18 The Times Magazineames 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 – the orchards and dry-stone
walls; the hay meadows and wheat fields; the
sheep, up on the fells – is what we think of
when we think of England being beautiful.
When we say “countryside” we mean “the
countryside that farming made”. But Rebanks’s
grandfather, it turned out, was the last
generation to be proud of being a farmer.
Rebanks’s father was of the next, postwar
generation, when farming underwent an
unhappy revolution. As it became more
and more industrialised, with huge fields,
monocrops, pesticides and artificial fertilisers,
public opinion started to turn against farmers.
“You read The Guardian and they’re
like, ‘Farmers are nasty. They’re the ones
killing the wildlife, poisoning the rivers with
agricultural run-off,’ ” Rebanks, 46, sighs.
“ ‘They’re trashing the country.’ Farmers are
in danger of becoming public enemy No 1.”
When the careers advisers at school put
Rebanks’s statistics into their computer, the
job they suggested for him was zookeeper.
Farming, incredibly, wasn’t an official option.
At this time, his father’s grim catchphrase
was “Farming is f***ed”. By the beginning of
the Nineties, as Rebanks heard this phrase
over and over, there were two things that
seemed very obvious to him: that the kind
of small-scale farming his family did would
continue to become less profitable, and
therefore more miserable, and that he would,
when the time came, nonetheless carry on this
failing business because that’s just who he was.
His story, and that of farming in modern
Britain, were one and the same. It’s not
working. It will carry on.I am on a quad bike at Rebanks’s farm on a
rainy day in July. Despite the rain, Matterdale
is undeniably, breathtakingly beautiful: lysergic
green hills rolling and dipping; bleak fells
above; lush rivers below.
Behind me, four sheepdogs sit on the backof the quad bike, surveying a flock of
Herdwick sheep with cold, bright blue eyes. In
front of me, James Rebanks is driving, giving
me a tour of the family farm he has now run
for the best part of two decades.
I have met genuinely content, happy people
living lives that are perfect for them before- I’ve been fishing with Bob Mortimer; I’ve
drunk champagne with a giggly Jilly Cooper
in her exquisite Cotswolds house as she
stroked an adorable greyhound; I’ve been
in a gay club with Lady Gaga where she
danced to her own songs in a £15,
Alexander McQueen cape, bra and pants – but
I have never met anyone so roaringly, joyously
in context and content as James Rebanks,
belting around his farm in the rain. An
ebullient, well-read bear of a man, he’s
just hosted a farmhouse lunch with me, his
wife, Helen, his mother-in-law and his four
children – one of them joining us around the
table only after lugging a gigantic bag of feed
out of the car and giving it to the pigs. They’re
a close, merry bunch in one of the most
beautiful places on Earth – you can see why
there have been various offers from television
to base a TV show on their story.
Still digesting some excellent sausages, I am
now getting the guided tour from Rebanks of
what he loves most about his farm, as we
bomb down tracks and across streams. So far,
his list is easily heading towards 40 items.
“Oystercatchers!” he says, pointing at the
flash of black, white and traffic-cone-orange
beak, flying above the river. “Yorkshire fog!”
he continues, gesturing to a hazy field of
grasses with seedheads so delicate they look,
en masse, like mist.
“MOLES!”
This as we speed past a line of molehills,
like Christmas puddings in the grass.
“You know, I wrote a piece a while back
that I’m a bit embarrassed about now,” he
says, turning round and beaming, even though
the rain is lashing his face. “Back then, I was
pro killing moles – most farmers are – and
now, I don’t think I want to kill moles! I didn’t
know then that moles do an incredible job
of aerating compacted soils. They spread
fungi spores on their hair right through the
fields, and build up the mycorrhizal networks
that we need to support healthy soil. Mind
you, back then, I didn’t even know how
photosynthesis works. And I’m a farmer!
I grow grass! Ninety per cent of what I do
depends on photosynthesis.”
He laughs in disbelief, and guns the quad
bike towards a freshly dug lake.
“We had egrets in there last week. They’ve
never been seen before in this valley! You
think these things will take years but life turns
up, almost instantly, if you make the right
place for it.”
He seems newly delighted in the land that
he has known since he was a boy. But that’s
because he has, for two decades now, tended
it on something of a mission. The story of
Rebanks and his family is, yes, the story ofJ
Caitlin, James Rebanks
and his son on the farmWITH THANKS TO LOWTHWAITEULLSWATER.COM, WHERE DOUBLE ROOMS START AT £