English Pastoral: An Inheritance - The Sunday Times bestseller from the author of The Shepherd's Life

Product Information

He clearly sees that the farm and this way of life have been passed to him, and there is a duty, not just to carry on as before, but to improve the holding and secure a viable enterprise which could be handed on.

Three meaty sections follow with the text cleverly broken up into short subsections which are interleafed with direct experiences from the Lake District with the author’s reflections and ideas.Instead of abandoning large areas of farmland to nature, Rebanks argues, we need to make productive farms better places for wildlife. Alternatively, it can be taken as a challenge to both politicians and the public to think through how we map out a future for these landscapes and the people who live in marginal economic situations. Poor Henry was a joke – until the soil from his fields was sent to an analyst and found to be richer than the intensively farmed land around it: “The most traditional farmer in the district had the healthiest soil. Vivid, accessible, inspiring - a story about one man's emerging land ethic, and an appreciation of the old ways in modern times . This deeply engrained concept of stewardship runs like a vein of rock through these upland farming families.

Removing sheep from these fells in favour of trees, or reducing headage numbers making the business of shepherding unviable, would set in motion a chain of consequences which would alter both the landscapes and the communities. Deeply personal but also global in significance, its pages course with love and concern so palpable I more than once wept while reading it. Farming, unlike almost any other job, is bound up in a series of complex ropes that Rebanks captures in his own story so beautifully: family pressure and loyalty, ego, loneliness, and a special kind of peer pressure. The layout and structure of the book reflect an urgency to explain the dilemma to a wide audience in a compelling but also straightforward way. Rebanks may not have made much money out of farming, but happily, both for him and for us, the pen has proved mightier than the sward.bestselling debut, The Shepherd's Life, won the Lake District Book of the Year, was shortlisted for the Wainwright and Ondaatje prizes, and has been translated into sixteen languages. The vision of a place which brings separate worlds together, replacing an older suspicion between those who work in the place and those who simply live there. Thus began his relationship with farming, with the land and with nature, a relationship that deepened as nature cast her spell over him, a spell into which he draws his readers. English Pastoral builds into a heartfelt elegy for all that has been lost from our landscape, and a rousing disquisition on what could be regained - a rallying cry for a better future. I have never met anyone so roaringly, joyously in context and content as James Rebanks, belting around his farm in the rain .

I was hoping that after a fair amount of repetition the author would branch out more boldly into the challenges faced by Lakeland farmers and in particular the influence of subsidies, grants and taxation. He watched his father struggle to survive and was initially ashamed of how backward the family farm seemed. Across Europe, the future impact of agricultural reform and changing patterns of trade is bringing into focus the issue of land abandonment. For Rebanks, farming and writing have proved complementary: while working long hours on the land, he has produced a book in a pastoral tradition that runs from Virgil to Wendell Berry. It made me simultaneously proud to be British, and sad for what we have become, but hopeful that we can change.

In 1974, when Rebanks was born and I first made my way up the River Nile, after spending a month hay-timing on a farm in the Yorkshire Dales, over half of the population in sub-Saharan Africa was malnourished. Many of these improvements are community-inspired, reaching out beyond the traditional core farming families. Following the recent Agriculture Bill it seems that farmers will be paid only if they enhance the environment. Rebanks is eloquent - scenes of mud and guts are interspersed with quotes ranging from Virgil to Schumpeter, Rachel Carson to Wendell Berry . The traditional pastoral is about retreat into an imagined rural idyll, but this confronts very real environmental dilemmas.