The Shepherd’s Life: A delightful surprise

The Shepherd’s Life (2015) is a book that came to me as a surprise. It was a Christmas gift and the best kind of present — unexpected and delightful. I knew nothing about its enormous popularity with British readers and had missed its being named a New York Times bestseller. Nor was I that keen on spending hours reading about shepherds and their sheep. I have a friend who collects sheep pictures and memorabilia; she even calls her television room ‘the meadow.’ You sense the joke. But cute and cuddly as her pictures are, they did not impel me to learn more about the woolly critters, even if they are so regularly celebrated as cultural icons these days.

So I was a reluctant reader when I picked up The Shepherd’s Life, but am keen to report that I found it an engrossing and enlightening experience. The book offers an account of the four seasons in the life of a sheep-tending family and, in larger terms, it examines what it means to be committed to raising and living by sheep in the hills (‘fells’) on the northeastern edge of England’s famous Lake District. The author, James Rebanks, is a third-generation shepherd in the fells and he has children of his own. Though he is a man of diverse interests, he is a born-and-bred shepherd of his flocks, be they Herdwicks or Swaledales.

The book is in part about the difference between being a stoic, long-term resident of a particular landscape and being a casual tourist. In the case of the Lake District the difference is enormous.

Every year tourists come, a copy of Wordsworth in hand; 16 million of them! They invade the Lake District simply as passing visitors keen on experiencing the pastoral scenery (the sheep are part of this pleasing panorama) and teasing out favorite literary connections. As well, some become new residents who buy up properties, inflate values, and find irritating ways to intrude on Rebanks’ traditional workaday life.

Glimpses of grazing sheep may be pleasing to the superficial eye, but Rebanks has the perspective to itemize and lament the inevitable intrusions of ‘cultural imperialism’ upon the ‘ancient’ way of life that he and his family continue to live by and value. The book’s subtitle “Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape” captures that disparity.

But the book is not a sustained complaint about the modern nor is it given over to the legitimate resentment of the locals. Rather, it is an intense record of the generations-old shepherding life in the present day--its complexities, grim realities, daily struggles, and abiding pleasures.

It’s about being a professional in a kind of livelihood that stretches back thousands of years and it’s about sustaining a knowledge of an occupation that is at once precarious and fascinating, one that is never profitable in the modern sense but is deeply fulfilling as a life. And it’s about a knowledge of sheep that can only be learned by patient endurance, seasonal experience and generational support. One learns shepherding from father to son (even grandfather to son) and from neighbour to neighbour in conversations or at the various shows and sales that make up the seasonal calendar. Rebanks makes us to realize what it takes to do something difficult and demanding as well as one possibly can. Collectively, we spend much of our modern lives as tourists, visiting here and there but usually missing the real thing right before our very eyes. Our travels encourage us blithely to pass by and to miss the real work that matters.

Being a shepherd is not a profession for sissies. Sheep get maggots, they live in the grass and dirt, they occasionally get lost in the fells, and at times they wander away from their flock. Some of them get ill and die in the fields from old age or diseases like pneumonia.

Rebanks doesn’t mention it but it would seem that ten to twelve years makes for a long, serviceable life for a ewe or a ram. We learn about the care required by these critters during each season and the dangers they face from the elements and disease.

One of the book’s bleakest sections deals with the necessary response to the foot-and-mouth epidemic that struck Britain some years ago.

So many healthy sheep had to be put down and the recovery time for the flock seemed interminable. Being a shepherd involves demanding daily work in bad times and good—there is little time off and little respite. Even in summer, hay must be grown for the winter season and sheep must be evaluated and groomed for shows and sales. A good shepherd knows all his sheep, be they ewes or tups; he knows when each was born, its pedigree and its history.

James Rebanks is an interesting character. A resentful student (like most of his pals), he wanted above all to quit school; hence, at age 16 he took up shepherding with his father and grandfather. There were, however, tough times with his father as they uneasily struggled to work together. But he began reading on his own and soon became interested in the educational possibilities he had formerly despised. Spurred by books like W.H. Hudson’s A Shepherd’s Life (1910), he learned cursive writing (he could only write in block capitals before) and, after taking a few adult-education courses, he qualified to attend Oxford University, of all places.

There he earned his degree while returning home as often as possible to help with the sheep. That led to his literary present. He began writing blogs about shepherding and took up work for UNESCO helping countries and regions hoping to develop their tourist business.

How ironic on the one hand but expansive for him on the other! Once he committed to shepherding full time, his other income supplemented his limited earnings at home.

This self-transformation underpins his observations and knowledge as a third-generation farmer with growing children of his own. It provides the rich perspective on which the book depends.

Rebanks is a gifted writer. There are so many passages worth sharing. There are the stories about Beatrix Potter (Mrs. Heelis) and her local successes as a sheep-raiser. That success, we learn, depended on Tom Storey, her laconic but knowledgeable shepherd. There are painful images of visiting the knacker’s yard with the carcass of a ewe. But at book’s end comes a passage that brings the richnesses of A Shepherd’s Life together. Having taken his flock to the fells for the summer, he writes:

“The skylarks ascend, singing, disturbed by my boots and the sheepdogs.

“The sheep’s evident satisfaction at being back where they feel at home means that winter and spring are fast receding behind us. The fell sheep can largely look after themselves in the coming weeks. So I lie down by the beck and cusp a handful of water. I slurp it. There is no water that tastes so sweet and pure.

“Then I roll over on my back and watch the clouds racing by. Floss lies in the beck, cooling off, and Tan nuzzles at my side, because he has never seen me lazing about. He has never seen me stop like this. He has never seen summer before.

“I breathe the cool mountain air. And watch a plane chalking a trail across the blue of the sky. The ewes call to the lambs following them as they climb up the crags. This is my life. I want no other.”