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

wider ecosystem, a valley, a river catchment, an interconnected world. I point out the chimney sweepers, the little black moths that are being kicked up by the sheep, others with little spots called ringlets, and meadow browns, the larger brown and red ones at the verges. I show them the lavender-blue bugle flowers that rise up every few inches from the turf, the simple little yellow flowers of tormentil, and the moss on the damp side of the oak-tree trunks. As we pass through our open gate and across the pastures, I lift some brittle papier-mâché cow muck and my girls look at me like I am weird. It crumbles in my hands, but is riddled with life – fat grey grubs, little black dung beetles, tiny turquoise beetle and insect shells sparkle in the sunshine.

~

The ewes flick their ears and lower their heads to escape the flies that are gathering above them. The oldest ewes are leading the flock, their lambs trotting behind them. The dogs weave from side to side, pushing them along, tongues flopping out of their mouths. I try to explain what I am doing, why I care about muck, and beetles, and peat bogs, and fungi and worms. I try to explain that the future of the farm lies in replicating as best we can the habitats (and natural processes) of this once-wild valley, thousands of years ago.

‘But what was it like?’ Molly asks.

I have to admit that for most of my life I didn’t really know. My grandfather acted as if our valley was what it had always been and always would be. But now ecologists tell us that it was once much more wooded and had species in it that I have never seen – creatures such as corncrakes, polecats, pine martens, lynx, wild boar, bison, wild cattle, beavers, bears and wolves – and species that no longer exist, like woolly mammoths and rhinos, bog elk and cave lions. Ecologists aren’t completely certain how it all worked, because there is no description, no photograph, no film, to help us imagine that past. Some believe this land was a closed canopy of mature trees, the deep dark wood of European fairy tales like Red Riding Hood, but growing evidence suggests that that is mistaken, or at least overly simplistic. Humans have been part of it, shaping it, for tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. We came to places like this as hunter-gatherers before the last ice age, and before the woodland reclaimed it, following herds of reindeer and other herbivores through such landscapes, as people still do in the far north.

The idea of it all being forested is more likely to be a projection based on what happens now when we abandon woodland to do its own thing, rather than what probably happened in the prehistoric wilderness when large herds of herbivores were moved around by large carnivores. Wild systems are full of what ecologists call ‘dynamism’ and ‘disturbance’. Large and small herbivores graze trees and scrub and smash it down, creating clearings and grasslands. We tend to think of habitats as being static, and fixed, but in nature all habitats are forced to change constantly by grazing, storms, disease, smashing, trampling, rotting, death and decay. And all of these processes are necessary because they create unique niches. A healthy ecosystem is in a state of perpetual motion. Real wilderness never looked like a genteel English wood. It was messy, and the three main habitat types – woodland, scrub and meadow clearings – were moving around in an ever-shifting, swirling dance of birth, life and death.

Molly says it sounds a bit like a documentary we watched recently about the Serengeti. She’s right, I think. Our traditional farming systems can evolve to provide a similarly shifting patchwork of habitats (using the native breeds and the craft skills of the people of the countryside): meadows and pastures that resemble the woodland clearings of the past, with different intensities and types of grazing, and thick hedges like those we are passing now with the flock, full of birds that think they are in a thorny wild woodland edge. As we add more of those vital habitats and processes, like wilder rivers and ponds, willowy and thorny scrub, the species we once lost will begin to return. Ironically, the best farming in Europe for wildlife is in the least developed, or ‘backwards’, places like Romania and Hungary.

~

The sheep in front of us have reached a beck. They bunch up, hesitating, until one jumps at the narrowest point and then the rest follow. Soon we turn into our gateway and down to the pens where the sheep are gathered in. The girls grab the dirty ones, and we hold them firm as I clean the filth from their back ends with a pair of hand shears. One lamb has some maggots on a damp patch of its wool; we flick them off and apply Battles Maggot Oil. The lamb shivers and looks relieved. Half an hour later we are done. We chase the flock through the pasture above the pens and into a fresh field. A redstart bobs along in front of the flock. Then another, and another, until five little red tails are flitting along by the sheep from one thorn tree to the next. Their tails flash with each wing beat, little triangular wedges of freshly cut mahogany. The air is heavy with mint, trampled by sheep feet. And then they are in the new field, heads down, grazing, or up, calling for their lambs. I tell my daughters to set off for home on their own and they race each other down the steep bank covered in white, pink and yellow flowers. I shout ‘Thank you’ after them, but they can’t hear me. I must go back to the cow and calf to see that all is well.

~

The meadow looks entirely different now from the way it did at dawn. These fields never look the