English Pastoral by James Rebanks (100 books to read .txt) 📕

unopened, on the table. The solicitor starts to speak, but I don’t hear her words. She sees that I am distracted and pauses. I ask if I can look at the deeds. She says I can. She pushes some of them towards me and begins to explain. The first two or three documents are open in our hands at their stiff folds, like giant cardboard butterflies unfolding their wings.

In these pages is the nearest thing to a written history of our land that exists. The waxy sheets are spider-scrawled with almost illegible copperplate handwriting and pastel-shaded sketches of fields. Giant antique letters open each crammed page. Melted burgundy-red wax stamps are surrounded by earnest signatures. As my eyes become accustomed to the script and field sketches, I see a half-familiar world opening up of field names and landscape features – trees, becks, lanes and barns – a parallel paper-and-ink negative of the grass, stone, soil, wood and landscape that I know. There are historic features I have never seen before, like archaeological finds, all marked ‘Celtic’.

The history of the ownership of every field is in these bundles, and every transaction is detailed in them, going back centuries. The last time these were seen must have been by my father or my grandfather, and before that by the people who farmed here before we did, because the deeds have been stored away from our grubby hands, in the archives. They were only consulted when there was a dispute about a boundary or ownership of some place or item or other, or when somebody died. The field names catch my eye:

Greenmire

Little Greenmire

Smithy Brow

High Stoney Beck

Clovenstone

Cloven Stone Rigg

Browfield

Wood Garth

Long Field.

Somewhere in this bundle of deeds is the transaction for my grandfather’s purchase of a hundred acres here in the early 1960s. He had taken my father, then a skinny teenager, and his brother-in-law Jack, who knew that country better than he did, for a Sunday afternoon ride out to ‘see something’. He drove them to see this little run down, scruffy, badly fenced, scattered collection of fields, mentioned in these deeds, that together made up a ‘fell farm’. He declared he was going to borrow the money and buy it for summer grazing for his cattle and sheep. It cost £14,000. There is also the paperwork for my father and mother’s purchase of fifty acres in the middle of those fields from another retiring farmer – to make it a whole farm – and later the addition of a further sixteen acres in the 1990s when the adjoining land came up for sale. Soon this archive will contain the deeds for the fourteen acres my wife and I bought up the lane behind our house in the weeks after my father’s death, because they are near to our farm and will be useful for our sheep and cattle.

These deeds show land passing from one family to the next, again and again, and remind me that a farm isn’t a fixed thing but often changes with every generation, as families buy or rent, or sell land. This history is messy and complicated, like that of most families. People’s attachment to their land is renewed by each generation – through their holding on and working it. It could also be lost. As the solicitor speaks, I know that my family’s future on this farming landscape in a corner of northern England will be determined by my ability to earn enough from our land (and any other way I can think of) to pay our bills, service our debts and make some money for us to live on. Ever since I was a teenager I have worked on our farm, and been the shepherd of a flock of sheep, but this was different. When we walk back down those worn sandstone steps of the solicitors, I know that I am now the ‘farmer’.

~

The months after my father’s death were the hardest of my life. I had always wanted to be the farmer, the captain of the ship with my hand on the wheel, but the moment it happened it felt empty. The world seemed a dull shade of grey. Beyond our little valley, people everywhere seemed to have gone insane, electing fools and doing strange things in their anger. England was divided and broken. Suddenly in those months I felt lost. It was as if I had been following in someone else’s footsteps down a path, talking to them, reassured by them when the going got tough, and then they had disappeared. The farm was a lonely place – a poorer thing when it wasn’t shared. And with every passing year farmers were becoming fewer and fewer, a vanishingly small and increasingly powerless share of the population. Our world felt fragile, like it might now break into tiny pieces.

~

The UN says that 5 million people move from rural communities to urban ones every month, the greatest migration in human history. Much of this took place two or three generations ago in Britain, the ‘first industrial nation’. So ours is now one of the least rural societies on earth. The majority of people now live in towns and cities, and we tend to give little serious thought to the practical realities of farming, the vital moment when we come up against the natural world.

And yet we are all still tethered to the land in a practical sense – our entire civilization relies on farming surpluses, which free most of us from growing our own food, allowing us to do other things. We are no longer the slaves of the ‘dark Satanic mills’ of the industrial era, but millions of us are still reluctantly chained to desks in the soulless corporate offices that followed. We act as if we popped into town to earn a living a generation or two ago, but will be going home soon to a place in the country. There are few things we profess to care about more than our most beloved landscapes,