North West Farmer caught up with a globetrotting farmer turned writer who has been Down Under this month on holiday, on a book promotion, exploring our farming systems – and giving an interview to us.
IT’S so thick, you could cut the Cumbrian dialect of farmer, history student and author James Rebanks with a knife.
Imagining a conversation between him and Norwegians based on a small island chain more than 650km north of Oslo might conjure thoughts of a machete, not a knife, to carve a path of understanding.
But when it comes to people connected to any kind of farming there is one language which unites them all – the love of their land and their pride in everything it produces.
It would be this common bond which would reach out and draw Rebanks north from his Lakes District farm to a chain of small windswept rocky outcrops, besieged by the turbulent arctic seas in latitudes level with Iceland and beyond, to learn – or relearn – some of life’s most important, yet basic lessons.
Lessons this Magdalen College (which, speaking of dialects, Oxford and its students insist on calling Maudlin) graduate, with a double first in history, concedes granted him an unexpected and astonishing reprieve from the personal challenges with his everyday life and which he recounts in his just published The Place of Tides (allen lane $36.99).
A story in which his comeback from the claws of modernity is educational, entertaining, endearing and enlightening as Rebanks takes us with him in a very, very small boat, out to a very, very small island where in a world of very, very unpredictable weather and fortunes he adopts a very, very traditional lifestyle in great, great isolation.
Isolation meaning (hummed to the tune of Gilligan’s Island):
No phone, no lights, no motor car,
Not a single luxury,
Like Robinson Crusoe,
It’s primitive as can be.
Yet annually Anna Måsøy, who will prove to be the most resilient star of the book, travels to this remoteness, defying her age, her health and absolute any dependence on the 21st century.
Through her recounting of timeless rhythms which span not just generations but millennia, Måsøy and, by default, Rebanks engage in this sliding doors adventure, blurring Norse mythology and modernity.
Because in Måsøy’s world, as one of the world’s last ‘duck women’ harvesting eider down from next boxes scattered across her small island each year, all those yesterdays are still her tomorrows. An island reached through a maze of waterways and channels, an area the locals call the place of tides.
Which brings us back to Rebanks and one of his main reasons for seeking his own dose of distance – from the world.
“I had been drawn to Anna because she seemed heroically tough – and she was tough, but her real superpower was forgiveness. She knew that a life full of other people meant accepting their weaknesses and still being there for them… Anna showed me how much we all need each other, and how empty it is to be alone,” he writes.
Before Rebanks joined Måsøy on her eider island of Fjærøy (pronounced Fi-aroy), in the Vega archipelago, he says he was struggling with his own isolation and anger.
While the Norwegians have their sagas to recount, Rebanks and his family have farmed their little corner of Cumbria for more than 600 years, so they know a bit about staying in one place, where their own history is everywhere they turn.
But pre his trip, and pre his book, Rebanks was becoming something of an angry ant.
His little world’s orbit had been seriously disrupted by his own changing landscape as a successful author and then spun out of control before crash landing with the death of his father, and his inability to adjust to, let alone accept, the depredations of the modern world on his agrarian environment. It was all changing so fast, and he felt he could not keep up.
In his off-farm role working in sustainable tourism to sustain his rural roots, Rebanks understood the need for harmony, but nothing had prepared him for the power of simplicity with Måsøy – and her friend Ingrid, who joined them at the start of the journey and who was pivotal at the beginning as Måsøy battled with her age and health before emerging centre stage in this saga.
Måsøy raised minimalism to an art form, her ability to sit quietly, motionless, patiently, and communicate with her surrounds, and her legacy, was slowly and surely embracing Rebanks himself, who could feel his stresses draining away.
It might have started out as Rebanks telling the story of his life and trip, but inevitably it became the story of Anna Måsøy, the traditions and customs which helped shape her and her very grounded vision of where it was all taking her.
“I am only the storyteller. She is the story,” he explained.
True, but perhaps without realising it, she had taken him with her. Although neither of them was blinded by their surrounding reality. Much of Måsøy’s heritage is a litany of loss, of family drowned battling the arctic seas, generation after generation, and as isolated as their archipelago might be, it has not proved immune to the 21st century.
Their once pristine islands have polluted beaches, water levels are changing and the eider duck is, most sadly, becoming scarcer by the season.
Yet through it all, the long-distance friendship which began with that first unplanned meeting, rekindled by letter and confirmed as a partnership on their little rocky outcrop, sent Rebanks home with a new fire in his farming belly (and a new family – he first met Måsøy in 2012, first wrote in 2019 and is still going back to see her and her children, including a couple of times this year).
And let’s not lose sight of Rebanks the farmer, because clearly he is no slouch himself when it comes to things rural.
On his compact 500 acres – some of which is lease country to give his business a bit of oomph – he runs Galloway cattle and Herdwicks, a heritage sheep breed embraced by the nobility and even Beatrix Potter, a former president of the breeding society and multiple broad ribbon winner with her own sheep. She bequeathed the National Trust 15 farms, and it has honoured the provisions of her will as Herdwicks graze that land to this day.
And the other day, Rebanks said, he sold a Belted Galloway bull for 20,000 guineas (at the time of writing, in Down Under dollars, that equates to $41,855.94) so no question good things can come out of small (by antipodean standards) farms.
While his flock of Herdwicks is recognised as one of the showcase gene pools in the country.
Both the Rebanks flock and herd are now formally closed studs, with just the occasional infusion of outcross genetics – but, tut, tut, none of that AI or ET fangled stuff.
The Herdwicks also provide a sense of serendipity to the story – the very name itself has descended from the old Norse ‘herdvyck’ which means sheep pasture. It is believed the sheep which would become the breed’s foundation arrived with the first Vikings more than 1000 years ago.
Today the breed is almost uniquely Lakes district – it is estimated 95 per cent of all Herdwicks live within 20km of Coniston and its famous water in Cumbria.
But getting back to the business of farming, Rebanks and his sustainable tourism history, and his time in far flung Norway, has inspired his push towards purely regenerative agriculture.
Given another push earlier this month during his time in Tasmania, in particular the Huon Valley, with which he fell in love.
“One hundred per cent my time on the island has changed my approach on my farm, to reinvigorate the land, to restore the bird habitats, to make my little corner of England a little bit better,” he told North West Farmer.
“And make sure our heritage breeds don’t just survive but thrive for generations to come,” he said.
“Our breeding is all natural and our animals, which are farmed at 1200 feet above sea level and higher, with 1m of rain a year, are 100 per cent functional.
“Now we are working to get more carbon into our ground, to make it healthier too – we don’t use any medications, no silage, no hay, no synthetic fertilisers – the old breeds are the best up here and we are re-embracing the old ways.”
Seems Anna Måsøy and James Rebanks are, finally, both the story.
