The Shepherd’s Life: A Tale of the Lake District by James Rebanks (Allen Lane £16.99) When, in 2002, my family and I moved from busy North London to bucolic north Herefordshire, we found that our new neighbours were, overwhelmingly, sheep. I didn’t want to be one of those townies who moves to the country but remains ignorant of rural ways, so I made sporadic efforts to get to know them, or at least, to get to understand life on a sheep farm. When my children were small, I asked the obliging farmer whose land abuts our garden if they could watch his ewes lambing. And I still often tell him that I’d like to spend some time alongside him, to see how his days unfold.This book is an exquisite account of what farming life is really likeThe stark prose brilliantly evokes the horror of the foot-and-mouth of 2001Rebanks studied for a degree at Oxford before returning to his rural roots
Alas, most of them have no understanding of the proud, beleaguered culture he comes from, just like the secondary school teachers who told him that farming on the _ fells was a dead-end business, a waste of brainpower.