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

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I lie in bed in the early hours unable to sleep, my mind racing like a revving engine. The farm fills my thoughts with decisions and choices to be made, crowding out anything else. I am a bundle of worries, failings and debts. I sleep with the window open so that I can hear the sounds of the night – owls hissing, the wind in the ash trees, the geese talking to each other as they pass over. The light from the rising sun floods in all at once and lights up the silvering oak beams above me, casting triangular shadows on the plastered ceiling. The room is full of a glow like sunlight through a jar of golden honey.

I head downstairs. My son Isaac often follows, half-dressed, sleepy-eyed and scruffy-haired, to go out to the fields with me at first light, but today he sleeps on. I must get out and see that a cow that is due to give birth is OK. She seemed to have ‘slipped’ (opened) her pelvis last night, as if she was about to calve. I straighten up outside the front door, before a pale sky bordered with blue-green trees and head out into the chill of the pre-dawn.

When I was about six years old I had an illustrated pop-up book about Puss-in-Boots. As the pages opened, the trees and mountains rose out of the pages to stand up in three or four uprights of cardboard scenery. As I look away to Patterdale from our farmhouse, the skyline reminds me of that book. The blue above promises a fine late-May morning. I walk up the hill to my barn, and see below me pockets of white mist lurking in the hollows: a milky ocean enclosed by the fells. On mornings such as these you can feel the warmth of the air on your cheeks as you climb the fell sides out of the basin of colder ground. The farm is visible again at first light, and I hold my breath a little for what will come. The mist below begins to burn away. The upper branches of the oak trees by our barn tremble in the dawn; the fell tops are glowing orange.

~

We have always gone shepherding at first light – by which I mean a tour of the farm to check that all is well with the cattle and sheep. That ‘stockmanship’ remains a vital part of who we are, and is as necessary as it ever was. But my morning rounds of the animals have broadened now to studying our land and our valley, and trying to truly see and appreciate the nature in our fields and around them and how we can care for it more effectively. I try to understand the things that we once took for granted, or didn’t see at all – the living soil, whether we are utilizing photosynthesis as well as we can with our grazing, the breadth and variety of wild flowers and grasses, and the woodland beside our fields.

We have not used artificial fertilizer on our farm for more than five years, and rely solely on healthy soil and sunlight. We are changing our farm in lots of little ways, creating new habitats by our becks, restoring bogs and grazing pastures in ways that will encourage a wider array of flowers, restoring meadows by bringing back seeds and plants of species we lost in the past century, and planting more woodland and hedgerows. I have come to care about half-invisible but vital things that we never thought about in my childhood, like moths, worms, dung beetles, bats, flies and the wriggling life beneath the rocks in our streams.

Two fields away the curlews rise to the warming air and on the fell a cuckoo calls gently in the shadows of the woods. Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo. Rooks caw angrily at each other from the sycamore trees by the houses down at Bald Howe. And jackdaws clack and chatter somewhere in the waking dawn. Twenty strides down the field from the barn, with my dog Tan by my side, I am soon back beneath the coming day, in a cold field, in the shadows again. It will take another hour for the sunshine to angle down into the blue-grey valley bottoms. Tan is wet, speckled with white grass seeds and yellow petals. The cold claws at my unbuttoned neck, makes my skin shiver; my leather boots are sodden.

The sunlight is almost cresting the brow of the fell to the south-east, a promised line of orange, lemon and white. But here beneath the new day the delicate flowers are still closed tight shut like little fists clenched from the cold. Buttercups bend their heads down in submission to the night; dandelions are bedraggled with dew. A roe deer doe with a fawn hidden somewhere in the meadow rises and gallops off to the field boundary as we pass, wary, but held by magnetism to her young. In the next field the cow lies chewing her cud, with her new calf tucked alongside her. Her shiny teats have been suckled. The cow smiles at me, as if she realizes I have been worrying for nothing. When I step closer, she snorts a little and shakes her head, to let me know that my interference is neither necessary nor useful. I back off.

~

I have worked here my whole life, but I am only now beginning to truly know this piece of land. I stumble across a field at a different time of day, or in different light, and I feel as if I have never seen it before – not the way it is now. The more I learn about it, the more beautiful our farm and valley becomes. It pains me to ever be away; I never want to be wrenched from this place and its constant motion. The