A valuable insight into the real life of the Lake District. I learnt about the divide between how a place is imagined and 'owned' by those travelling through and just how much work and thought goes in to maintaining an old way of life while also juggling/accommodating the traveller tourist.
At times it felt a little repeticious but then again it is about the ordinary amongst the extraordinary and it is very much about sheep...so I hope you like them because this is also their story.

Repetitive, disdainful and smug with moments of beauty and warmth. Needs an editor both for cutting repetitive swatches and for the rare but glaring grammatical error ("I" as a direct object? Really?)

I would never have chosen to read a book on shepherding on my own, it was chosen by someone in my bookclub, but I enjoyed it. I learned things about farming that I never would have thought about. I've literally walked through fields like in the book as a tourist and didn't really give it much thought but now I feel like I have little bit of understanding. It has also given me a very different perspective on subjects like farming, heritage, unleashed dogs, and land use.

A thoughtful and moving memoir about an ancient way of life. This book meant even more to me as I visited my cousin's sheep farm in the border of Wales while reading it and saw what Rebanks is talking happening in real life. The week I was there, the tups had just been put into the pasture to impregnate the ewes and I could only imagine what my cousin's lambing season will be like as she handles the births of over 200 lambs. The author weaves his own personal life and struggles together with the seasons on the farm. My only criticism is that the pace is jumpy as I believe he pulled in short essays from Cumbria Magazine from time to time which interrupts the flow of the story.

A gem of a book; the quiet writing transports you to the rural fell district of England into a sheep farmer's world. I didn't want to leave that place.

If your ideas of the rural Lake District were formed by Wordsworth, Beatrix Potter, or James Herriot it might be a shock to read this memoir of a fells shepherd who decries that type of tourist sentimentality which erases the agency of the local people. But when you learn the author went to Oxford and evidently studied a type of longue durée history, you start to suspect that the joke is on you as a reader... but with a sly little twinkle of the eye rather than any real malice.

For an American the closest emotional equivalent to the fells might be the wild west of a thousand cowboy movies. The Lake District is a national park in England, where tens of thousands of the more hardy city dwellers go every year for a taste of the sublime, like we Americans go to Yellowstone or Yosemite except with heritage-breed sheep instead of bison and farm B&Bs instead of RV parks.

Rebanks is at pains to point out that the "wildness" of his Cumbrian landscape is based on literally thousands of years of subtle but critical agricultural interventions: stone walls, gates, predator control, and perhaps most crucially drainage. Wild salmon still spawn up the tiny becks (creeks) that artery their way through the sheep pastures during spring lambing season! As a child of the Pacific Northwest I can't help but find this fact fascinating and beautiful, not least because our great salmon runs occur in the longest days of summer.

Even the fell sheep, which look and probably taste quite different from American sheep, are the result of thousands of years of canny breeding, assiduous herding, and occasional tectonic shifts of agricultural vogue or farmland catastrophe. A surprising yet crucial episode in the history of Herdwick sheep especially was that the writer Beatrix Potter became utterly enamored of the shepherding life and eventually bequeathed 4,000 acres of land to the National Trust on condition that they continue to support her beloved hill sheep. Now the Trust and the British Ministry of Agriculture largely subsidize the livelihoods of Lake District shepherds such as the author, who are rather unique in the British Isles for having outlasted the enclosure movement and still relying largely on common grazing.

Rebanks is deeply, almost painfully, sincere in trying to explain his sense of being tied to the history of his land and the shepherding way of life, but also of being both the object and the subject of books about the Lake District. The writing constantly evades a single conclusion and instead doubles its point of view through time, space, social class, and literature. Flashes of memory, humor, gore, and pride in his agricultural achievements are sometimes shocking but welcome because they illuminate the character of an author who is self-effacing to an extent we can barely understand in modern urban society.

Very unique, sincere and admirable memoir with furtively adoring B&W photographs of sheep and sheepdogs. Most highly recommended for anyone who is utterly enamored with a particular place above all others, no matter how hard the lifestyle it demands of those who belong there.