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A review by troutgirl
The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District by James Rebanks
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.
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.