One to re-read

I Bought a Mountain Thomas Firbank (Short Books, £16.99)

THIS book, first published in 1940, about how the 21year-old Thomas Firbank bought a 2,400-acre farm in Snowdonia, made a lasting impression on me as a teenager for its sheer romance. Now re-issued, with a preface by Patrick Barkham and a conclusion by present-day hill farmer Dafydd Morris-jones, it seems extraordinarily relevant, if less romantic—firbank and Esme, whom he describes tenderly as a ‘windswept elf’, divorced during the Second World War.

This was hard-core farming, every task a race against vicious wind and rain and treacherous mists. In March 1937, the Firbanks returned from a holiday to waist-high snow and to discover their entire flock of sheep buried; they spent the next three weeks tirelessly looking for them and most survived.

Firbank describes with affection and humour his fellow hill farmers and rightly so, for he was dependent on them: after an exhausting day’s shearing, repaid with no more than Esme’s cold mutton and jam tarts, many of them walked five miles home over the mountains to their own work.

Apart from the fact that good Welsh rams cost £5 and their hydro-electric scheme only £350 to build, this book could have been written in 2022, with Firbank talking angrily of a country that needed to improve its self-sufficiency (then about 42%), of farmers ‘sacrificed on the shabby altar of industry’ and trade deals made at British farming’s expense. Above all, however, he describes so movingly the privilege of farming this miraculous landscape.