Dan Snow's History Hit - One Family, 600 Years of Farming in England's Lake District

Episode Date: November 12, 2020

James Rebanks joined me on the podcast to tell the history of his family farm in the Lake District hills. This was part of an ancient agricultural landscape: a patchwork of crops and meadows, of pastures grazed with livestock, and hedgerows teeming with wildlife. We talk about how it has transformed over time.If you want to get Christmas gifts for your history loving family, then we've got all sorts at historyhit.com/shop. King Tut face coverings, Lord Nelson hoodies, History Hit TV gift subscriptions... we've got it all. We're running a competition where you could win a £100 voucher to spend in the shop. To enter, you'll need to take a quiz about 20 facts from recent podcast episodes. Just go to historyhit.com/quiz to give it a go. Competition ends at midnight on Monday 16th November. Terms and conditions apply.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everyone, welcome to Downstone's History. I've got an absolutely glorious podcast for you today, an interview with an inspiring man, an interview from the Lake District, that glorious, well, district of England full of lakes, but so much more, full of hills, frosty moorland, glittering, glittering lakes, picturesque towns, old Roman forts high on craggy landscapes. It is in the northwest corner of England and it is a thing of absolute beauty. It's where Beatrix Potter wrote all her Peter Rabbit books, for starters. Lots of other things to recommend it as well. And a man who knows the area really honestly better than most people alive is today's

guest, James Rebanks. He's the number one best-selling author of The Shepherd's Life, and he's written a book called English Pastoral Inheritance about his family, the land, love and loss, over three generations of a Lake District farm, but his family stretches back farming that terrain for hundreds and hundreds of years. One more very exciting bit of housekeeping. It's time we start thinking about Christmas gifts that does not involve giving it to a monopolistic and brutal and unlikely to pay any tax.

Yes, you can buy Christmas gifts right here at History Hit for your history-loving family. Though it's hard to buy for people. We've got all sorts. Historyhit.com slash shop. We've got the famous King Tut face covering. We've got the Lord Nelson hoodie. We've got the History Hit TV gift subscriptions.

You can give someone a digital present. There's no carbon footprint on this present. You just give them this for Thanksgiving, for Christmas, whatever. You're doing them a favour, obviously, because they're going to get a history hit. And right now on this podcast, we are running a competition where you could win a £100 voucher. This was the source of some controversy in the office, because £100 is a lot of money. £100. To enter, though, we're not making it easy, you need to take a quiz about 20 facts from recent podcast episodes. Yes, you've got to be a true listener.

The winner gets £100 to spend in the shop. That will basically do your Christmas shopping, frankly. Kind of outer family and acquaintances. That'll nail it. Go to history.com slash quiz to give it a go. The competition ends on the 15th of November at midnight Zulu, midnight Zulu time, GMT, universal time. Go to historyhit.com slash quiz. It's going to be awesome. In the meantime, here's James Rubanks. Enjoy. Hi, James. Thank you very much for coming

on the podcast. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me. Yeah, it's a pleasure. Tell me, where in the country are you at the moment? So I'm just in Matterdale. So I'm just looking over the top of the computer here to the little valley of Matterdale next to Allswater in the Lake District in the north. And from the fell behind us, you look across the Solway to Scotland. Have you got any frost on the ground yet this morning? There's snow on the fells for the first day this morning. So where my sheep live on the mountains, there's about three inches of snow this morning. And how long have your family been farming that ground? They've been on this particular farm since the 1960s.

But when we looked into our sort of genealogy and where we'd been and how far we'd travelled, we discovered that we'd been nowhere the last 600 years. So we're in the next parish, literally about two minutes drive away in 1420, I think is the first mention of us. But it was quite funny because we thought there must be paperwork before that. But actually it's the paperwork that runs out, not the rebanks is.

There's no paperwork older than 1420. And you learnt your trade, you're a sheep farmer. You learnt that your granddad was an important man by the sounds of it. Tell me about him. I now realise, very lucky to grow up on a sort of old-fashioned family farm my grandfather was probably a bit like everybody imagines a farmer was sort of 50 or 60 years ago he spent a lot of time leaning over gates and chewing bits of straw and he had this fantastic sort of patchwork farm and all of his interests all of his loves all of his passions seem to revolve around the

things that happened on his land and i didn't know it then but i was sort of born into the end of what we now know as mixed rotational farming so this is a sort of patchwork landscape divided up by hedgerows and walls there's still lots of farm workers knocking about this might interest you dan quite a lot of the farm workers at that time were German POWs who'd never gone home. Or at least we said they were German POWs and they tended to live in the houses. I think I've since worked it out. I don't think they were German. I think they were from some of the Baltic states. And I think they may have been recruited into bits of the German army whereby you couldn't go back to Eastern Europe.

