Caroline Fraser
The Shepherd’s Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape by James Rebanks
Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey by James Rebanks
The Shepherd’s Life:
Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape by James Rebanks.
Flatiron, 293 pp., $18.99 (paper)
Pastoral Song:
A Farmer’s Journey by James Rebanks.
Custom House, 295 pp., $28.99
What to Look For in Spring ,... Summer ,... Autumn ,and... Winter are four small books published in the early 1960s by Ladybird, a legendary British children’s publisher. The charmingly eccentric text was written by E. L. Grant Watson, a Cambridge biologist and prolific novelist, and every facing page was illustrated by Charles Tunnicliffe, a renowned painter of birds whose colorful scenes captured the British Isles’ peaceable marriage of the wild and domestic: a farmer cutting hay, lambs frolicking, cows grazing, stoats hunting field mice, moorhens nesting, hares boxing during the mating season. They are a perfect image of the lost English pastoral.
In August 2020 Kerrie Ann Gardner, an artist and naturalist living in Devon, reproduced a number of Tunnicliffe’s illustrations as part of a Twitter thread (and subsequently for an essay for the Penguin website). She offered them not as an exercise in nostalgia but as poignant proof of ecosystems that now lie in tatters. In the UK, 133 species have gone extinct since the 1500s. Since the 1970s, 40 million birds have vanished from its skies.
Shocked at the contrast between the present and the recent past, Gardner said that we cannot continue to look for many of the animals in Watson’s pages, because they’re no longer there:
A rooftop covered in...swallows, house and sand martins. Beyond them were telegraph wires equally laden with these birds. The words of an elderly neighbour came to mind: “Couldn’t see the wires for the swallows” he’d told me when speaking about days gone by, and in an instant I realised that I wasn’t looking at some fanciful event—this is what Tunnicliffe had actually seen . . . . There were huge flocks of lapwings and swarms of eels . . . kaleidoscopic butterflies . . . swifts, grey Partridges, a turtle dove, spotted flycatcher, wood warbler and there, in all his heraldic glory, was a cuckoo, proudly perched on a post in a blossom-filled garden.
I thought back to the last time I’d heard a cuckoo, let alone seen one. It was years ago, yet I used to hear them every May.
The destruction is driven largely by modern agriculture, and no one knows this better than the British farmer and shepherd James Rebanks. As he says in his new book, Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey, he has been seeing these shifts—the steady impoverishment of rural landscapes—for most of his life, since he was a child sitting behind his grandfather on a tractor, watching seagulls descend on worms flung up by the plow. “I was a boy living through the last days of an ancient farming world,” he says. “I didn’t know what was coming, or why.”
What was coming was a global revolution in monoculture that upended their lives and those of everyone they knew. Terrifying in its destructive power, it “played out in the fields,” mowing down all before it. “I was a witness,” he says, but he is more than that. Pastoral Song, in its cri de coeur against our current state of abject agricultural illiteracy, may be the most passionate ecological corrective since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.
James
Rebanks was born in the summer of 1974 in the rural county of Cumbria, in North West England. Bordered to the north by Scotland and the remains of Hadrian’s Wall (the old Roman wall built in AD 122), Cumbria is one of the most sparsely populated corners of the country, home to the peaks and lakes celebrated by Wordsworth and his fellow Lake poets. The Lake District is now a national park and a UNESCO World Heritage site, although much land remains under private ownership.
It is not uncommon, on a summer’s day, to see enormous buses packed with international tourists towering over tiny Dove Cottage, the house on the edge of Grasmere village where Wordsworth lived with his sister, Dorothy, or pulling up beside Beatrix Potter’s Hill Top, a seventeenth-century dwelling in Near Sawrey almost as diminutive as Tom Kitten’s. With the lucre from her little books, Potter helped preserve the Lake District, buying and bequeathing four thousand acres, including fifteen farms, to the National Trust. But not even she could have predicted a day when (preCovid) the region was drawing close to 20 million visitors a year.
Pastoral wallpaper to the tourists, roughly three million sheep also abide in Cumbria. In his immensely popular Guide to the Lakes, Wordsworth celebrated the region as “a perfect Republic of Shepherds and Agriculturists,” and it remains, as Rebanks says, “a kind of nursery for the national sheep flock,” supplying breeding stock for the rest of the country as it has “for many centuries.”
Rebanks began this story in his first book, the 2015 memoir The Shepherd’s Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape. His second builds on the first, and while both stand alone, they are especially powerful when read together. The Shepherd’s Life is about the farmer; Pastoral Song is about farming.
In The Shepherd’s Life, Rebanks lays out the year as it has unfolded over the past five thousand years on a socalled mixed or rotational farm on the “fells,” or mountainsides, rocky and dangerously exposed. In summer the shepherds gather sheep off the fells for shearing; in late autumn “tups” (rams) join the ewes to perpetuate the flock. We see the cycle of planting, plowing, and making hay for the winter months; the sheep sales of late autumn and winter; the shepherding of the core flock through the harsh winter months; and spring lambing. “It is a farming pattern,” he says, “fundamentally unchanged .... You could bring a Viking man to stand on our fell with me and he would understand what we were doing.”
Rooted in land and culture, Rebanks is no tourist, and he instructs us in the specialized language of his work. In