Exploring the Ancient Landscape of the Shepherd's Life: Modern Insights into a Timeless Tradition

Stephen: Intended to be a gift, sticker on the back that left a sticky residue and it was bashed around during shipping in a box so that it looks used. To think Amazon started out selling books…

United States on Oct 26, 2023

Jeremy David Mishkin: The author brings us into the daily life of the sheep farm - with all its gory glory and stunning beauty. A wonderful read that will stick with me for a long while.

United States on Oct 18, 2023

Ros Tildesley: Arrived on time well packaged and book is in very good condition .

United Kingdom on Oct 13, 2023

anna p: This book is descriptive and moving. I was wrappred in the language, place, and narrative and read it twice right off!

United States on Sep 18, 2023

JDM: I read Pastoral first and I'm enjoying this just as much. You can really feel the sense of what the farm looked and felt like.

Australia on Sep 12, 2023

Kate Hopkins: James Rebanks reminds me in some ways of Thomas Hardy's shepherd-hero Gabriel Oak. He's wonderfully straightforward, highly intelligent, and completely devoted to his work. His beautifully-written memoir tells the reader both about the daily life of a shepherd on a Cumbrian hill farm, and about his unique career.

As a boy, Rebanks wanted nothing other than to be a sheep farmer, running the family farm just like his father and his adored grandfather. He resented school for taking him away from his farm work, was a trouble-maker and left at the age of 16 with two GCSEs, in religious studies and woodwork. Some years later, bored with leisure time that consisted largely of drinking, fighting and television, Rebanks discovered books (starting with W.H. Hudson and history books on World War II) and was hooked. With the help of his new girlfriend Helen he acquired A'Levels at night school, and went on to win a place at Oxford, from where he graduated with a First Class degree in History. But he always intended to return to the farm and - with the help of some consultancy work for UNESCO - he managed to fulfill his dream.

This is a wonderful book in many ways. The story of...

United Kingdom on May 23, 2021

Vigilantius: This is a passionate memoir by an unusual hill-side sheep farmer (born in 1974). Rebanks brings his motivation tellingly to life. In his Cumbrian secondary modern school 'I argued with our dumbfounded headmaster that school was really a prison and "an infringement of my human rights". He looked at me strangely, and said, "But what would you do at home?" As if this was an impossible question to answer. "I'd work on the farm," I answered equally amazed that he couldn't see how simple this was.'

This sense of the contempt which the available intellectual class had for his family's way of life was reinforced at a particular school assembly, where a female teacher implied that the pupils ‘were too dumb to want to leave ... The idea that we, our fathers and mothers, might be proud, hard-working and intelligent people doing something worthwhile, or even admirable, seemed to be beyond her.'

A few years later, Rebanks came across the highly Romanticised view of the Lakes as a place of 'nature', in which the farmers, the people who lived there, did not feature. This was galling, leading Rebanks to demand that 'The real history of our landscape should be the history of the...

United Kingdom on Apr 12, 2017

Frostback: Lauds the simple life, goes hard as anti-academic, then becomes one, then bails back to the farm. An odd mixture of hypocrisy and consistency. Paints a beautiful romantic and exclusive picture of living and working close to the land. A story worth telling but it is a view of the landscape through an opaque tunnel where livestock are lauded beyond a station the public might be willing to award them. It has overtones of the same moral framework that nature-blinded environmentalists, western US cattlemen, and imminent domain developers display. Within their purview, their argument for human-hill sheep-pasture resonates. The love of their framework is beautiful though and this makes it well worth reading. Rebanks turns some beautiful and compelling phrases that occasionally reminded me of Wendell Berry (big praise!). As an academic and an outdoor educator though, I found his belaboring experiential learning over the classroom teaching slightly irresponsible and mildly depressing. The magic cocktail is some mix of each I think. He fortunately escaped through books, as did I, but many students excel with either or both and if generations of school-sneering kids (as I saw in the Deep...

United States on Jan 03, 2017

C. Henig: I started reading this book, which was "recommended" to me by Amazon based on some other book I'd bought. I've learnt to take Amazon's recommendations w/ a grain of salt over the years. But this one truly is a book that is "bloody marvelous" to quote Helen MacDonald whose mini-blurb is on the jacket of my copy. As I had loved her book, H is for Hawk, I figured she might know something. And I'm glad I did because the beginning of this book is not an easy sell. James Rebanks dropped out of school at fifteen to work on his family's farms w/ his father and grandfather. And it is pretty clear when he did attend school, it was not where he wanted to be. I wondered how a person so against education could write such a lyrical book. Let me be clear - I've never been to the Lake District. I've no interest in raising sheep. I'm not a farmer of anything except for the tomato s in my garden. But I got caught up in this man's love of the life he and his ancestors for generations had shared. No one does this for anything but love. It's brutally hard work. It's physically and mentally exhausting. There is no day off. And there's precious little money in it - just enough to keep going. But this...

United States on Jul 01, 2016

Middle Aged Mackam: My dad was a pitman. Some people might have called him a coal miner, but to those who shared our family’s world, he was a pitman. He was proud of his work and the hundreds of years of tradition which lay behind it. The history and folklore of mining was part of his life and the life of his brothers in a very natural way. They spoke in their own dialect and would speak about events in their own little town as if they had only happened yesterday – though they may well have occurred before they were born.

Reading The Shepherd’s Life: A Tale of the Lake District by James Rebanks (@herdyshepherd1) took me back to that world. This wonderful book is set an afternoon’s bus journey from where I grew up, but in some ways it could have been much closer. When Reebanks writes about his family and the way that tradition had endured down through the generations, there were distinct echoes of the conversations around my grandma’s table on Sunday afternoons. Even some of the vocabulary was similar: ‘bait’ for packed lunch is the most obvious example. The lowland fields nearest the farm house are ‘in-bye’, but the coal seam far from the mineshaft is ‘out-bye’. This can...

United Kingdom on Oct 09, 2015