So there was cowmen called Walter and things like this that worked on those farms. And it sort of felt like it had always been like that. It always would be like that. Everybody knew everybody else. What about the land? Whenever I go now to the sheep farming areas in Snowdonia, where my family used to farm, it feels like quite a barren landscape. The more I learn about it now, the more I feel we've lost a lot of wildlife.

Even in these places that people think are the countryside with all the wildlife, it feels like it's quieter than it used to be the truth is there's probably two or three things happening there so we we now know and there's some interesting research done recently in this landscape we now know that some of that clearance of that landscape was in the late mesolithic period so some of the clearing away of those landscapes some of the profound changes are very very very old and then there's another thing happening which is probably over many centuries you see it farmed in a way which results in it very very gradually becoming barer so many of the people that live in those places think it's the same as it was forever but it's just the same as it was in your dad's day it's a little bit different from your grandfather's day and what's

happening is you're seeing a gradual disappearance of woodland and other things from those places and then probably the third layer is from the sort of 1960s onwards there's there's real pressure on the uplands to specialize just in sheep so the sort of cattle disappear quite often and you have a real intensification of the uplands in terms of sheep farming and it strips it even barer so in a valley like ours i'm quite lucky i live in a valley where a lot of that patchwork still remains a lot of the hedgerows are there a lot of the woodland still there but even here you can see parts of this valley where the hedgerows are disappearing and it's becoming bare and stripping away and as you say people haven't necessarily

been seeing that or understanding what that was. And just explain to me the challenges around upland sheep farming in terms of the number of animals that you might be able to graze on a particular piece of ground. Traditionally there was a system in places like the Lake District where a lot of the mountains and the moorland was common land. You could only put the number of sheep, cattle or in some cases poultry onto the common land, the mountain, in direct proportion to how many you could winter on your own ground, originally without feeding hay. So there was these sort of highly worked out traditional systems that limited stock numbers basically on the fells and that in part has survived so i can only i can still by tradition and by law i can only put a certain number of

sheep on the fell where i graze but there is certainly in the post-war period after the second world war there's enormous pressure put on that so government starts saying hang on a minute we need way more cheap food we need way more sheep produced on the uplands use more feed in the lowlands make more hay make silage keep more sheep on your home farm push more sheep produced on the uplands. Use more feed in the lowlands. Make more hay. Make silage. Keep more sheep on your home farm. Push more sheep onto the mountain. And as with any other farming system in Britain,

there's a lack of understanding of what those ecosystems are. And there's a lack of understanding of what those changes would result in ecologically. Let's talk about the ecology before I talk about the human consequences of modern farming. When you look out now, you said your particular valley is still quite mixed human consequences of modern farming when you look out now you said your particular valley is still quite mixed in terms of its farming when you look at what else is going on though in the Lake District has it become too intense is it being overgrazed dare I ask are there too many sheep in the Lake District? It changes over time basically so we think there are about a third more sheep than there were in the 1950s now in places like the Lake District but there's probably about a third less sheep than there was in the 1980s so the real

peak of messing things up by having too many sheep is 20 or 30 years ago now there's been gradual reduction so on our fell is about half as many sheep as they used to be the question really is what do those habitats need to be to be diverse to be sustainable to look after things like the peat bogs to have enough woodland in them and how would you need to farm them be diverse to be sustainable to look after things like the peat bogs to have enough woodland in them and how would you need to farm them to make that work and this all becomes a little clumsy if we obsess about sheep it doesn't really matter what the grazing animal is it's how we graze them where we graze them or what time of year we graze them and whether we're allowing recovery periods and other things so one of the things that we've learned in the last 20 or 30

years is that we can farm our pastures, which have nearly 100 species of wildflowers and grasses in them. We can farm them in ways that's good for the soil, good for nature, good for biodiversity. But we have to have long recovery periods in there. So the big enemy is not really sheep. It's overstocking and particularly set stocking, which is leaving animals in the same place for very, very long periods of time. That's where you do the real damage.

