A sheep that has been hefted has “become accustomed and attached to an area of upland pasture,” to quote from the definition near the start of this book, but that definition clearly applies, in a way, to James Rebanks as well. The Lake District is his home and his family’s home; he grew up watching his grandfather and father raise sheep on a farm by the fells, and now he raises sheep on that same farm (and tweets about it). In The Shepherd’s Life, Rebanks takes us through the seasons from a shepherd’s perspective, but this isn’t just about his life now: he also writes about how he ended up where he did, from leaving school at fifteen to attending Oxford to farming and working as an advisor to the UNESCO World Heritage Centre.
At the start of the book, I had a hard time getting into it: it felt like the prose didn’t always flow, and I sometimes had a hard time picturing some of the minutiae of shepherding, even though Rebanks describes them in some detail (e.g. exactly how you hold a sheep when you’re clipping it). But as the book continued, I started to enjoy it more. I liked the black-and-white photos of sheep and sheepdogs and fields, and I liked the descriptions of the landscape of the farm and the fells in different seasons—the hay meadows in summer, the fields at lambing time, and passages like this, from “Autumn”:
Sunlight lay like smoke in the hollows, resting, before it made the long afternoon trek up the fell sides. The lichened stones shone silver in the thinning light. The hedges flecked with the blood red spots of rosehips. The chimneys of the farmhouses marked again by the first whispers of wood smoke. (153)
Not that life on a working farm is all loveliness. There is so much uncertainty and chance for disaster—the part of the book where Rebanks describes the foot-and-mouth-disease epidemic in 2001 nearly made me cry.
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