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

They say that old wheelwrights planted, felled and stored apple trees in a three-generation cycle, so that their grandsons would have sufficient matured trees, and dried wood of the right kind, from which to make the hard wheel hubs they needed. We need to live like that again, thinking longer term and with more humility. Maybe my descendants will make something from these trees we are planting now. But, less grandly than that, I hope my children and grandchildren will climb trees and build dens, catch fish and roam free the way we once did. I hope they will love our flocks and our culture and cherish the wild things. I am tired of absolutes and extremes and the angriness of this age. We need more kindness, compromise and balance.

Everything good we have done on our farm has come from people finding ways to bridge the historic animosity between farmers and ecologists. The old freedom to do what we like as if each farm were an island, just a business, separate from all others, is now problematic. One appropriately chosen field of maize in a landscape may not be a major problem for soil erosion; all of the fields being planted with maize might be an ecological disaster. Ecology is bigger than one field and one farm. We need to work across many farms, and many valleys. If we know anything about ecosystems it is that they span whole landscapes, from sea to mountain top, from north to south and east to west and back, and encompass farms, valleys, regions and countries, even continents.

The cuckoos that call from our oak trees for two months each spring come here from sub-Saharan Africa. They need many safe places to live and feed, and to be able to pass safely over as they migrate. The same applies to the swallows, swifts, stonechats, spotted flycatchers, redstarts and many others. My farm is intricately linked to faraway places that I’ll never visit, and over which I have no influence. The fieldfares and redwings I love in my hedgerows all winter disappear one day each spring and fly north to the Arctic tundra and forests of Scandinavia and northern Russia. They say the ravens that pass over our farm – and which strip the flesh from the dead sheep on our fell – sometimes fly north-west to gather and find mates, and to escape the cold spells, on the coasts of other countries like Denmark or Norway. But even on a more local scale, wild things move around between valleys and areas constantly. The curlews, oystercatchers and lapwings that grace our valley move between our fields and the mudflats of tidal estuaries in places like the Solway Firth and Morecambe Bay. The otters that leave their spraint (dung) marks on the rocks below my farmhouse have much larger territories and move up- and down-stream of our farm, covering many miles in a night. And the salmon and sea trout that flash silver in the pools of our becks spend much of their lives far out at sea dodging trawler nets and the mouths of killer whales. Our little farm is part of a very big world.

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We cut across the fields on the quad bike, through the gateways, with Bea jumping off to open each gate. We are almost on the floor of the valley now and fingers of sunlight stretch across the fells to the north-west. Shadows lengthen. I have not seen our stock tups yet today, the most valuable sheep on the farm. They are the source of new blood for the flock and I must see they are all right before nightfall. Isaac has stayed behind to watch TV until bedtime, but my Bea was keen to come.

We are heading for the marshy land of the floodplain. Carved apart with countless little becks and old drainage channels, it is rough grazing land and later in the summer will be waist-deep in creamy meadowsweet flowers. It is here that the tups are meant to be. At dawn and dusk the valley bottom feels a little primeval, with the cattle and roe deer often grazing in a sea of mist, while herons pass to and fro from the places where they fish and catch frogs and their roosts. For centuries it was drained heavily to turn it from a bog into more usable fields, with giant channels as deep as eight or ten feet. It took Herculean efforts and a lot of men to keep it drained. The final act of ‘improvement’ took place in the 1980s with powerful machines when the ‘Water Board’ straightened the beck across our land. They lined the river on either side with posts and wooden planks until it looked like a tiny canal. That a utility company had the money or inclination to do this in a remote Lake District valley out of little more than a sense of engineering zeal and a theology about straight rivers already seems surreal. But scarcely a field in England hasn’t been ‘improved’ in one way or another in the past century.

I have neither the staff or money, nor the will to drain this place. Hairy old cows and Herdwick sheep don’t need ramrod straight rivers or perfect green sward. So, without any great master plan or fanfare, the valley bottom has, year on year, been reverting to a wilder place. The straightened river has eventually eroded the banks put in place to hold it, and now threatens to break loose. The canal planks are rotting. The gutters have silted up and are slowly filling in, with sludge and pondweed, and otters and herons hunt frogs in them.

As we travel into the valley bottom, I see around me on all sides an ancient working landscape that still lives and breathes, but also with twenty years of changes written across its surface.

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