“Be careful,” says James Rebanks. “She’s only just had puppies, and she’s very protective of them. She might give you a nip.” The mother to whom a wide berth must be given is his sheepdog Floss, tucked in the corner of the living room in Rebanks’ farmhouse feeding her 10 pups. The dad, Tan, his other sheepdog, is studiously avoiding his huge new family. An absentee father after just four days. Call canine social services.
It’s 8.30am on an intermittently bright early spring day in the Lake District – “a bonny day”, Rebanks’ father-in-law, Ian, calls it later, when a sudden hailstorm subsides. Rebanks’ wife, Helen, is getting his two young daughters ready for school; three-year-old son Isaac is playing with his model sheep; Rebanks himself is preparing for his morning’s work: feeding his 450 sheep, most of which are pregnant with lambs. He’s taking me along for the ride. He is riding a quad bike; I’m in a small trailer filled with hay being pulled along behind. It is not a glamorous assignment.
Rebanks is no ordinary shepherd, even if that is exactly how he would like people to think of him. In 2012 he opened a Twitter account with the handle @herdyshepherd1 – he specialises in Herdwick sheep, the tough mountain breed synonymous with the Lake District. He now has more than 40,000 followers. The success of his Twitter feed led to a commission in 2013 to write an article for the Atlantic Monthly. That, in turn, led to interest from half a dozen publishers in a book; Penguin won the bidding war, and the book – The Shepherd’s Life – is already winning critical plaudits. It may well do for sheep what Helen Macdonald did for hawks.
The book is a tribute to the two men who farmed this land, near Penrith in the northern Lakes, before Rebanks – his father and grandfather. His father died of cancer a month ago – the programme from his memorial service is sitting on a shelf in the living room – and Rebanks wells up when he talks about him. “He read a proof copy of the book before he died and loved it,” says Rebanks. “He told my sister it made him look like a bloody legend.”
There is, though, a greater purpose to it than eulogising his father and grandfather. He is consciously using the book – and social media – to fly the flag for farming. In the middle of the 19th century, when accurate censuses were taken for the first time, more than 20% of the workforce in England were in agriculture. That proportion fell steadily, and by 2011 it had dipped under 1%. There are now fewer than 300,000 people in the UK engaged in agriculture and fishing [pdf download], and sheep farming is especially marginalised. Rebanks reckons a sheep farmer in the Lake District will earn about £8,500 on average, which is why shepherds have to do other jobs to support their farming.
Rebanks hopes his book will shine a light on this largely overlooked world. “There is something amazing going on, which has gone on for a very long time, but which has fallen completely out of view behind the romantic, touristy view of the Lake District,” he says, “and I am stubborn enough and foolish enough to want to stick my head up and say: ‘That’s bullshit. Look at this. Open your eyes, everybody.’”
As well as the beauty and complexity of sheep farming, he wants to show the dignity of the people who practise it. “My dad was the least academic person I’ve met in my whole life,” he says. “He could barely spell the names of his own breeds of sheep, but he knew everything about this farm. My dad was very intelligent; he just happened to channel his intelligence into things which aren’t particularly valued in our society.”
The son initially followed the father. Rebanks was a disaster at school – he hated it and left just before his 16th birthday with two GCSEs, in religious studies and woodwork. All he wanted to do was work on the family farm, and he couldn’t see the point of academic work. The school classified him as having learning difficulties. But once he had left school he discovered a love of literature, working through a cache of books left to the family by his maternal grandfather. He started helping his younger sisters with their homework, found it easy, embarked on A-levels, was encouraged to apply for Oxford, and ,ended up in his mid-20s studying history at Magdalen College.
He worked hard and got a first, but the experience only deepened his feeling that the rest of society despised the world that had produced him. “When I went to Oxford,” he says, “people would treat me differently to my dad in front of him.” He flirted briefly with getting a job away from Cumbria, and did an internship at a magazine, but in the end his Oxford education didn’t take him out of his community. If anything, it made him more determined to represent that community to the rest of society.
“I’m a farm lad who grew up admiring my grandfather and my father and the way they farmed here,” he explains, “and the book’s about realising that for most people, the Lake District isn’t about them. It’s about Wainwright and Wordsworth and walking and beautiful lakes. As I grew up, I found that annoying – that we’re invisible in our own landscape – and the book is a kickback against that.”
It has been shaped during the past couple of years, but was conceived more than a decade ago. “Some of the best bits in the book were originally written as poems,” he says. “I liked writing poetry, with no expectation it would ever sell.” His nascent writing career was then put on hold. “Life got in the way, because the only way I could keep this farm going was to do other work and balance my farming on the side. I wanted to convert a barn into the farmhouse we’re sitting in now, and if I’d just worked on the farm I would never have been able to afford it, so I had to give up on being a writer for 10 years and spend every minute working. I was depressed about that, and thought: ‘It was just a dream. It’s gone now.’ But my wife said: ‘It’ll be fine. By the time you’re 40, you’ll have a little bit more time and it will happen.’ I haven’t had any more time, but it has happened by the time I was 40.”
The work he did to finance the farming began as consultancy to cultural organisations – raising funds and assessing their impact – and mutated into working in sustainable tourism, principally for Unesco. Tourists visiting developing countries, he argues, prefer to see unspoiled landscapes and authentic ways of life, so it is in everyone’s interest to protect the legacy of the past. The consultancy work fits perfectly with his vision of the Lake District as a working farming community that tourists are welcome to visit if they don’t attempt to impose their own romanticised image on the harsher realities.
