English Pastoral: An Inheritance
JAMES REBANKS
(ALLEN LANE, 304 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • Tel 020 7799 4064

English Pastoral is a home-grown Georgics for the twenty-first century. James Rebanks, author of best-selling The Shepherd’s Life, is a Lake District farmer who reads and quotes Virgil and espouses the same mix of poetry and blunt practicality. His is the story of an inheritance that is also ours: an agricultural tradition that is on the verge of collapse, but that is, Rebanks passionately believes, still retrievable. His own love affair with small farming began at his grandfather’s back, watching the gulls settle behind the plough, gradually and almost unconsciously learning to ­forsake TV for the endless cycle of mostly thankless jobs that make up a working life that might once have been set out in a Shepheardes Calendar but that now seems more of an industrial rota. The problem with “pastoral” is that it has come to mean not just sheep-herding, but an idealised realm better suited to poetry than to real life. The cover of this book – a woodcut curlew, a bird that has come to stand in books like this for vanishing nature – might suggest another gently elegiac account of dwindling species and precarious old ways. But it’s much tougher than that.