35 years ago, but in the bigger picture, it is more or less contemporary).

Rebanks describes the book as

'partly an explanation of our work [on our sheep farm in the Lakes District in England] through the course of the year, party a memoir of growing up ....and the people
around me at the time, like my father and grandfather: and partly a retelling of the history of the Lake District - from the perspective of the people who live there, and
have done for hundreds of years.

It is the story of a family and a farm, but it is also tells a wider story about the people who get forgotten in the modern world. It is about how we need to open our eyes
and see the forgotten people who live in our midst, whose lives are often deeply traditional and rooted in the distant past. If we want to understand the people in the
foothills of Afghanistan , we may need to try and understand the people in the foothills of England first.'

Rebanks contends that until 1750 or so, little attention was given to the Lakes District by any outsiders, but over the century, increasing focus was given to it by those who saw the Lakes District as a place of escape (in particular from the Industrial Revolution) , and an idealised landscape.

'For many people , it exists to walk over, to look at, to climb, or paint, or write about, or simply dream about. It is a place many aspire to visit or live in.'

Indeed Rebanks says that in 1810 Wordsworth proposed that the District should be 'a sort of national property, in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy.'

But as Rebanks says, the sheep farmers had, for many centuries before then, worked those lands, and were not for simply to be told to go away.

His time at school were not productive. Rebanks did not see the relevance of what he was being asked to consider/learn. But he later embraces further education (including Oxford) and the internet. Indeed, whilst still having his farm as the focus of his (and his family's life, including economically), he becomes a consultant to the UNESCO World Heritage Centre in Paris, where is work around the world s to assist in ensuring that tourism benefits host communities rather than subsuming them. As such Rebanks comes across as someone who is not simply striving to a 'nothing must change' stance, whilst at the same time, not rolling over and giving up what is important to him and his community.

The book, for me, was fascinating for 2 reasons:

- firstly, for a city dweller and at that, one who lives in sunny Queensland Australia, to learn of the workings of a sheep farm in the Lakes District, with its very different climate and expectations, including as how families, over many generations depend on each other and yet evolve; and how the community evolves and the issues that raises;
- secondly, as an illustration of the issues facing other examples around the world where different cultures, practices and lifestyles clash but seek to, a greater or lesser degree, accommodate both.

As to the later, the clear and very real example in Australia is the long standing interaction between our First Nations people (who are said to have been here for some 60,000 years) and those who came later (in the last 300 years or so).

Rebanks' almost primal scream for others to understand the history of his (and his predecessors) work and lives, but also calling on others to understand, how to co exist, and that it s not for one to subsume the other.

The comments of some reviewers who call Rebanks as being selfish or simply outdated, and someone who should just accept that his traditional way of life has been overtaken, and that he should just uncritically accept it, regrettably still reflects some commentary as to the Australian situation.

There are no easy answers, but intolerance and an unwillingness to listen and be generous in discussion is an absolute bare minimum.

Big Ship

7 June 2022

Rebanks' view of the world was formed by his childhood on a modest traditional farm, and by the knowledge and attitudes he inherited from the prior generations of his family who worked the same land. It's both a hard and an idyllic life, and as a picture of childhood, truly charming. And he tells it with profound humility—or let's say that this life gave him a profound humility.

Alas, he had the misfortune to grow up in the second half of the 20th century, a period when traditional, mixed purpose family farms in Britain were being supplanted by big spreads, Big Ag, and big applications of chemicals and machinery that went quite far toward destroying the land, and that way of life.

If you've paid attention to the modern fate of farming in the U.S., and in many other countries, this will be familiar news. If you know a fair amount about it, his careful and detailed explication may seem boring and occasionally redundant. But in Rebanks, the realization of this destruction opens his mind to a way of carrying on based on repairing the broken ecology of the place. The details of this are vivid and place-specific: reviving the living hedgerows that not only delineated fields but provided wildlife habitat, renaturalizing streams and reestablising their verges, for flood control as well as habitat—all described in the finest-grained specifics of his particular property. It will always be a modest farm and a challenging way to make a living, but he, at least, ends up optimistic.

A thoroughly engaging memoir of the author's personal journey to becoming a proud inheritor of the family fell farm in England's Lake District, and his exploration of what that does--and ought--to mean in the 21st century. A cautiously optimistic assessment of how badly we have screwed up our relationship with the land and its other inhabitants in the quest to feed Earth's human population, and how we might change that. The US Midwest is Rebanks' ultimate paradigm for misguided land use, but UK commercial farming comes up smelling like acidic green muck as well.

