The English Lake District is situated in the far northwest of the country, between Manchester and Liverpool and the Scottish border. Since the early 19th century, when it was made famous by the poet William Wordsworth and his friends, it’s become the UK’s premier mountain hiking destination, receiving some 16 million visitors a year, some coming just to admire the daffodils, others to hike over the region’s often snow-covered peaks, relatively easy of access at all seasons.
The summits aren’t high — the highest is under 1,000 meters. But the landscape is exceptionally dramatic, partly because the valleys lie at little above sea-level. This is country where you can set out after a leisurely breakfast, climb through spectacular views to the tops of several linked peaks, and be down again for a traditional English tea. Furthermore, since the region was declared a National Park in 1951, almost no building or other development has been allowed, so that the Lake District is increasingly becoming a pre-modern landscape, a sanctuary enshrining a world about which devotees (of whom I must admit I’m one) can otherwise only dream.
All this is effectively made possible by the resident locals, numbering only around 43,000. Key here are the sheep farmers. Through traditional rights going back to the Middle Ages, they let their sheep range freely over the entire area, with distinct mountains (“fells”) assigned to distinct farms. The animals know their home turf well and are only brought down to the valleys (“dales”), using highly-trained sheepdogs, a few times a year, for lambing, shearing and so on.
All this activity is taken for granted by most tourists, and anyone wanting to know the details has up to now had to glean information from scattered sources. But the unthinkable has happened. A book has been written by a local farmer that is detailed, funny, scholarly, historically informed and in every way a joy to read.
The author, James Rebanks, must be the only person in the area who could have brought off such a feat, and it isn’t until half-way through the book that you realize how he did it. He originally left school without any certificates on the first day departure was allowed. He subsequently wrote, on government forms and so on, in block capitals. But then some books belonging to his maternal grandfather arrived in the house, and he began to read. Many classics from the 1950s and 1960s, by writers such as George Orwell, A.J.P. Taylor and Ernest Hemingway, were there, and before long James Rebanks was having extensive bookshelves put up in the family farm.
When he was 21, someone suggested he try his A Levels, the UK examinations that form the basis for university entrance. He drove to an adult-education center two evenings a week, and was quickly told that his essays, written at home on a computer as he still hadn’t mastered longhand, were “straight A’s.” He grudgingly applied to Oxford and got in. An Internet search reveals that he won a “demyship,” a form of scholarship, to Magdalen College in 2000 to 2001, reading history under, among others, Nicholas Stargardt, a celebrated historian of modern Germany. Once there, he eked out his income by baking cakes with his girlfriend for local Oxford shops, and on one vacation doing sub-editing for a magazine in London.
But he’d never planned to leave sheep-farming in the Lake District, though he’s subsequently combined this with working for UNESCO in a nearby town, and running an agency to advise applicants for cultural endowments. Now that he’s written The Shepherd’s Life, who knows what lies ahead?
This book, then, is a unique product. It’s arranged by seasons, starting with summer and sheep-shearing (“clipping”) and ending with spring and lambing, the major event of the year. Somehow or other, the author’s life-story is fitted chronologically into this structure.
Anyone interested in the Lake District will learn an enormous amount from this book. One example is the veneration accorded to “tups” — prime male lambs selected to father the next generation, and the prices that the best of these can fetch. The top tups can serve 100 ewes, Rebanks states, adding that if he only had a few days left in the world he’d spend one of them inspecting Herdwick tups. Herdwicks are the distinctive Lake District breed, thought to have been introduced to the area by the Norsemen. (Ninety percent of all Herdwick sheep are said to still reside within 30km of the village of Coniston.) Before the big autumn fair, where tups are traded between farmers, individual animals have to be approved by breed inspectors who check for desirable characteristics. Rebanks has served as a Herdwick inspector, so as far as this goes he knows what being happy entails.
But there’s also the gamble of haymaking (where nearly a week without rain is needed for a successful crop), the dangers of prolonged snow, the value to sheep farmers of motorbikes with trailers attached and the absurdity of having to pay commercial sheep-shearers one UK pound per animal when the resulting fleece can only sell for less than half that price.
Generally, though, Rebanks exhibits a marked even-handedness. He displays this when depicting fox hunting (technically now illegal in the UK) and the mass slaughter of animals during the area’s 2001 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. Even the buying up of large numbers of Lake District homes by tourists, probably the most contentious of all local issues, is treated dispassionately, and without the fury I’d expected.
The author of The Shepherd’s Life, a truly magnificent book, runs a popular site on Twitter, (@herdyshepherd1), which last week showed his favorite sheepdog giving birth to 10 puppies. James Rebanks, in other words, is still managing the seemingly impossible — simultaneously inhabiting both the modern and the most traditional of worlds. Few people can be so lucky.
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