And that poses challenges to people like us that live in these landscapes. We have to find ways either to get back to a better system from the past or some of the past with some new tweaks based on the new science about ecology and soils and grazing. Do you ever feel that there's a conflict there as someone who loves that land, that land's in your blood, but so is the farming? Do you ever sit there and think, oh God, you know, is it compatible? Or are you convinced that there is a way where the land can heal, the land can regenerate, and there are also livelihoods to be made in traditional sheep farming? Yeah, I spent 30, 40 years thinking about this. I am

absolutely, categorically, without any doubts at all, sure that we can mend these places, that we can have massively more nature in them, that we can graze them way more responsibly in ways that mimic nature, in ways that build soil, in ways that build biodiversity. And yes, in ways that put back more woodland cover, more hedgerows, more natural wetlands, all of that stuff's entirely possible. In fact, I don't think it's a conflict. I actually think you need people in the uplands to do these things. If you look at places like Yellowstone, where they're doing restoration work, there's a kind of daydream that if you abandon it and you put back things like wolves, the whole thing mends.

And actually, there's a whole body of science now, which shows that's not true in about half of those valleys. There's a lot of work needs to be done. We're basically the ecosystem engineer in most of our ecosystems now, whether we like it or not. And a lot of the answers are about us managing places in ways that mimic nature, doing the functions of many of the species that are missing and probably can't come back to many of our landscapes. So that's not a point against nature.

It's a point about enlightened land management. I think we can do it. Yes, I know some stubborn farmers that don't want to play ball and want to be grumpy and say, get off my land. But most of the farmers I know are learning very, very quickly, changing very quickly. There's over a million trees been planted in the Lake District in the last five years from the Woodland Trust and have told me that. That doesn't tell me that people are incapable of change and learning and making their landscapes better. It actually tells you the opposite. We can do this.

Now, let's talk about what you've seen in changes in the human geography of the uplands you mentioned that there used to be lots of farm laborers around is it quite a lonely thing now being a farmer do you not have that much companionship when i was about 20 years old i thought our world our culture was dying really that we were the last of it and i was almost come to terms with that i thought that's fine i'll be one of the last people to see it i'll understand it i love it and it may disappear and people were disappearing all around us so it did feel lonely and it did feel isolated and actually it hasn't played out like I thought it would at all there's all sorts of changes happening at the moment so as farms are adapting and doing more nature restoration work our farm

is now busy all the time with ecologists and river experts and meadow experts and other people coming here. So we've never had so many people working on the farm or with us. And farmers themselves have adapted to the new technologies that everybody else has. So your typical 20-year-old young farmer now isn't at home feeling isolated, dreaming of the city. They're at home like everybody else on Zoom or on Facebook. And they're building their own communities and they're reinforcing their sense of identity and okay there are less people physically within a mile or two of them but they're connecting to people in the next valley or they're connecting to people like them in Scotland and they're reinforcing their sense of

why it matters and they're sharing their stories and actually the 20 year olds today are very different to how they were when I was 20. They're really proud of being part of these communities. They're proud of their traditions. They're proud of their history, their identity, and they're trying to find new ways to keep it alive. And some of that's taking forward the traditional businesses and the traditional skills and some of its new things. What are the bits of the tradition that you work to try and keep alive? What are those key bits of traditional practices or business or community relations that you want to see flourish? There's probably two big parts of that in my mind.

So the hefty flock of sheep that we have on the mountain. I've interviewed lots of historians about this. It appears that they are the same flock of sheep going backwards and forwards from the mountain to my homestead or a neighbouring homestead for at least a thousand years. We know that their genetics are the genetics of viking sheep so their nearest relatives to those sheep genetically are in the sort of coastal fringe that the vikings norse people came from on boats so we think they brought the male sheep with them the rams and if you think about that how many places in the world can you go to where the practice is a thousand years old and actually i've interviewed historians and said why does it start a thousand years ago and they say no it doesn't it's potentially those were ancient British sheep before that your people may well have been doing

this for four thousand five thousand years so the coming and going of those hefted flocks of sheep I think is really important and really beautiful and really special and has been done for a very long time and for most of that history was done in landscapes with woodland and scrub and other things so there's not necessarily incompatible with making it better for nature and then then the other part is the sheer beauty of this landscape. So we have a pattern here with the commons above the wall, the sort of open common land. So we have the largest area of common land in Western Europe. We have the intakes, which is the lower fell slopes where you put your used twins or your cattle. And then you have the hay meadows in the valley bottom. And lots of those hay meadows are ruined as of the last 50 years but we're lucky to have 30 acres of the last remaining 3 000 acres of upland hay meadow

and they have 105 106 107 species of grasses and flowers in them they're one of the rarest habitats in europe and yeah i think there's a cultural landscape there which people clearly care about there's 19 million visitors a year come to the lake district they spend about two and a half billion pounds and it's been a huge thing in our culture as well the way this place looks so i think we have to reconcile all of that with the need to do stuff about the sixth mass extinction and to do stuff about climate change and if you can find a way through the middle to do those things then i think that's good why not do it get on with it english pastoral the book that we're talking about I talk about the culture of farmers and the culture of farmers isn't perfect. I'll be honest with you. Farmers are what they always wanted to be, which is that they always were tasked with making money.

