Exploring the Timeless Landscape of the Shepherd's Life: Contemporary Insights from an Ancient Tradition

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

Helen Stephenson: The account of sheep farming in James Rebanks’ book is authentic living history. He keeps the traditions of his father and grandfather alive and feels a connection to those who farmed the same land over, possibly, thousands of years. The accounts of hefted ewes and well bred tups are fascinating. I was filled with admiration for the energy and passion which he is pouring into his farm.

There was just one thing bothering me, as I finished the book. He is talking about farming marginal land, in a time when, shockingly, there is no market for wool, and UK consumption per capita of lamb’s meat has been falling. When we are faced with a crisis of biodiversity in these desperate times of climate change, shouldn’t James be considering returning this land to nature? Would he be able to “betray” his forbears by changing his way of farming?

This morning I turned on the radio and there was a programme on Radio 4, Could I Regenerate My Farm to Save the Planet, hosted by James Rebanks. He was examining the role of regenerative agriculture. I was excited, but anxious that he might find that there wasn’t a good enough case for him to do this on his land. I was thrilled...

United Kingdom on Nov 24, 2021

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

fitzalling: In the modern world filled with people, smartphones and apps, James Rebanks writes about a world that has existed for thousands of years, which struggles to maintain its existence despite the encroaching urban world. How does one value a sense of place and integrate that value into a world that does not value place or the work that holds you to a place. As a teenager he, and his mates, resisted the pleas of their teachers to adapt to the demands of formal learning and leave their rural world. His teachers thought that the shepherd's work was intellectually barren and the teenage James Rebanks thought the world of books offered by his teachers was unworthy of effort. The demands of place included arguments and fights with his father in his younger life with a growing appreciation of his father as he grew older.

The book is the story of his life's journey to show that shepherding demanded high order emotional, physical and intellectual effort, while coming to realize that books, too, could impart knowledge and maybe wisdom. Remember, shepherding is a pre-industrial occupation; The idea that anything that requires hard, physical labor is somehow unworthy, and maybe demeaning,...

United States on Jul 17, 2016

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