ENGLISH PASTORAL : AN INHERITANCE is written by James Rebanks.
His previous books include THE SHEPHERD’S LIFE and THE ILLUSTRATED HERDWICK SHEPHERD.
James Rebanks is a farmer in the Lake District of England, where his family has lived and worked for over 6oo years. His writing is very descriptive, historical, emotional and very lyrical.
ENGLISH PASTORAL has been described as “beautiful and shocking”; “a beautifully written story of a family, a home and a changing landscape”; “told with humility and grace, this story of farming over three generations will be our land’s salvation’.

As a shepherdess and farmer by desire, but not by practicality and trade, I have read many ecological and farming-related books. This one is so personal, so beautifully and lovingly written - it is head over heels above all the rest.
ENGLISH PASTORAL is many things:
It is a memoir; a family history; a naturalist’s diary; very emotional; aspirational; interesting.
It is ‘rough’ at times, speaking of hardship and confusion; a science textbook at times; very practical.
It is an ode to the writings of Wendell Berry, Jane Jacobs and of course, Rachel Carson.

I would give this book 100 stars if I could. *****

Better than 3 stars, not quite a 4.

In 3 sections, Rebanks takes us through his family's ownership of the family farm in the Lake District of England. He tells about the type of traditional farmer his grandfather was, how things were upended post WWII with increased industrialization of farms, and how he has slowly evolved his farm to become a more naturalized setting, while still trying to make a profit.

Rebanks' family have been fell (hill) farmers in Cumbria in the north of England since 1400-something. It's mind-boggling to think of belonging so truly to a particular spot on earth.

This book is best when he is simply describing his farm, and his grandfather, and his father. The past two generations began to 'modernize', 'get big or get out', mow down hedgerows, specialize, feed silage rather than hay, and above all apply synthetic fertilizers. These things degrade the land and ultimately the farmers themselves. Rebanks is now trying to rejuvenate his farm by going back to the old ways, and the even older ways of setting nature back to rights in certain areas. He thus has to supplement his reduced farm income by selling books; and I'm only too happy to help him along in the endeavor.½

I was a farm boy, from generations of farmers, and though didn't grow up to be a farmer, that upbringing shaped me in ways I'm still discovering. And now I'm a steward of the land in my own way, as an avocation, working to improve the habitat and diversity of the lands I manage. So much of this book really resonated with me, and reflects how I think about how humans have interacted with the landscape in recent generations. A brilliant piece of writing here.

"This is about farmers like us in our tens of thousands across the country and around the world, and why we did the things we did, and what some of us are now trying to do to make it right. The last 40 years on the land were revolutionary and disrupted all that had gone before for thousands of years, a radical and ill-thought-through experiment that was conducted in our fields. I lived through those years, I was a witness. The more we learn about this change, the more unease and anger we feel about what farming has become our society was created by this farming, but yet we increasingly distrusted."

The pace and structure of this book reflects in some ways the life Rebanks has lived: to get to the beauty and the joy, you have do a lot of hard, dirty, slogging work. It is to Rebanks's credit that he makes it worth it. Raised at the cusp of an agricultural revolution, he learns much of "the old way" of farming: small in scale, mixing livestock and crops, and integrating them into a whole, from his granddad. His own dad struggles to keep it going, but faces unbearable pressure from the new, competitive, commercial, technology-driven ways. When James steps in to take over, he has to choose, and this is the story of what he chose and why.

First he tells the story of his grandfather and his own education as a boy, learning and absorbing how it's done, and has been literally for hundreds of years. This is an often lyrical, sometimes nostalgic, classic rural-memoir stuff that the Brits have done well for generations. It's slow-paced, sometimes verges on "heartwarming," and could have used some editing as it meanders on for many pages. But it sets the stage. The second part explains how it all went to hell, with machinery and toxic chemicals and a ferocious and distorted market, forcing farmers to "feed the world" instead of their families and community, with the consequent poisoning and disruption of the soil, animals wild and domesticated, the plants, towns, families and farmers. In the third - and to my mind, the best, part is when James makes his choice to turn back, to aim for health of his farm, his animals, his soil, his earth. He had a bit of a head start, as his own family traditions had not gone so far down the modern road as to be irretrievable. A soil scientist is delighted to tell him his analysis shows his soil is still the healthiest in his district. He also has a university education and a profession that pays the bills (he is an expert advisor to Unesco), as he flatly acknowledges that farming the way he would like to means you will go bankrupt. Period. Some environmentalists would say he should give it up and let his 185 acres simply go wild. But even on his hill farm, it's probably too late to just walk away. So he tries to strike a balance, helping streams revert to natural courses, planting thousands of trees, rotating his pastures and plantings, scheduling mowing around nesting birds, and tweaking his livestock (sheep and cattle) by bringing in hardier, sturdier, more versatile breeds who will graze the weeds, churn the soil, drop healthy fertilizing manure, and cope with conditions as they are in the fells with less need for drugs, stabling, and other interventions. The final passage is one of great beauty: he and his youngest daughter out in the meadow as a barn owl swoops and dives and swirls in the falling dusk. There is a barn it can live in safely, there are unpoisoned fields where the mice and voles it is hunting can live, and where his animals feed and fertilize and work the soil to support them all. Rebanks's goal is not a wilderness, but a healthy farm. And we need more of those.

