The Shepherd's Life (2 page)

Later, I would read books and observe the other Lake District, and begin to understand it better. Until around 1750 no one from the outside world had paid this mountainous corner of northwest England much notice, or when they had, they found it to be poor, unproductive, primitive, harsh, ugly, and backwards. No one from outside thought it was beautiful or a place worth visiting. Then within a few decades all that had changed. Roads and railways were built, making it much easier to get here. The Romantic and Picturesque movements changed the way many people thought about mountains, lakes, and rugged landscapes. Our landscape suddenly became a major focus for writers and artists, particularly when the Napoleonic Wars stopped the early tourists from going to the Alps and forced them instead to discover the mountainous landscapes of Britain. From the start this obsession was (for visitors) a landscape of the imagination, an idealized landscape of the mind. It became a counterpoint to other things, such as the industrial revolution, which was born less than a hundred miles to the south, or a place that could be used to illustrate philosophies or ideologies. For many it was a place of escape, where the rugged landscape and nature would stimulate feelings and sentiments that other places could not. It exists for many other people to walk over, to look at, or climb or paint or write of, or simply dream about. It is a place many aspire to visit or live in. But above all I would learn that our landscape changed the rest of the world. It is where the idea of all of us having a direct sense of ownership (regardless of property rights) of some places or things because they are beautiful or stimulating or just special was first put into words. William Wordsworth proposed in 1810 that the Lake District should be “a sort of national property, in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy.” Arguments were formulated here that now shape conservation around the world. Every protected landscape on earth, every National Trust property, every national park, and every UNESCO World Heritage Site has a little bit of those words in its DNA.

Above all, I learned that we are not the only ones who love this place. It is for better and for worse a scenic playground for the rest of Britain, and for countless other people from around the world. I simply have to travel over the fell to Ullswater to see the cars streaming past on the roads, or the crowds milling around the shore of the lake, to see what this means. There are good outcomes and less good ones. Today sixteen million people a year come to the Lake District (an area with only forty-three thousand residents). They spend more than a billion pounds every year here. More than half the employment in the area is reliant upon tourism; many of the farms rely upon it for their income through running B and Bs or other businesses. But in some valleys 60 to 70 percent of the houses are second homes or holiday cottages; many local people cannot afford to live in their own communities. The locals speak begrudgingly of being outnumbered, and all of us know that we are in every way a minority in our own landscape. There are places where it doesn't feel like our landscape anymore, like the guests have taken over the guesthouse.

So that teacher's idea of the Lake District was created by an urbanized and increasingly industrialized society, over the past two hundred years. It was a dream of a place for a people disconnected from the land.

That dream was never for us, the people who work this land. We were already here doing what we do.

I wanted to tell that teacher that she had it all wrong … tell her that she didn't really know this place or its people at all. These thoughts took years to become clear, but in a rough childish form I think they were there from the start. I also knew in a crude way that if books define places, then writing books was important, and that we needed books by us and about us. But in that assembly in 1987 I was dumb and thirteen, so I just made a farting noise on my hand. Everyone laughed. She finished and left the stage, fuming.

 

4

If Wordsworth and friends invented or discovered the Lake District, that concept didn't touch our family until 1987, when I went home and started asking questions about what the teacher had said. From the start this other story felt wrong. How come the story of our landscape wasn't about us? It seemed to me an imposition, a classic case of what I would later learn historians call cultural imperialism.

What I didn't know was that Wordsworth believed that the community of shepherds and small farmers of the Lake District formed a political and social ideal of much wider significance and value. People here governed themselves, free of the aristocratic elites that dominated people's lives elsewhere, and in Wordsworth's eyes this provided a model for a good society. Wordsworth thought we mattered as a counterpoint to the commercial, urban, and increasingly industrial England emerging elsewhere. It was an idealistic view even then, but the poet's Lake District was a place peopled with its own culture and history. He believed that with the growing wider appreciation of this landscape came a great responsibility for visitors to really understand the local culture, or else tourism would be a bludgeoning force erasing much that made this place special. He also recognized, in these discarded lines from a draft of “Michael, a Pastoral Poem” (written in 1800) that a shepherd's view of this place was different and of interest in its own right:

No doubt if you in terms direct had ask'd

Whether he lov'd the mountains, true it is

That with blunt repetition of your words

He might have stared at you, and said that they

Were frightful to behold, but had you then

Discours'd with him in some particular sort

Of his own business, and the goings on

Of earth and sky, then truly had you seen

That in his thoughts were obscurities,

Wonders and admirations, things that wrought

Not less than a religion in his heart.

But for a long time I knew none of this, and blamed Wordsworth for the failure to see us here and for making this a place of romantic wandering for other people.

We are all influenced, directly or indirectly, whether we are aware of it or not, by ideas and attitudes to the environment from cultural sources. My idea of this landscape is not from books but from another source: it is an older idea, inherited from the people who came before me here.

What follows is partly an explanation of our work through the course of the year; partly a memoir of my growing up in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and the people around me at that time like my father and grandfather; and partly a retelling from a new perspective the history of the Lake District—from the perspective of the people who live there, and have done for hundreds of years.

