The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

James Rebanks is a shepherd and farmer in the Lake District, a mountainous region in northwestern England celebrated for its natural beauty. His memoir, structured around the four seasons of the shepherding year, blends present-day farm work with memories of growing up in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s alongside his father and grandfather. It is also a defense of a way of life that has endured for centuries but is increasingly misunderstood.

The book opens with a formative memory from 1987. Thirteen-year-old Rebanks sat in a school assembly listening to a headmistress describe the Lake District as a landscape of poets and walkers, dismissing local farming families as lacking ambition. Rebanks realized that outsiders had claimed ownership of the landscape his family had worked for generations. He traces this view to the Romantic movement, which transformed the region from a place considered poor and ugly into a celebrated destination. Poet William Wordsworth proposed in 1810 that it should be "a sort of national property" (xx), yet Rebanks discovers that Wordsworth actually valued the shepherding community and believed its self-governing farmers represented a social ideal. Rebanks states his purpose: to tell the story of the Lake District from the perspective of the people who live and work there.

Born in 1974, Rebanks grew up centered on his grandfather, William Hugh Rebanks, a proud, independent farmer he idolized from his earliest memories. The family farmed in Matterdale, a small valley in the eastern Lake District, as part of a community of roughly 300 farming families. Rebanks describes three types of farmland essential to fell farming: inbye (meadow in the valley bottom), intake (enclosed lower slopes), and fells (unfenced common mountain grazing). The sheep are "hefted," meaning they learn their sense of belonging on the mountain from their mothers, an unbroken chain of knowledge stretching back thousands of years.

The Summer section follows a present-day fell gathering, in which Rebanks and neighboring farmers work with sheepdogs to bring flocks down from common land for clipping (shearing). He explains the communal system of grazing rights, divided into units called stints, that governs these ancient commons. The sheep are Herdwicks, a breed native to the Lake District whose genetics link them to Scandinavian sheep, supporting the local belief that they arrived with the Vikings. Interwoven with the gathering are memories of clipping days with his grandfather and father: the years-long struggle to learn the craft and the near-worthlessness of wool in the modern economy.

Rebanks traces his grandfather's life from a childhood condition through renting his first farm in the Eden Valley to buying the run-down Matterdale property in the 1960s. The grandfather supplemented farm income by dealing in livestock and adapting to whatever the market rewarded. He transmitted values through stories: work hard, pay your debts, help your neighbors, hold on to who you are. The farming community operated through an intricate web of relationships in which reputations spanned generations and integrity mattered more than short-term profit.

Hay-making structures Rebanks' childhood memories. He grew stronger each year while his grandfather weakened, until they reached a midpoint of equality around age 13, then the balance shifted. The catastrophic summer of 1986 brought relentless rain that ruined the entire crop. His grandmother anchored the domestic world, suspicious of new things and judging herself by her cooking and garden.

Secondary school was miserable. History lessons ignored local farming culture, and Rebanks left at 15 with minimal qualifications, swearing never to be trapped again. His grandfather had a stroke at 72 and was placed in a care home. Visiting him at 17, Rebanks recognized that the old man would die. His grandfather clutched his son's hand and said the name of his farm, then listened intently to every detail of the ongoing work. Rebanks understood that he was the thread connecting past to future.

The Autumn section opens with Rebanks winning a champion tup (breeding ram) prize in his grandfather's memory. But the reading of the will revealed the farm was in debt; land and the family bungalow had to be sold. Rebanks and his father, stripped of the grandfather's mediating presence, clashed repeatedly. The farm lost money, and a vicious argument over a tup became the spark for a broader explosion. Rebanks decided to leave.

He found his way to books, inheriting a collection from his maternal grandfather: Hemingway, Orwell, and Salinger. W. H. Hudson's A Shepherd's Life was a revelation, the first time he saw people like himself in great literature. At 21, he met Helen, a red-haired farmer's daughter who believed he could do anything and became the foundation of everything that followed. Encouraged after a pub quiz triumph revealed his intelligence, Rebanks enrolled in evening A-level classes (advanced secondary-school qualification courses) in Carlisle, earned straight As, and applied to Oxford. The interview went well because he was genuinely unbothered by the outcome and argued freely with the professors.

Oxford was disorienting. Helen joined him, baking cakes in their tiny flat to support them. During holidays and weekends, Rebanks returned constantly to the farm, checking sheep teeth at autumn sales while no one at the sales knew he attended Oxford.

The foot-and-mouth epidemic of 2001 devastated the farm. Pregnant ewes were loaded into wagons for slaughter, and the family's cattle were later shot in the fields. The farm fell eerily silent. The epidemic nearly reached the unfenced fells, where it would have destroyed the ancient hefted Herdwick flocks. After restocking, Jean Wilson, a formidable shepherdess, sold the family Herdwick draft ewes (older breeding ewes sold out of a flock) and lent them a tup. The first Herdwick lambs gave Rebanks the breeding ambition that shaped the rest of his farming life. Rebanks also honors the legacy of Beatrix Potter, who bought Lake District farms and upon her death in 1943 left 15 farms and 4,000 acres to the National Trust, stipulating that fell farms maintain flocks of pure Herdwick breed.

On a quiet Sunday morning during his final year at Oxford, Rebanks watched an old farmworker tend house martins and told Helen he had to go home. They returned with everything they owned in a transit van. Over the following years, Rebanks built a dual life, working as an advisor to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Centre while farming mornings, evenings, and weekends. He and Helen moved progressively closer to the farm until they converted a barn on the Matterdale land into their home.

The Winter and Spring sections describe the hardest months: feeding sheep in blizzards, wading through chest-deep drifts, and losing ewes to pneumonia. His father was diagnosed with cancer and spent Christmas at the farm, weakened and ashen, admiring a new stock tup from the window while Rebanks turned away to cry. During lambing, his father was in hospital receiving chemotherapy, and Rebanks worked alone, sending photos of newborn lambs to his father's phone.

His children joined the generational chain. His six-year-old daughter Bea insisted on lambing a sheep herself. Three generations showed sheep together at local shows, and his older daughter Molly held a winning sheep sired by the tup her grandfather had admired at Christmas. His father recovered and entered remission, though Rebanks noticed him step back from clipping one day for the first time ever.

The book closes with the ewes and lambs pushed up to the fells for summer. Rebanks lies by a mountain beck (a small stream), watching clouds race across the sky, his dogs beside him. The ewes call to their lambs climbing the crags. He breathes in the mountain air: "This is my life. I want for no other" (288).