So they were partly businessmen. They were always tasked with changing the land to make a profit, create a surplus. And we need them to, of course. We never really asked them to be proper ecological stewards. They didn't know about it. Most of asked them to be proper ecological stewards they didn't know about it most of us didn't the rest of society didn't either so we didn't really have a sort of clearly thought through philosophy that we were expecting of farmers where they had to be ecosystem managers and food producers and now is arguably the first time in history where we realize that we have to be both of those things and do all farmers like it no some of them don't some of them want to think like their dads and their granddads and they think their job is to be both of those things. And do all farmers like it? No, some of them don't. Some of them want to think like their dads and their granddads, and they think their job is to be only efficient,

produce as much as possible. And they're not stupid. They would make coherent arguments that that's their role. That's the more efficient they are, we might need less land elsewhere. So you can even make an environmental argument for that way of thinking. But I think it's wrong. I think we have to have a different way of thinking about farming, which is to reconcile those two things, to be very productive producing food and to think very clearly about our role in those ecosystems and to have as much of the native habitats and processes as we can so that it works. If you don't mind me asking, are there further generations coming up behind you that want to do this work, continue your work? My eldest is 14 and is adamant she wants nothing to do with farming, so she may be sensible. My eldest is 14 and is adamant she wants nothing to do with farming, so she may be sensible. And the other three, two boys and a girl, are very interested and keen on the farm.

And you'd be amazed, Dan, if you go to any of the sheep shows and things here at the moment, I've never seen so many young people. I've never seen so many teenagers. I've never seen so many 20-year-olds. I think they've just realised that this is important, that being part of your community, playing a role in a long sort of tradition of things that matter, albeit with a new spin on it, that this is not a bad thing. This is a good thing. And we need people like them. We need loads and loads of really, really keen, passionate young people to come into these places, give them new life, turn over a new chapter in them. I think I know the answer to this question, but is there any amount of money that anyone could pay you for you to go and live anywhere else in the world or the cost of del sol no sorry if that's humorless but no i genuinely i said at the end of my first book the shepherd's life i love this life i don't want to do anything else i'm really happy

and it's nothing to do with money i have to make money like you do to pay my bills and everybody listening to this program but what i really want to do is I want to be part of my community. I want to look after my land and I want to try and be both a good shepherd. And I also have cattle, by the way. And yeah, and I want to address the issues and the challenges that my community faces, just like anybody else would. Well, listeners to this podcast can help you do the latter by buying the book and helping you do the former.

What is the book called? It's called English Pastoral and tells the story of the last 40 or 50 years, explaining the old farming, explaining what changed and hopefully ending on a hopeful note about how people like me, with the help of people like you and your listeners, we can make the English countryside much better. Just one last point. A lot of people listening to this will probably live in the cities. Apart from buying your book, how can they support you and what you're doing through their wallet, through the way they shop, they consume and they live? I think probably the best thing you could do is to start asking a lot more questions. Be really wary of anonymous food. If it's not really clear which farm it comes from,

which landscape it comes from, try and avoid it. I know everybody's busy and got limited funds. Try and connect to, if you're going to buy something like meat, for example, go online, try and find a local farmer that will do a mail delivery or a drop-off and try and align your spending with good farming rather than bad farming. The sort of anonymous packaged, it's from nowhere food is the real problem. We need to be exerting our sort of moral authority, each and every one of us as best we can. And I know that's difficult with two kids in a supermarket or whatever, but we've got to try harder, all of us. James, you're such an inspiring and passionate advocate

for your way of life and your community. So it's a huge privilege to have you on the podcast. Thank you very much for coming on. Thank you, Dan. I'd love to talk history with you someday. Anyway, bye-bye. Hi, everybody. Just a quick message at the end of this podcast. I'm currently sheltering in a small windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol Channel called Lundy.

I'm here to make a podcast. I'm here enduring weather that frankly is apocalyptic. Because I want to get some great podcast material for you guys. In return, I've got a little tiny favour to ask. If you could go to wherever you get your podcasts, if you could give it a five-star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review, I'd really appreciate that. Then from the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favour. Then more people will listen to the podcast, we can do more and more ambitious things and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you.