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

some as supportive friends, and some paid for by us to help us understand what we have and why it matters. The pooling of knowledge is transforming our understanding of our land and our valley. This coming together of old and new knowledge on our land makes our farming the most exciting and rewarding it has ever been. Life is richer for all these things we are learning. And the more we share our farm, the more it feels like it matters. I am no longer turning away from the world.

Our fields are busier than they used to be in the 1980s and 1990s, when they were sometimes lonely and quiet places, as layers were stripped away and work and people were lost. This valley is now increasingly a place of regeneration – where work, good skilled work, is being done again. There is always someone else here working, or learning, or helping us. Restoring the countryside isn’t about destroying old communities and traditional ways of life, or at least it shouldn’t be. It is about building strong new rural communities that respect both the old and the new.

Schools come to our farm and use our fields as classrooms for learning about farming, food and nature. Seeing children watch a lamb be born, touch a fleece, or follow how food is produced from field to fork is a joy. They gasp at caddis fly larvae in a Petri dish, scooped from the becks. They scour for woodlice in rotten tree logs. They rummage through the understory of our wilder places for frogs and toads. They gallop around counting wild flowers in our meadows. And they help us plant hedgerows or stick willows in the riverbanks. During their breaks they revel in the freedom of the fields, running around yelling, filling our land with a wild happiness and freedom.

One day a class came from a distant town, and we were told that one little boy was having a rough time at home. He could barely speak, was as grey as concrete and flinched each time an adult moved near him. At lunchtime, his teacher and I took him to collect the eggs from the little waist-high mobile hen hut that stands on the grass by the barn. We spoke gently about the hens clucking around the yard, and how they come back to the nest boxes to lay their eggs in the hay. He reached in and lifted out the warm eggs, and his face glowed for a second with the sheer simple joy of it. As the day went on, he seemed to get the colour back in his cheeks and find his voice and a little more confidence. He loved seeing the sheepdogs work our sheep. And when he said goodbye, he smiled to us as if he really meant it. His teacher said he had had an amazing day, his best for a long time. When he left, I cried with frustration and sadness.

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After lunch my daughters come with me because I need them on the lanes to move one of our flocks to the pens. Some of the lambs have dirty backsides and need worming. The flock is up past the village on an ‘allotment’, some rough pasture ground enclosed a long time ago from common land. Molly stays at the lane end and sits on the grassy bank sunning herself while Bea and I go for the sheep up the road. Bea stops the cars as I get the flock out of the field. We chase them down the road, with our five dogs behind them, and as they reach Molly she turns them down the lane and we head for home between the willow trees. The girls swish stripped ash wands from the hedges.

‘What kind of tree is that?’ I ask.

‘A rowan … Easy,’ they reply.

‘Who farms this field?’

‘Peter Lightfoot.’

‘What do you think of that Herdwick tup?’

‘OK. But it’s a bit light-skinned for you, Dad.’

They are proud of their farming culture, having shown and sold sheep since they were small.

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I have tried to teach my children the things I was taught, like how to ‘know sheep’, being able to recognize who they belong to, and to weigh up their quality in a few seconds. They understand the style and character of our flock and the others around us, and they also have sheep of their own. Molly lost her eldest ewe two winters ago. And, because she worked for me at lambing time, I let her choose a young ewe as a replacement when a hundred or more sheep were in the barn. They would have looked identical to most people. A few minutes later she chose the best one and dropped a cool teenage smile at me on the way out of the shed. She knew it was the best, and one I had hoped not to give away, but the loss was lessened because I was proud that she was knowledgeable enough to pick it. Not many shepherds would have chosen so well.

When Tom was born, I purchased a ewe lamb at a sale from our neighbour and rival Jean Wilson for £500 to start his flock. She wrote him a card saying she hoped he would grow up to beat me at the shows with the lambs this ewe would breed. She gave him his ‘luck money’ (£20 back on the purchase price to wish him well). In the years to come he will, no doubt, hold sheep of his own at shows as well as my girls can (they are a match for most of the shepherds).

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I also want my children to know how fortunate we are to live in this raggedy old farming valley that is so full of nature. To see – as I did not when I was young – the bigger picture beyond our traditional horizons and think of our farm in its wider setting; to appreciate that no farm is an island, but part of a