I’d like to suggest some reasons why understanding the function of nostalgia in fiction has a bearing on our perception of the rural environment, and also on our consciousness of how looking backwards can also be a useful way of looking forwards.
Rebanks’s own farm is teeming with wildlife, and his writing captures this in all its sensuous pleasure, as he describes hearing the cuckoo call, the rooks cawing, the song of a host of birds – thrushes and warblers and the coo of the wood pigeon.
Like the poet John Clare, Bell’s view may not have been broad, but it was deep. The land of which he writes is, primarily, a small part of his beloved Suffolk, and his connection with it is integral to his work.
The Running Hare does not invite us to return to a pastoral idyll which existed in some ideal imagined past. We are not allowed to settle into one simple way of seeing and understanding all the scenes and experiences described.
Nature writing has discovered a new level of popularity. Fresh and varied voices have allowed readers to connect with the natural world, and the countryside has been reimagined as a place of restoration, recreation and ecological intrigue. It’s an exciting time for the genre, but in the midst of this surge, it’s clear that some voices remain oddly quiet.
We would never own the land, we knew this, but for one or two weeks in September we were Kings and Queens of the spud field, lifting the tubers from the ground like they were jewels to put in our imaginary crowns.
In fifteen years’ time, there won’t be any breeding curlews here. Many of the meadows and moors that I love will soon be ploughed and planted to create thousands of hectares of lucrative timber on behalf of distant investors who will never even come here. That’s desperately painful. In writing Native, I made a big attempt to understand that pain and extract something valuable from it.
'There are whole swathes of truth about animals, landscape, nature and heritage about which farmers are in fact the experts. Collectively, they represent a national repository of knowledge without which we would be poorer as a country.'
Pen and Plough is a new creative writing programme designed to support farmers and land workers who have stories to tell.
James Rebanks is a farmer and writer from Matterdale in the English Lake District. His first book The Shepherd’s Life was a Sunday Times bestseller and translated in to 16 languages.
The Pen and the Plough 