English Pastoral: An Inheritance - The Sunday Times bestseller from the author of The Shepherd's Life

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Following the recent Agriculture Bill it seems that farmers will be paid only if they enhance the environment. The traditional pastoral is about retreat into an imagined rural idyll, but this confronts very real environmental dilemmas. Vivid, accessible, inspiring - a story about one man's emerging land ethic, and an appreciation of the old ways in modern times . They switched to more “efficient” breeds of sheep, stopped growing turnips and barley, sprayed pesticide to clear their pastures of thistles, and no longer laid hedges by hand.

And, as Rebanks says, we need mechanisms, including financial incentives, that encourage productive farms to be more friendly to nature. His second book, English Pastoral , was also a Top Ten bestseller and was named the Sunday Times Nature Book of the Year. If you want a detailed analysis of how we could bring about the sorts of changes that he and many of us would like to see, you will be better served by Dieter Helm’s Green and Prosperous Land. In “Digging”, Seamus Heaney wrote how, unable to handle a spade like his father and grandfather, he chose to dig with a pen instead. This final section is perhaps the most lyrical of the three, and the description in the last few pages of an encounter at dusk with a barn owl hunting across his pasture land is as fine a piece of nature writing as one could hope for.The vision of a place which brings separate worlds together, replacing an older suspicion between those who work in the place and those who simply live there. I have never met anyone so roaringly, joyously in context and content as James Rebanks, belting around his farm in the rain . Our land is like a poem,” he says, and rapturous metaphors become his way of both honouring and conserving nature: the tails of redstarts “like little triangular wedges of freshly cut mahogany”, “copper-bronze beech leaves, wind-brittle and crunchy like plastic crisp packets under foot”, the mist below the fells “like a milky ocean”, curlews wheeling round “in giant fairground-ride loops”, cobwebs hanging from rafters “like tangled pairs of women’s tights”, an owl hunting back and forth “like a ball rolling from one side of a glass jar to the other”, a mare in labour with one of the legs of her foal “pushing up jagged beneath the taut skin as if she had swallowed a stepladder”.

International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Sisyphus with a smile … James Rebanks with his Herdwick sheep in Cumbria. For Rebanks, farming and writing have proved complementary: while working long hours on the land, he has produced a book in a pastoral tradition that runs from Virgil to Wendell Berry.This applies to the Andalusian goat herd and the Lapland reindeer herder, as much as to the Welsh sheep farmer. Estimates of this shrinkage in the areas of agricultural land have been made ranging from 8 to 11% ( https://ec. While the title of the book, English pastoral, evokes an expectation of a bucolic lifestyle, the reality is somewhat different as the author makes clear.

His bestselling memoir of five years ago, The Shepherd’s Life, told the story of his work with Herdwick sheep, against the backdrop of his unlikely progress from schoolboy dropout to high-flying Oxbridge graduate.James Rebanks takes an honest and heartfelt approach to one of the challenges of our time; a degrading landscape due to intensive farming practices. Farming, unlike almost any other job, is bound up in a series of complex ropes that Rebanks captures in his own story so beautifully: family pressure and loyalty, ego, loneliness, and a special kind of peer pressure.

I can imagine future historians mining English Pastoral for information about ploughing and harvesting, making hay and scything thistles, pulling out ragwort and ferreting in the days before the tentacles of modern agriculture reached into the hills. Rebanks is at his best when focusing on his home patch rather than railing against economists, supermarkets and cheap food.In the urgent and noisy debate around how we cope with climate change, and the damage to biodiversity in Britain, the media have increasingly sought out authentic voices to balance the often emotional and complicated arguments. In 1974, when Rebanks was born and I first made my way up the River Nile, after spending a month hay-timing on a farm in the Yorkshire Dales, over half of the population in sub-Saharan Africa was malnourished. A lot, as it turns out: about being a farmer, not just a shepherd, and about balancing the need to make a living with a sense of duty towards future generations.