A mostly enjoyable portrait of sheep-farming life, interspersed with vignettes of autobiography. On the whole, a good read about a way of life most people don't see, however there's just a wisp of a 'holier than thou' attitude throughout. It gets a bit repetitive in places, and frustrating -- on one page Rebanks recalls how his grandfather turns his back and walks away from tourists who stop to see him mending a stone wall, then pages later, wistfully ponders whether any of the tourists who walk & drive down the lanes today know or care who built these walls. Well, you can't have it both ways -- he seems to want to simultaneously draw people in to admire this way of life, yet hold them at arms' length. It's a club we can look at in admiration, but never join, as you must have been brought up there and been doing the same thing for generation after generation....God forbid you'd want to go hike up a mountain for enjoyment, that makes you someone to be looked down upon.

He hits the reader over the head with 'we've done things the same way & always will' message a bit too hard as well -- surely 'because we've always done it that way' is not a great reason to keep doing something the same way. Yes, he'll always have to walk his sheep to the fell, and the Herwick breed will always be best-suited to the hills of his region, a dog will always manage some tasks better than a 4x4, but he over-emphasises this point of resisting change a bit too much. Farming has to change with the times, to at least some degree, and often the best farmers are the ones who do -- try new strategies, technology, machinery... and he'd never have any of the fame he does without twitter, which I wish he'd put a bit more of in the book, how he started using it, how his followers on twitter increased, what he got out of communicating with people that way.

He's at his best when describing the intricacies of sheep farming. It's a field that seems mundane and all sheep the same from the outside, but once he begins to unravel the details of what it means to choose a tup, or why certain ewes are better than others, and the commitment to certain characteristics in a flock-- it all becomes much more intriguing. A bit like the Tour de France - glance at it on TV and it seems boring - a huge group of men cycling hundreds of miles, much the same every day, but once you slow down to learn about the teams, the strategies, the different players - mountain specialists, sprinters, domestiques, time triaillists and how they work together and compete throughout a long race..... it all becomes more interesting.