![]() He communicates the intimate understanding his family and neighbors have of their land - “we see a thousand shades of green, like the Inuit see different kinds of snow” - and the exhausting, unglamorous tasks that define daily farm life: mending walls, chopping logs, treating lame sheep, worming lambs, moving flocks between fields. Rebanks brings both to his account of shepherding. ![]() In “The Shepherd’s Life,” he reclaims this place for the local farmers who work there, wresting a difficult living from the land - quietly taming this countryside over the centuries, clearing forests and creating the hedges, walls, roads, barns and lanes that define this world.Įxpertise - and explanations of the craft and clockwork behind the ticktock of a profession - is hugely compelling when described with ardor and élan, and Mr. Rebanks writes about the Lake District known to many readers and tourists through the work of Wordsworth and other artists as “a landscape of the imagination,” representing a pastoral ideal of beauty and a refuge from the industrialized world. Rebanks writes, dates back even further - as much as 5,000 years - and has somehow survived here, he says, because of its “historic poverty, relative isolation, and because it was protected from change by the early conservation movement.” This shared history, he observes, has given the 300 or so farming families who live there the bone-deep knowledge that “we are each tiny parts of something enduring, something that feels solid, real, and true.” And it’s a book about a farming family whose history has played out in the fields, hills and villages between the Lake District and the Pennines for at least six centuries. ![]() It’s a book about a way of life essentially unchanged for centuries in an era that’s all about change and flux. James Rebanks’s captivating new book about his family’s small sheep farm in England is also a book about continuity and roots and a sense of belonging in an age that’s increasingly about mobility and self-invention. ![]()
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