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

water from our farm downstream. Rivers needed to be made more natural once again, less engineered, and to be given space to wiggle and meander, with banks covered in trees, with lots of old wood in them to help the rivers become healthier for fish and other creatures. Planting trees in the right place, she said, could also slow down floodwater, and let it soak into the ground instead of running off the surface. And fells and moors ‘roughed up’ with tussocks and healthy mosses and peat bogs could act like giant sponges. Healthy soil in the pasture fields could hold water better than compacted, dead soil. She said that if these things came together to create more natural river habitats, then it would make a big difference to our whole landscape. It was perhaps unrealistic to think we could do all of these things everywhere – but there were many places where they could be done, including on land like ours. She asked lots of sensible questions about how we farmed and talked us through what we might be able to do on our land differently if they helped us. And it wasn’t a fantasy. She had funds. She could pay for things if we would work with her.

Like many farmers we were perhaps still in denial about how much our land had changed. Even on Grandad’s beloved old fell farm things had altered over time – not as radically as on the more improved land beyond the valley, admittedly, but the same forces were gnawing away at it all. Between our little fields the old hedges had grown out, and the fences were rusty and the posts rotten. We couldn’t afford to maintain or replace them, so our small fields had been amalgamated into bigger ones, all managed the same way and often bare-grazed with sheep.

Lucy offered to help pay for us to put all those old field boundaries back, and many new ones, so our farm would become a quilt of smaller fields once more. But she wanted the riverbanks, boggy bits and woodland fenced off and managed differently, with only light and occasional grazing. She wanted wider hedgerows and thousands of trees planted.

We had been with Lucy for about an hour when it occurred to me that something odd was happening. My family didn’t really have these kinds of conversations. We were always suspicious of meddling outsiders. But for some reason my dad was quite enthusiastic. The atmosphere was constructive and respectful. Lucy’s vision of a valley that was better for rivers and fish had a lot of overlap with our thoughts about how much better the old farming landscape had been. Her plan would help us to reconstruct the original field pattern around our new family home and restore the fell farm that had begun to slip away. If we gave her what she wanted, we would be getting a load of new fencing that would be half paid for. There was a chunk of selfishness in our listening. We were probably more interested in the half-price fences than what might happen inside them.

My father heard all this, and then, to my surprise, pushed me to make the final decision, saying, ‘It will be his farm. He can decide.’ When I asked him later for his approval for changing our farm quite radically – becks fenced off, trees planted, a mile of new hedges and fields restructured – he said we should just ‘get on with it, unless you’ve got a gold mine to pay for all the new fences yourself’. Weeks later a team of Polish men came in the middle of winter and began to alter the farm to the plan agreed by us with Lucy. The Poles worked through the snow, impressing my father greatly with their hardiness.

~

With hindsight, Lucy did something very clever indeed when she persuaded us to fence off those becks. And perhaps my father can have a little credit too for giving those changes his quiet blessing. Lucy didn’t take those bits of land away or end our responsibility for them – she just put them in our care with a different set of rules. We would, for the first time, manage some land for something other than farming. These strips of land would be almost entirely given back to nature to do its thing. Though I didn’t realize it then, she and my father made me the guardian of some half-wild spaces. This was a big shift for a farmer, not an easy one initially, but revolutionary in the longer run. It was probably the first time in generations we had ‘unimproved’ land. This first step changed me as well as our farm. Once you start moving, the steps get easier.

~

Soon after the Polish workers had fenced off our riverbanks, the grass grew rank and much rougher than it had ever done before, and there was an explosion of voles. They scurried between clumps of grass, from tree roots to rocks. Within weeks, barn owls returned to our land after many years of absence, to feast on the voles. Everyone in our family felt proud about the owls, as if we had been paid back straight away. It felt true to who we were, something my grandfather might have appreciated.

After that, wilder plant life began to take hold, though it took longer to emerge and was harder to see. For the first three or four years, strong coarse grasses shot up on the banks and choked out the smaller delicate flowering plants; for a while it became less biodiverse. But in the fourth and fifth years purple and yellow flowers were suddenly blooming everywhere, rising above the grasses, and a golden haze of insects, butterflies and bees flitted to and fro over the wilder areas as the summer sun set. The little becks began slowly to find their own space again, with a little help from us, breaking out of their nineteenth- and twentieth-century straitjacket channels, and