It is the story of a family and a farm, but it also tells a wider story about the people who get forgotten in the modern world. It is about how we need to open our eyes and see the forgotten people who live in our midst, whose lives are often deeply traditional and rooted in the distant past.

 

 

SUMMER

I've lived in the country for a lot of my life but I've never felt that I belonged.… It is so strange.… I have never experienced such an atmosphere … as exists here.… I have to talk about it simply because it is so curious. It is the power which the children have to resist everybody and everything outside of the village.… The village children … are convinced that they have something which none of the newcomers can ever have, some kind of mysterious life which is so perfect that it is a waste of time to search for anything else.

DAPHNE ELLINGTON, TEACHER, QUOTED IN RONALD BLYTHE'S
AKENFIELD: PORTRAIT OF AN ENGLISH VILLAGE
(1969)

 

1

There is no beginning, and there is no end. The sun rises, and falls, each day, and the seasons come and go. The days, months, and years alternate through sunshine, rain, hail, wind, snow, and frost. The leaves fall each autumn and burst forth again each spring. The earth spins through the vastness of space. The grass comes and goes with the warmth of the sun. The farms and the flocks endure, bigger than the life of a single person. We are born, live our working lives, and die, passing like the oak leaves that blow across our land in the winter. We are each tiny parts of something enduring, something that feels solid, real, and true. Our farming way of life has roots deeper than five thousand years into the soil of this landscape.

 

2

I was born in late July 1974, into a world that centered on an old man and his two farms. He was a proud farmer, called William Hugh Rebanks, Hughie to his mates. “Granddad” to me. He had a rough, whiskery face when you kissed him good night. He smelled of sheep and cattle, and had only one yellow tooth, but he could clean the meat off a lamb chop with it like a jackal.

He had three children: two daughters, who had married good farmers, and my father. Dad was the youngest, the one who was to carry on his farm. I was his youngest grandson but the only one with his name. From my first memories until his dying day, I thought the sun shone out of his backside. Even as a small child I could see that he was the king of his own world, like a biblical patriarch. He doffed his cap to no man. No one told him what to do. He lived a modest life but was proud and free and independent, with a presence that said he belonged in this place in the world. My first memories are of him, and knowing I wanted to be just like him someday.

We live and work our small hill farm in the far northwest of England, in the Lake District. We farm in a valley called Matterdale, between the first two rounded fells that emerge on your left as you travel west on the main road from Penrith. From the summit of the fell behind our house you can see north across the silver glimmering of the distant Solway Estuary to Scotland. There is a stolen moment each early summer when I climb that fell and sit with my sheepdogs and have half an hour to take the world in. To the east you can see the backbone of England, the Pennines, with the good farming land of the Eden Valley opening up below. I smile at the thought that the entire history of our family has played out in the fields and villages stretching away beneath that fell, between Lake District and Pennines, for at least six centuries, and probably longer. We shaped this landscape, and we were shaped by it in turn. My people lived, worked, and died down there for countless generations. It is what it is because of them and people like them.

It is, above all, a peopled landscape. Every acre of it has been defined by the actions of men and women over the past ten thousand years. Even the mountains were mined and quarried, and the seemingly wild woodland behind us was once intensively harvested and coppiced. Almost everyone I am related to and care about lives within sight of that fell. When we call it our landscape, we mean it as a physical and intellectual reality. There is nothing chosen about it. This landscape is our home and we rarely stray long from it, or endure anywhere else for long before returning. This may seem like a lack of imagination or adventure, but I don't care. I love this place; for me it is the beginning and the end of everything, and everywhere else feels like nowhere.

From that fell I look out over a place crafted by largely forgotten working people. It is a unique man-made place. A landscape divided and defined by fields, walls, hedges, dykes, roads, becks, drains, barns, quarries, woods, and lanes. I can see our fields and a hundred jobs that I should be doing instead of idling up the fell. I see sheep climbing a wall into a hay meadow down below, and I know I have to stop messing about, daydreaming like a bloody poet or day-tripper, and get some work done. To the west I see the high fells of the Lake District, often covered for half the year in snow, and from the highest of those you can see the Irish Sea. To the south the fells block my view, but somewhere beyond them is the rest of England. The Lake District is relatively small, being only about eight hundred square miles. So if you looked down on our land from outer space you would see we are on the eastern edge of a small cluster of mountain valleys. Our valley is small, even by the standards of the Lake District, a basin of enclosed land and meadows surrounded by fells, scattered with little farmsteads. I can drive through it from one end to the other in five minutes. I look across to my neighbours on the other side of the valley a mile away and can hear them gathering their sheep on the fell sides. The valley where we live and farm stretches beneath me like an old man's upturned cupped hands.

There is something about this landscape that people love. It would, in summer, seem to most people around the world to be exceptionally green and lush. It is a pastoral landscape and temperate, a place of heavy rainfall and warm summers, an excellent place, in short, for growing grass in the summer. As writers have long noted, it is an intimate landscape, big enough to fill the eyes, but small enough to feel intimate and knowable. Whitewashed farmhouses hug the fell sides just beneath the ancient common land of the fells. Other farmsteads dot the valley floor on the higher ground, or riggs, that rise from the rushes of the sodden valley-bottom land, including the one where my grandfather lived. We are one of maybe three hundred farming families who sustain this landscape and its ancient way of life.