English Pastoral: An Inheritance - The Sunday Times bestseller from the author of The Shepherd's Life

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For Rebanks, farming and writing have proved complementary: while working long hours on the land, he has produced a book in a pastoral tradition that runs from Virgil to Wendell Berry. The story he tells is one of hard work, little money and narrow horizons, reminiscent of Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie but without the adolescent sex and occasional violence.

A lament for lost traditions, a celebration of a way of living and a reminder that nature is 'finite and breakable. This deeply engrained concept of stewardship runs like a vein of rock through these upland farming families. Following the recent Agriculture Bill it seems that farmers will be paid only if they enhance the environment.English Pastoral may be the most passionate ecological corrective since Rachel Carson's Silent Spring -- Caroline Fraser ― New York Review of Books --This text refers to the hardcover edition. Now around one in five people there is hungry – still far too many, but an improvement on the not-so-distant past. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. But he has put his environmental ideals into practice by planting 12,000 trees, rerouting the river across his land to create wetland areas, dispensing with pesticides, and sacrificing arable land to encourage wildlife. Many of these improvements are community-inspired, reaching out beyond the traditional core farming families.

While the title of the book, English pastoral, evokes an expectation of a bucolic lifestyle, the reality is somewhat different as the author makes clear. The power of English Pastoral lies not just in the passion and eloquence of its prose or the clarity of its argument.Removing sheep from these fells in favour of trees, or reducing headage numbers making the business of shepherding unviable, would set in motion a chain of consequences which would alter both the landscapes and the communities. If it hadn’t been for high-tech agriculture, there would have been less food, more hunger and possibly an even greater loss of pristine ecosystems, as food production sought to keep pace with population growth. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. They switched to more “efficient” breeds of sheep, stopped growing turnips and barley, sprayed pesticide to clear their pastures of thistles, and no longer laid hedges by hand. We should bear this in mind when Rebanks describes the last forty years of farming as ‘a radical and ill-thought-through experiment’.