Paperback: To be a shepherd is to stand as tall as any man.
Until around 1750, no one from the outside world had paid this mountainous corner of north-west England much notice, or, when they had, they found it to be poor, unproductive, primitive, harsh, ugly and backward.
Yet, in a few decades, that had all changed. Road, and later railways, were built, making it much easier to get here.
And the Romantic and picturesque movements changed the way many people thought about mountains, lakes and rugged landscapes like ours.
Our landscape suddenly became a major focus for writers and artists, particularly when the Napoleonic Wars stopped the early tourists from going to the Alps and forced them instead to discover the mountainous landscapes of Britain.
Today, 16 million people a year come here to an area with 43 000 residents. They spend more than a billion pounds every year here. More than half the employment in the area is reliant upon tourism - and many of the farms depend upon it for their income by running B&Bs or other businesses. A layman's idea of the Lake District was created by an urbanized and increasingly industrialized society, over the past two hundred years. It was a dream of a place for a wider society that was full of people disconnected from the land.
That dream was never for us, the people who work this land. We were already here doing what we do. William Wordsworth believed that the community of shepherds and small farmers of the Lake District formed a political and social ideal of much wider significance and value. People here governed themselves, free of the aristocratic elites that dominated people's lives elsewhere, and in Wordsworth's eyes this provided a model for a good society.
Wordsworth thought we mattered as a counterpoint to the commercial, urban and increasingly industrial England emerging elsewhere. We are all influenced, directly or indirectly, whether we are aware of it or not, by ideas and attitudes to the environment from cultural sources. My idea of this landscape is not from books, but from another source: it is an older idea, inherited from the people who came before me here.
The Shepherd's Life (2015) is partly an explanation of our work through the course of the year; partly a memoir of growing up in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s and the people around me at that time, like my father and grandfather; and partly a retelling of the history of the Lake District - from the perspective of the people who live there, and have done for hundreds of years.
It is not only the story of a family and a farm, but it also tells a wider story about the people who get forgotten in the modern world. It is about how we need to open our eyes and see the forgotten people who live in our midst, whose lives are often deeply traditional and rooted in the distant past.
If we want to understand the people in the foothills of Afghanistan, we may need to try and understand the people in the foothills of England first.
The Shepherd's Life has been named Cumbria’s book of 2015, spent ten weeks in the Sunday Times top 10 bestsellers list and also won the Zeffirellis Prize for People and Business.
About the author: James Rebanks is a farmer in the Lake District. He wrote, "There is no beginning and there is no end. The sun rises and falls, each day, and the seasons come and go. The days, months and years alternate through sunshine, rain, hail, wind, snow and frost. The leaves fall each autumn and burst forth again each spring. The earth spins through the vastness of space. The grass comes and goes with the warmth of the sun. The farms and the flocks endure, bigger than the life of a single person. We are born, live our working lives and die, passing like the oak leaves that blow across our land in the winter. We are each a tiny part of something enduring, something that feels solid, real and true. Our farming way of life has roots deeper than five thousand years into the soil of this landscape."
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