Recently I read an interesting article by Mark Cocker about the "new nature writing". In it he refers to Kathleen Jamie's sardonic comment about the Lone Enraptured Male: "What’s that coming over the hill? A white, middle-class Englishman! A Lone Enraptured Male! From Cambridge! Here to boldly go, “discovering”, then quelling our harsh and lovely and sometimes difficult land with his civilised lyrical words."

James Rebanks is not a Lone Enraptured Male, looking at a landscape through cultured metropolitan eyes. His family has herded sheep in the Lake District for centuries, and although his life has taken a slightly different turn from his ancestors' (no spoilers) he is still doing it. It's quite humbling to see this iconic, much-visited place through the eyes of someone who is part of it and who can say that his family has formed the landscape.

When people in positions of authority spoke about our home, it felt as if they valued everything in it except the things we valued, that producing food was a pathetic cheap thing.

I have always liked the feeling of carrying on something bigger than me, something that stretches back through other hands and other eyes into the depths of time. ... Perhaps, in a hundred years' time, no-one will care that I owned the sheep that grazed part of these mountains. They won't know my name. But that doesn't matter. If they stand on that fell and do the things we do, they will owe me a tiny unspoken debt for once keeping part of it going, just as I owe all those that came before a debt for getting it this far.