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

longer I am here, the clearer I hear the music of this valley: the Jenny wren in the undergrowth; the Scots pines creaking and groaning in the wind; the meadow grasses whispering. The distinction between me and this place blurs until I become part of it, and when they set me in the earth here, it will be the conclusion of a lifelong story of return. The ‘I’ and the ‘me’ fades away, erodes with each passing day, until it is an effort to remember who I am and why I am supposed to matter. The modern world worships the idea of the self, the individual, but it is a gilded cage: there is another kind of freedom in becoming absorbed in a little life on the land. In a noisy age, I think perhaps trying to live quietly might be a virtue.

~

A pair of ravens honk and rattle through the half-lit sky. Each beat of wings rasps the air and sounds like an old man wheezing for breath. They see me as I climb over the wall back into the meadow, and give their alarm call and are soon gone. This field doesn’t look anything special in winter, not noticeably different from more intensively farmed land a few miles away in the lowlands. But three weeks ago I closed it off from grazing mouths to grow our hay, and it has become a place of amazing ragged beauty. Each day it looks different, passing through several colours and stages as over a hundred different plants race each other to the sky, flower and then seed.

I climb the fence at the meadow’s edge to take the ‘scenic route’ home along the beck. I disturb two mallard ducks from a sandbank where the sheep gather to drink and they explode into the sky. Behind me, the fresh-calved cow moos to her friends in the herd, and they reply.

I would once have thought of these fenced-off, largely ungrazed strips of land as wasted, but they have become my classroom for understanding how wilder vegetation develops over time, and how rivers change when they are allowed to, and how trees grow, age, die and rot and are recycled into the earth. There was nowhere like this on our farm a decade ago. They exist because of a young woman called Lucy, who changed my father’s and my views of what it means to be a good steward of this land.

~

Lucy came to see us for a meeting about our rivers. Dad said she was from the ‘Water Board’. She wasn’t. Everyone associated with rivers or water was described as being from the ‘Water Board’ and held in mild disdain. She was actually from a local river conservation charity. We met in the caravan that passed as our makeshift farmhouse before we had converted my grandfather’s barn to live in. My dad rather enjoyed having this caravan by the roadside; he called it ‘his caravan’ despite us paying for it. He would invite friends in for a coffee or a can of beer and a chat – they called it the ‘Matterdale Social Club’.

At that time Helen and I were living in Carlisle in the only housing we could afford, a red-brick terraced house among what had once been cotton mills and factories. I drove back to the farm to work each day. That year in the city there were devastating floods, and the waters reached to within a few metres of our front door. We saw hundreds of people displaced by the muddy water. And when the water receded, their soaked and smelly possessions were ripped out and heaped in the streets. Wide-screen TVs. Carpets. Chairs. DVDs. Tables and chairs. Rugs. Children’s toys. Things being thrown out of doorways and windows and into skips. There was talk about where this water had come from, and what might be done about it. Our farm was upstream, twenty or thirty miles away, a tiny part of a huge watershed – and I think that’s why Lucy came, as part of the process of looking at the landscape and exploring whether some of that water could be slowed down to reduce the floods.

We sat inside the caravan with the gas fire on, waiting for her to come and talk to us about our rivers. My dad was joking around as if she was coming to tell us off and he wasn’t going to take it too seriously. Or else she would jail us for some crime we didn’t yet know we’d committed.

She came in and braved a mug of tea. My father wasn’t known for his kitchen hygiene – the mugs were filthy. He often swilled the tea-stained cups out with some suspect-looking water. Lucy was disarmingly normal and likeable, quite unfazed. She persuaded us she wasn’t here to catch us out or tell us off. After we had exchanged pleasantries, the rain paused and we were able to walk our land. She talked to us about how unnatural most rivers were, and what needed to be done about it. She showed us some good and not-so-good things about our streams, without sounding lofty or know-it-all. She told us that the becks that we had always known, and rarely given a thought to, had actually been straightened and dredged, often by hand, in the nineteenth century. They were really man-made drainage channels – too straight, too deep and too regulated to be much use for salmon and trout. A healthy stream, she explained, needs slow bits and fast bits, wide bits and narrow bits, shallow riffs and deep pools, and places where it drops gravel and silt to form places where fish can spawn. There was no judgement or condemnation in this. She just told us it straight. My father and I soaked it up, because no one had ever bothered to explain all this to us before. It made sense.

Lucy said there were lots of sensible things we could do to ‘slow the flow’ of