A lovely follow up for his first book! Plain language laced with quiet humour makes you want to go visit this places he loves so much - see the sheep and experience the lifestyle.

Autobiography by a farmer doing rewilding. Different ethos to Knepp Farm and one that I'd probably like less at first look, but prefer as I saw it through a decade or more. And then possibly less again a decade after that. What I'm saying is, I don't know who's "right" but I'm glad both options are being tried.

The author accuses the city people who visit the peak district of searching for a fantasy experience without realising he is himself living a fantasy experience 24/7. His life is some sort of bizarre medieval reenactment society gone wrong, living in the past like it was a virtue in itself. The book itself has a very simple and tired old conceit of tying his biography to his regular day to day work which is a solid structure but the author finds it hard to stop himself from ranting in his wild tangents. I guess sheeperds life is nie stressful than I imagined.

This is a memoir by a Lake District shepherd who has, perhaps surprisingly, become a Twitter sensation in recent years. This memoir of the farming experiences of himself, father and grandfather is a passionate defence of a way of life that he sees as a continuity of a shepherding tradition going back centuries and even millennia (his own family has apparently farmed the same land for 600 years). He writes movingly and evocatively of the timelessness of the fells and the sense of purpose of a life in tune with the rhythms of nature (the book is divided into four sections by the seasons). Yet, despite this positive view, he does sometimes come across, particularly in the early part of the book, as somewhat bitter towards the rest of the world, basically anyone not part of this farming tradition. He had a troubled schooling, not seeing the point in trying as he was a part of this continuity of the farming tradition, and stubbornly resisting his teachers' desire to "better" himself. Later on, though, he took A levels in evening classes and then a history degree at Oxford, before returning to his farm. He certainly represents a strong ambassador for a particular way of life, though I feel slightly ambivalent about some of the ways in which he expresses this.½

Atrocious

When people think of the Lake District the first thing that comes to mind is the landscape; the majestic fells, the lakes and tarns nestled among the peaks and valleys and the harsh beauty of our National Park. It is a place that has inspired writers and artists for hundreds of years, and has 16 million visitors every year. However, for a number of people they are completely dependent on this landscape to make their living. James Rebanks is one of those people.

The Rebanks family have lived and worked as shepherds in the Lake District for generations. His father was a shepherd before him, and his grandfather taught both of them all he knew. The inexorable grind of the seasons defines what they do and when. The Herdwick flock is moved up onto the high fell during the summer, and all the farmers gather to bring it down at the end of the season. The shows and sales are in the autumn when they sell the spare lambs and look for the new males tups to add to their bloodlines and quality of stock. Winter is the hardest time; the incessant rain, heavy snows and storms make keeping the sheep alive a daily battle, even for the tough Herdwicks. Spring brings new challenges as it is lambing time. Most of his flock can manage perfectly well, but there is always those that can’t and need that extra assistance. As another year passes the sheep are move back up onto the fells once again.

‘This is my life. I want no other.’

Rebanks is not afraid of hard work. Following his father and grandfather into this way of life, and he has chosen a tough and demanding career, but he loves it. He paid little attention at school, wanting to be out in the fields and up on the fells, continuing a way of life that people from the Viking age would still recognise. In his early twenties started education again this time with the single mindedness and determination to succeed. It gave him a separate career that supports the work on the farm. Like his father, he is strong minded and opinionated; great qualities for battling through all that the elements and bureaucracy have to throw at him, but not necessarily for making relationships straightforward. He is not the most eloquent or lyrical of writers, he tells it as it is, but the enthusiasm for his way of life comes across is deep hearted and honest and this is what makes this book such a pleasure to read.

This is a great, almost deceptively straightforward account of what upland sheep farmers do, and why, and a thought-provoking memoir about what it feels like to grow up in a family with a farming tradition. And it's also a challenge to the reader to provoke us into looking at landscape not just aesthetically, but also in terms of the ways humans have interacted with it productively, and continue to do so.

When Rebanks, as a rebellious teenager counting the days to the end of school, was first presented with the Wainwright-and-Wordsworth way of looking at his native region, he couldn't see the point of it. He'd been brought up to think of fells and fields according to the kind of grazing and weather-protection they offered, who owned them, who farmed them, and so on; no-one he knew would be daft enough to climb a hill unless there was work to be done at the top of it. Nowadays he's a bit more nuanced: he admits that Wordsworth had a lot of respect for shepherds and the work they did, he doesn't begrudge Wainwright his escape from Blackburn, and recognises that both have something relevant to say about the region, even if the people who climb mountains clutching their books don't always get it...

