As 2021 draws to an end, I review four great books about Lakeland or walking: James Rebanks portrays three generations on a Cumbrian fell farm and finds the key to a sustainable future in the teachings of his grandfather. Chris Townsend walks Scotland’s spine. John Bainbridge takes us on furtive forays into Forbidden Britain; and Beth Pipe teams up with Karen Guttridge to blaze a new Lakeland trail, connecting the district’s distilleries..

• English Pastoral by James Rebanks
• Along the Divide by Chris Townsend
• The Compleat Trespasser by John Bainbridge
• Gin, Cake and Rucksacks by Beth Pipe and Karen Guttridge

Change doesn’t always come from those in power. Sometimes it happens quietly from the ground up as ordinary men and women find the courage of their convictions.

English Pastoral is a remarkable book: a work of rare lyrical beauty and an argument of astonishing power. Moreover, it is acutely in tune with the zeitgeist: as the world grows impatient with the hollow greenwash slogans of politicians, here is a simple honest testament, a voice of integrity, and an insight of major environmental significance.

It is a book written by a Cumbrian fell farmer, renouncing the ecologically damaging efficiencies of industrial agriculture (efficiencies he once embraced), in favour of a sustainable model rooted in the past. But it is not a declamatory manifesto or dry scientific treatise. Instead, it is an engaging human-interest story spanning three generations of a family on a small farm in Matterdale.

Woven from threads of reminiscence, it begins as the author recollects how his grandfather taught him to farm. His grandfather had a strong connection with the earth, born perhaps of walking behind a horse-drawn plough, feeling every trough and stone as the blade cut into the soil. He never lost that understanding, even when he reluctantly replaced the horse with a tractor. Rebanks remembers a day his grandfather jumped down from the tractor to rescue four curlew’s eggs from the path of the plough, diligently restoring them once the furrow had been cut, and watching from the gate to check that the bird returned.

It was a relationship with the natural world that many of his generation possessed. Yet, two decades later, the face of farming had changed drastically. Tractors were three-times the size, combine harvesters were ivory towers of technology, driven by contractors in air-conditioned cabs with music blaring. Cows were no longer grazed on pasture but packed into barns to be fed silage and commercially produced foodstuffs. That connection with nature had been severed, and the curlews (like many other species) were in decline.

The centuries-old practice of small mixed rotational farming was jettisoned in the name of science. You could farm industrially, stripping out hedges, ploughing right up to the edges, and sowing the same crop in the same field year after year, replenishing nutrients through the magical application of chemical fertilisers. It seemed like progress, and yet, there were worrying signs that it might be the wrong road. 

When Henry died, a unexpected discovery sent a mini shockwave through the valley. Henry had been the last of the old guard, stubbornly refusing to modernise, eschewing chemicals in favour of manure, making hay instead of silage, mowing late. He was well liked, but perceived as a relic, marooned in the past. When his land was put up for sale, an analyst reported that the soil was the best he’d ever tested.

To glimpse where this industrial highway might lead, Rebanks visits the Midwest. Here the tone turns chilling bleak. It is worth pausing to pay tribute to the transportive quality of the writing. Rebanks has a poetic way with words. The way he describes the landscape is painterly. We can almost smell the grass of the Matterdale meadows and, equally, taste the dust of the American near-desert, where much of the top soil has blown away and the vast acres of crop are choked with weeds, grown resistant to the pesticides. Much of the work is automated, administered by drones, while farming communities languish, their incomes gone, their buildings dilapidated, their windows dressed with confederate flags and Trump stickers—testimony to a collective refusal to face facts, placing faith instead in charlatans with ready-made scapegoats.

Back home in Matterdale, Rebanks changes course. He brings in ecologists and begins restoring biodiversity: planting trees, laying hedges, re-wiggling rivers, fencing off boggy areas to create wetland habitats, cultivating hay meadows and resowing indigenous wildflowers. And the rewards come quickly. Curlews return. Barn owls appear. 

He is not alone. Many of his neighbours are following suit. The benefits are not financial, but the work is vital. Unhelpfully, the government pursues destructive trade deals with nations still wedded to the industrial model. Some activists demonise stock farming, advocating a vegan future, where swathes of land are designated as wilderness while the rest is given over to intensive crop production. But those intensive methods are the very ones that have been destroying the soil. They are unsustainable.

Rebanks doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but he is busy doing what his grandfather did—making sure that what happens within the boundaries of his own farm is done right. He humbly suggests that in a world of noise, living quietly might actually be a virtue. By farming in harmony with nature, he shows that agriculture and wilderness can co-exist. Change doesn’t always come from those in power. Sometimes it happens quietly from the ground up as ordinary men and women find the courage of their convictions.

I grew up in a village of small mixed rotational farms; several surround the place where I live today. Thanks to English Pastoral, I no longer view them as a link with the past, but a signpost to the future.

Follow James on Twitter @herdyshepherd1

Next: Along the Divide by Chris Townsend