It’s time to leave the warmth of the farmhouse and head for those harsher realities. Rebanks has groups of 50 or so sheep on parcels of land – some owned, some rented – along the valley. In summer, they graze on common land up on the fells, but it is far too early in the year for that, and in any case, lambing is due and pregnant ewes have to be given special attention.
I see why in the first field we reach. A ewe refuses to come when Rebanks and his sheepdog round up the flock for feeding; she skulks by a tree instead, looking sorry for herself. She has a virus, has failed to respond to the penicillin jabs Rebanks has administered, and he is sure her lambs – she was due to have twins – will have died. If he doesn’t remove the dead lambs, she will die too, so we catch her, take her to a nearby pen, and, while I hold her tightly round the neck, he reaches in and pulls out the body of a wiry little black lamb, placing it on the concrete beside its mother. He can’t get the other lamb out, but when we return an hour or so later she has expelled it. She fusses over the two tiny corpses, unable to understand why they are failing to respond to her mothering.
I ask the inevitable townie question: does this scene distress him? “It makes me disappointed, not sad,” he says. “I’m disappointed because a year’s worth of effort – her effort and my effort – has gone to waste. We’re not particularly sentimental. I’ve done this for 30 years, and probably seen it 100 times.”
Losing them in this way is, he says, less distressing than losing them when they have been born healthy. “We don’t lose many, but there are odd ones you do lose and you’re gutted. It’s more than a commercial thing. It might seem strange to a non-farmer, but even if we only bred animals for meat – and we don’t [most of their money is made from selling breeding stock], but even if we did – you still think it’s your duty to look after them as well as you possibly can until the day they go. I get occasional people on Twitter saying, ‘Why would you care? You’re going to kill them anyway.’ As if your whole point of existing was to kill a thing. But we see it the other way round: our whole point is to keep it alive.”
Rebanks is proud of his farming heritage – his family have farmed hereabouts for 600 years – and admits to being obsessed by sheep. He says his friends here think nothing of his Oxford degree and that his book will fail to register with many of them – when I meet some of them later, they rib him mercilessly about his new authorial role. His status in the community comes from having bred prize-winning rams (or tups, as they are called in this part of the Lake District). “My status is set in the same way as my grandfather’s was,” he says.
The wider response has surprised him. A photograph of his sheepdog puppies that he posted on the morning we met registered more than 300,000 views within a couple of hours; his book has been selected as a Radio 4 book of the week; simultaneous editions are being published in the US and Canada. “What should be a niche book for a bunch of nutters in the Lake District appears to have caught everybody else’s imagination,” he says.
By lunchtime I am exhausted, limping after twisting my knee, and covered in smelly hay. At least, Rebanks tells me, I will have the carriage to myself when I head back to London. He is disappointed I don’t appear to share his obsessive interest in sheep, though even I, after a couple of hours, can tell a prize Herdwick (strong body, thick legs, well-defined head, proud deportment) from a run-of-the-mill one. When the photographer arrives, Rebanks rushes round moving sheep so the ones with straggly coats are not in shot. “You don’t think I’m bonkers, do you?” he says at one point. We try to reassure him.
After lunch (Herdwick burgers, of course) we spend the afternoon getting a huge caravan out of his sheep shed. The caravan – the family’s living quarters while he was converting the barn – is 12 feet wide. The gap through which it has to be extracted is 13 feet wide. It weighs a ton. Several tons, in fact. Moving it takes six men and a tractor two and half hours. Helen, Helen’s mother and little Isaac watch from a safe distance. I am blamed on several occasions for not pushing hard enough. For a brief moment I feel part of a community. My co-workers laugh when I suggest it would have been easier to leave the caravan where it was and move the shed. Eventually, it emerges with only minimal damage. My knee is now extremely painful, and I have broken my watch by accidentally bashing it on the side of the caravan, but we are rewarded with a cup of tea and Rebanks’ mother-in-law’s scones. The hail has stopped, the fells are bathed in milky sunshine, and Isaac is playing with his toy sheep. It is a bonny day. Tough and remote though this world is, I feel almost envious.
I also feel a bit guilty. Rebanks suspects I am going to make fun of his love of sheep and his way of life. I don’t really intend to do that, but did bring along a copy of Cold Comfort Farm to read on the train in case I could work in a few jokey lines – seeing something nasty in the caravan shed, that sort of thing? “When the modern media meet us, the temptation is to go for the joke and write about these crazy people who love sheep,” he says. “At its worst, it’s sheepshaggers-type innuendo; at its best it’s an urban middle-class dig at these strange rustics. But sheep farming is just another form of culture, no dafter than anything else, and as interesting as being into Picassos or Rembrandts or 1970s punk music. You don’t generally laugh at people for being interested in those things, and to me it’s just the same. I’m precious about it, and see it as being every bit as intellectually interesting and culturally significant, so I’m resistant to the joke.”
Above all, he appreciates the humility of sheep farmers. “I like the idea that people lead lives devoted to something bigger than themselves – the landscape, the flocks and their continuation. Somebody like my father wouldn’t have thought his life was particularly meaningful or significant in its own right, but he saw himself as part of a community and way of life and tradition. I deeply admire that in an age when most things are about the individual and about instant gratification and consumption.”
Even if the book does sensationally well, Rebanks is on his farm for keeps, and hopes Isaac – or his sisters – will one day graduate from miniature sheep pens to the real thing. “This is my life. I want no other,” he says emphatically at the end of the book. He has travelled widely for his consultancy work, but his heart has never really left his valley, and he is one author for whom success may mean he travels less, not more.
• The Shepherd’s Life is published on 2 April by Allen Lane at £16.99. Buy it for £13.59 at bookshop.theguardian.com
