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

face despite his attempts to swipe them away. After we have been around the flocks of sheep and fed our cattle, we head home. When I hold out my hands to lift him from the quad bike, he shakes his head, as if he would happily sit and wait in the rain all night rather than miss it tomorrow. So as I enter the farmhouse, I sweep him up in my arms and tell him I am sorry, and he can come and see the new calf later. I have to give a full report of all I have seen while I eat my breakfast. But he seems sceptical about the dragons in my tale.

~

After breakfast I get Tan and my other dog Floss, and we head up the wooded ghyll by the farmhouse. This giant V-shaped ravine, carved out of the hillside by the beck, connects our lower ground to our highest fields. In storms, the tumbling stream sings down past our house. In winter, wind roars off the fells and over our roof, wave after wave, over the slates, with us hunkered beneath it like barnacles clinging to the rocks. The ghyll is almost a quarter mile long and perhaps 70 feet deep, at its deepest point. Spruce trees, planted by some unknown hand a century or more ago, have grown from the bottom of the ravine and fill it with their evergreen branches. From the high ground you can look into the crowns of these great trees. Buzzards nest in one, on a platform the size of a child’s bed, made of branches. When these trees fall or blow over in a storm, they crash down to the other bank of the ghyll and create mossy aerial walkways that the red squirrels tread smooth with their feet. I duck under them as I make my way up with the dogs. These ghylls are vital ribbons stretching through our farm from the wilder woodland above our land to the valley floor. The twisted and broken old trees seem to own this place. Isaac says that perhaps they come alive when we aren’t looking, like the ‘Ents’ in the Tolkien books. Their tangled roots sometimes reach out of the ground and trip me up, scattering mice and their enemies the stoats. As I reach the top and emerge into the sunshine, I can hear a post hammer striking somewhere – a wooden crack that echoes around the fells.

~

I pass through the gate into the ‘New Field’, our highest field. It is poor ground, two thirds a steep, south-facing grassy bank, and one third of bog. We bought this in the months after my father’s death, because it came up for sale. It was cheap to buy, and with good reason. It is only suitable for rough cattle and sheep grazing, and not much use to anyone except us because of its isolated location up the lane above our farm. The banks of it, in summer, are a mass of flowering grasses, pignut, red and white clovers, bugle, buttercups, forget-me-not, cowslips, vetches, orchids and burr thistles. The field was bought with set environmental scheme rules about when it can be grazed and how, in order to protect these wild flowers. The bog at the bottom is so sodden that you can scarcely stand on it; the turf suspended, but only just, like thick skin on custard. The higher land all around it drains down into this basin, and because the water mostly cannot escape it is always wet, a peaty mass of rushes and long grasses. Little fish, bullheads, dart away from my shadow, and dive down into the pondweed a few yards away.

The fences around this field were mostly redone before we bought it, but one, across the bog, was falling down and had been left, perhaps because the fencing contractor didn’t fancy getting his feet wet. So, when it became ours, I hired a different gang to come and build a new fence to make the land secure. When we walked the fence line to measure the job and agree a price, we found a dead ewe of my neighbour’s lying stuck in the bog, face chewed off by badgers. I half expected the lads to tell me to do the fence myself, but they welcomed the challenge and now they are up there working. I have come to see if they are OK.

Half a dozen sheepdogs are playing in the sunshine on the grassy banks, chasing each other and fighting. A broad-shouldered, black-haired lad wades through the bog towards me. His bare suntanned arms are wet with sweat, as he lugs fence posts on his shoulders across the rushes to where his mates are working. With his free hand he swipes at a fly that has nipped his arm. These damp places with long grass in them are hellish for horse flies, or ‘cleggs’ as we call them. They suck your blood and leave a giant welt on your skin. Others are hovering gently around him for a chance to land. I wade out to meet him at the line of newly sunk-in fence posts, sodden to my knees, and as I reach him I see that the biggest of the lads using the post hammer is standing up to his belly in dark water. They are using very long posts to grab into harder earth down below, and the tension of the wire to hold the fence in place. The black-haired lad tells me they have seen some stray sheep of ours on the ‘lonnin’, or lane: two ewes and three lambs. And some of the sheep on the enclosed land beside them are being bothered with flies and will need attention from me.

When these lads are not doing contract work, they gather the fells for other farmers with their sheepdogs, bringing down the flocks. They also shear sheep and work on their families’ farms – the kind of people who made this landscape. They look