The only Lakeland writer he has serious respect for, though, is Beatrix Potter, who, whatever you might think of her children's books, was a committed breeder of Herdwick sheep and a responsible landowner, as well as employing a highly-respected shepherd whose advice she was prepared to listen to. And Herdwick sheep are clearly Rebanks's real passion: he often has to rein himself in when he starts getting lyrical about the finer points of ewes and tups he has known. Even if you barely know one end of a sheep from the other, this makes for interesting reading, because it's so evidently something Rebank cares deeply about and takes the trouble to communicate clearly.

The autobiographical parts of the book are very interesting, too. Firstly, of course, we have to think about the big question of "tradition" — do you have a special claim on something just because it's what your grandfather and father did? Why should people who happened to be born in the Lake District have a better right to work there than those born in Manchester or Blackburn? Rebanks doesn't quite confront this, but he tries to demonstrate how important it is to the work he does that he has been around sheep and shepherds since early childhood. Hill-farming techniques have been optimised in very local ways over hundreds (perhaps thousands) of years, and are best learnt from people with local knowledge. Only long experience gives you the ability to anticipate problems and be in the right place at the right time to deal with them. Also, perhaps less obviously, farming is an activity that involves complicated networks of deals between farmers who have different surpluses and needs at different times, and most of these deals rely on trust that has been built up over a long period. It's much easier to trust someone if you've known and worked with their family for several generations, even if you don't know them personally.

The other striking autobiographical element is his slightly unusual background as someone who got into the least favourable channel of the English education system, left it as early as he could with no qualifications to speak of, and then went back into education as an adult. He has a lot of nicely caustic things to say about the terrible school he went to, as well as making fun of the people who only know him as a sheep-farmer and suddenly start taking him more seriously when they discover that he has an Oxford degree (and a high-powered second job advising UNESCO...).

I have a feeling that this is not just the book you bring back from the gift-shop at (insert Lakeland tourist attraction), but something that will stand up as one of those minor classics of rural writing that people are still discovering with pleasure in secondhand bookshops in fifty years' time.

In the early 1800s, the New England landscape was dominated by sheep herding. To this day our forests are full of stone walls left over from this era, and Vermont still has a fair bit of pasture. This tradition has heavily influenced by immigrants from the Brittish Isles. In this book, James Rebanks walks us through this way of life that is still somewhat intact in his home of the Lake District. Due to my upbringing in the rural New England landscape, as well as a familiarity with sheep from both childhood and adulthood, I felt a certain kinship with Rebanks’ story.

As might be expected, Rebanks has a number of somewhat conservative views. He speaks of dunking sheep in WWI chemical warfare agents to keep the flies off of them. He discusses the way in which collective ownership with an aesthetic that appeals to the beauty of “natural” lands can be at odds with the needs of a traditional agricultural economy, such as when Londoners want the Lakes District as their summer retreat when the farmers would rather be left alone.

In early adulthood I spent a year farming and homesteading. The founder of the program, Ben Holmes, told me as he was walking me around the farm while I was considering enrolling on a wet and dreary day that it would be a place where I would learn the drudgery of farm work. It is hard to use the word “romantic” to describe such a sentiment, but there is something about the drudgery of farm work that comes through in Rebanks’ writing, and it is clear that he wouldn’t have it any other way.

One of the fascinations in the book is all the discussion on breeding. Similar to heirlooms seeds, maintaining a breed is as much an art as a science. The genetic diversity must be kept broad enough so that the breed is vigorous, but not so broad as to diverge from the hallmark traits.

A gaping hole in the book regards Rebanks’ cursory coverage of the Herdwick massacre of 2001 as a result of foot-and-mouth disease. No time is spent discussion what it meant to revive the breed, or how the farming community at large with this issue. Although there’s mention of slaughter and subsidies, we’re left in the dark as to how that wasn’t the end of the breed.

Rebanks states that farmers in his region can’t make a livelihood from their agricultural endeavors, and have never been able to do so. Although there is a good bit of truth to this sentiment I find it both disconcerting and depressing to reinforce such a message. Unless we can move to some kind of Universal Basic Income model, societally, we need to find ways to make agricultural economics work. Much of my professional work has revolved around this issue, and I know there are models that work. I wish Rebanks did more to highlight the ways in which agriculture can provide a living wage; I know a number of case studies in the subject.

To attest to its merits and grit, after listening to the audiobook, I actually purchased a physical copy of this book from my local bookstore to circulate amongst my community.