Agricultural History Review, Volume 66 Part 2 (2018), p. 291

Lake District farming has received a wide press in recent years, not all of it positive. On the one hand, World Heritage Site inscription recognizes the continuing role of traditional farming in creating and preserving the iconic landscape of the National Park, while public fascination with Lake District farming has been demonstrated by the runaway success of James Rebanks’ memoir, The Shepherd’s Life (2015). On the other, George Monbiot and the re-wilding lobby see the monoculture of sheep as having created an ‘ecological desert’ on the fells. Terry McCormick’s book falls unashamedly in the first camp, celebrating hill farming life and Herdwick sheep by tracing their history and exploring how writers have viewed fell farming since the ‘discovery’ of the Lake District in the eighteenth century. The author is uniquely placed for the task: he is a literary scholar who has worked closely with Lake District farmers and contributed to the World Heritage inscription process himself.

Part I provides an overview of the history of fell farming, presenting it as the story of an heroic struggle against a host of challenges, from manorial lords in the seventeenth century to the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in 2001 – all in the context of an unforgiving environment, severe weather, and recurrent bouts of harsh economic conditions. The findings of research into the socio-economic history of the Lake District since the 1960s are rehearsed: the independence afforded by customary tenantright; the decline of the traditional yeomen (or ‘statesmen’) farmers in the nineteenth century; the persistence of small family farms. McCormick places particular emphasis on the development of what may be termed ‘fell farming culture’, the communal aspects of a farming system which centred on sheep grazing on common land. Communal grazing had long required farmers to collaborate over the day-to-day management of the fells, while other parts of the traditional farming system – communal sheep shearings; shepherds’ meets; the exchange of stray sheep – also brought farmers together. The growth of breed societies and their associated shows from 1844 led to the improvement of the Herdwick breed and increased a sense of communal endeavour amongst farmers. Meanwhile, as the author usefully shows, the publication of successive ‘shepherds’ guides’, recording the ownership marks of each farm – the first of which appeared in 1817 – also fostered a sense of pride among hill farmers. The literature drawn on in these chapters is wide-ranging, with a focus on the important work of Charles Searle and John Beckett, but there are some surprising omissions, such as Jonathan Healey’s case study of Grasmere and, notably, Eleanor Straughton’s book on the history of common land in Cumbria, Common grazing in the northern English uplands, 1800–1965 (2008).

Part II, ‘Writers and Fell Farming: 1750–2017’, is the heart of the book and is full of interest. From the earliest tourists, visitors to the Lakes commented on the character of the farming community, to the extent that by the 1790s Lake District farmers were seen as something of a breed apart, deeply traditional but exhibiting a striking moral integrity. William Wordsworth was convinced that this farming culture of ‘statesmen’ would soon be extinct. As McCormick puts it, he was ‘mourning for what he perceived to be vanishing around him’ (p. 107) and his backward-looking view of the inevitable decline of fell farming cast a long shadow. A sense that the heyday of traditional farming lay in the past was heightened by negative perceptions by other nineteenth-century commentators. Edward Baines, the historian of Lancashire, was disparaging. For him Lake District farmers were ‘dull-looking’ (pp. 113–14) and intermarriage had produced a streak of insanity. Harriet Martineau saw the demon drink as the cause of decline. John Ruskin simply ignored the skilled, mutually supportive ‘craft’ farming of his neighbours at Coniston, even though their culture exemplified some of the ideals he championed.

This changed in the later nineteenth century, not least because of the flowering of interest in the Lake District’s Scandinavian roots. The farming community came to be seen as the inheritors of a Viking past, preserved in their dialect and, for example, their system of sheep marking. Building on the work of W. G. Collingwood, H. D. Rawnsley, one of the co-founders of The National Trust, was influential in ‘lionising’ Lake District farmers, extolling their stockmanship and perceived integrity, which he linked back to their Scandinavian inheritance. In one of her lesser-known works, Beatrix Potter, famously a keen breeder of Herdwick sheep, wrote a ‘hymn’ to the sheep and, by extension, their shepherds. By the 1930s, the fell farmers had become a treasured part of the Lake District and active attempts were being made to preserve their way of life.

However, some of the best-known Lake District writing in the twentieth century glorified the fells but ignored the fell farmers. Both Arthur Ransome’s adventure stories and Alfred Wainwright’s celebrated pictorial guides rejoiced in the Lakes as a playground but paid little regard to those who maintained it. Natives make an appearance in Ransome’s books, as charcoal burners or farmers providing holiday accommodation, but for Wainwright, exhibiting what McCormick calls a ‘wilful blindness’ (p. 160) to the farming community, the fells are largely devoid of people.

One of the charms of this book is the attention given to lesser writers and long-forgotten works. Examples range from Mary Ward’s novel Robert Elsmere (1888), which centred on the clash between the heroine’s traditional ‘statesman’ background and the metropolitan culture of her suitor, to the informative evocations of the realities of fell farming in books as diverse as Abraham Rumney’s The Dalesman (1911) and Dudley Hoys’ Below Scafell (1955). Meanwhile, a host of stories set on hill farms, such as Marjorie Lloyd’s Fell Farm series in the 1950s and Joyce Gard’s Smudge of the Fells (1965), celebrated hill-farming culture. These works, and others, receive deeply insightful commentary from McCormick in this rich and welcome book.