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

Product Information

Now around one in five people there is hungry – still far too many, but an improvement on the not-so-distant past. The author provides encouragement to do so but his portrayal of the Lakeland farmer as independent of such influences is a piece of pastoral fantasy.

He clearly sees that the farm and this way of life have been passed to him, and there is a duty, not just to carry on as before, but to improve the holding and secure a viable enterprise which could be handed on. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. English Pastoral concludes with a description of the changes made on Rebanks’s farm in recent years.

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”. Rebanks, by now a celebrated author, expected to be out of tune with his neighbours, but was gratified to find that many of the older generation also felt farming had gone badly wrong. I really enjoy James Rebank books and his latest is a really smart way of thinking for future living and farming. However, such is the sweeping nature of his polemic that there is a danger some readers will come away from the book assuming all modern farming is environmentally destructive. After a while he realised that he was no longer going outside to work because he had to, but because he wanted too.

It's about progress and nostalgia , without being prideful or mawkish, it's about families and tradition, and the passing of time.I was gripped from the very first paragraph, where he describes joining his grandfather on tractor and plough: ‘Black-headed gulls follow in our wake as if we are a little fishing boat out at sea.