Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer's Reviews > English Pastoral: An Inheritance

Our land is like a poem, in a patchwork landscape of other poems, written by hundreds of people, both those here now and the many hundreds that came before us, with each generation adding new layers of meaning and experience. And the poem, if you can read it, tells a complex truth. It has both moments of great beauty and of heartbreak. It tells of human triumph and failings, of what is good in people and what is flawed; and what we need, and how in our greed we can destroy precious things. It tells of what stays the same, and what changes; and of honest hard-working folk, clinging on over countless generations, to avoid being swept away by the giant waves of a storm as the world changes. It is also the story of those who lost their grip and were swept away from the land, but who still care, and are now trying to find their way home.

Winner of the 2021 Wainwright Prize for Writing for UK Nature Writing – the book was described by the prize as “the story of an inheritance. It tells of how rural landscapes around the world have been brought close to collapse, and the age-old rhythms of work, weather, community and wild things are being lost. This is a book about what it means to have love and pride in a place, and how, against all the odds, it may still be possible to build a new pastoral: not a utopia, but somewhere for us all.”

The author was already well known for his previous autobiographical book “A Shepherd’s Life” – a book which has generally very favorable reviews on Goodreads – although I note with interest that a number of reviews criticise the book for its anti-intellectual inverted snobbery.

This book is effectively a tale of two family farms – one rented by his late Father in the Eden Valley (between the Pennines and the Lake District) and where the author grew up, and one owned by his grandfather in the Lake District which the author now farms.

The book is in three parts:

Nostalgia (which broadly is the author’s reflections on his Grandfather’s more traditional approach to farming around 40 years ago in an already changing era – his Grandfather a late resister to the changes around him)

Progress (which mainly sets out the way in which farming changed rapidly – firstly on his Father’s farm and then in the farming the author inherited with: machinery replacing hands on manual labour, artificial fertilisers replacing manure, larger fields; silage replacing traditional feeds; bigger barns: modified crops and livestock; as well as economic pressures from global competition, supermarkets squeezing down prices, banks tightening the screws – and the resulting impact on farms and on the nature they used to support)

Utopia (which explores the author’s attempt to bring back some traditional ways to his farm and in particular to support diverse wildlife)

Each of the chapters is named slightly ironically: the first chapter does not hide some of the brutal realities and precariousness of his Grandfather’s approach; the second commendably tries to be partly even handed about the change (recognising what it has done to enable more people to be fed alongside concentrating on all that has been lost) and the third is far from a utopia but a very deliberate compromise the author has made which he knows will disappoint both “die hard production focused farmers” and “extreme wilderness-loving ecologists”

The main thrust I think of the author’s arguments is captured in this compromise. At its worse this seems to be rather resentful of both sides: he seems to share equal dislike for the world of neo-liberal free-trade and globalised economics (economists in particular seem to be his rather odd bête noire) and for left-wing extremists (George Monbiot is not named in the book but the two seem to have a history of opposition). But more commonly he argues against entrenched positions (that farmers are either all bad or all good) and bifurcation (for example colleges which turn out either economics focused MBA farmers or nature loving ecologists but without ever bringing the two into dialogue).

Although seemingly close to Isabella Tree (and her “rewilding” at Knepp) his focus is not on rewilding (which in its fullest sense he sees as firstly impractical on any scale, and secondly as leading to either even more intensive and damaging farming on the land left for growing food or to the import of food and the exporting of the environmental damage) but on altering the practices of farms in lots of ways which improve their impact and on altering people’s attitudes to the quality, convenience and price of what they eat. He argues that any natural system has an alpha predator and that enlightened man has the potential to be the best such alpha.

A few other comments:

I must admit I struggled with the first part of the book and the description of apparently traditional and generally benevolent farming from around 40 years ago. My own recollection of farming from that time was of widespread use of pesticides, polluting stubble burning (with the added “bonus” of accidental destruction of pesty field boundaries), destruction of hedgerows, the deliberate concealment or obstruction of rights of way – and that things are much better in almost every sense since - but I think industrial farming hit East Anglia a long time before the author’s corner of the lakes.

Perhaps related to this the solutions the book puts forward does seem to focus on a particular type of farm – highland, small scale which I cannot relate to many farms I know – and I suspect the upcoming book from the head of Conservation on the Holkham estate will be of much greater interest to me (see for example this New Yorker article https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...)

There are some parts I was not so keen on – I can see the anti-snobbery point that was criticised in the earlier book : the author for example seems to believe that people deep down hate working in offices and living in Cities (doing only from economic necessity) - which is I think simply not true. And perhaps this gets to a wider issue which is endemic in so much nature writing of this type – any book which harks back to tradition/past generations/trying to resist change tends to have an (at least) implicit diversity issue (of race, descent, class, location), and of course the idea of native-born and native adapted animals makes its inevitable appearance. There is also a rather bizarre part where anti drink driving laws are blamed for their adverse effect on social solidarity in the country.

But overall this is an enjoyable and thought provoking book – some of the writing is really very strong and literary with some great use of description and similes and the book is a lot more nuanced that I had expected: so that overall this was a book which was more poetical and less polemical than I had expected.