James Rebanks’s family have farmed Matterdale, in the Lake District, for as long as records have existed. “At least six centuries, and probably longer,” he says. He loathed school, where teachers would lecture the local children on how they could be “more” than “just” farmers, “But we were all set on being what we were, and had always been.” He smashed up school equipment; sat sullenly through lessons. “When I think of the Eighties, I just think of how shit school was.”
All Rebanks wanted to do was get back to the fields and tag along with his grandfather, who was from a generation where shepherds and farmers were respected. The stories he told made farming seem like hard work, but the best work.
Farming