{"id":2678,"date":"2015-08-03T11:15:30","date_gmt":"2015-08-03T10:15:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?p=2678"},"modified":"2015-08-03T11:18:17","modified_gmt":"2015-08-03T10:18:17","slug":"talking-sheep","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?p=2678","title":{"rendered":"Talking Sheep"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"JGH-Sheep1\"<\/a>
Jason Gathorne-Hardy, the master artist when it comes to sheep<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Not often that an obvious stand-out classic arrives in the rather over populated world of nature history writing at the moment. Last year it was Meadowland<\/em> by John Lewis-Stempel.<\/p>\n

This year it is definitely The Shepherd’s Life: A Tale of the Lake District<\/em><\/strong> by\u00a0James Rebanks\u00a0, who already has a large following from his Twitter account as \u2018The Herdwick Shepherd\u2019.<\/p>\n

Counting sheep will never send people to sleep again.\u00a0It’s an extraordinary authentic account of what it actually is like to live and breathe sheep. \u00a0Tersely written as well.<\/p>\n

He pays tribute both in his title and in his text to WH Hudson\u2019s classic A Shepherd\u2019s Life, <\/em>which was based on a series of interviews with a shepherd in Dorset and which I quoted in The Green Road into the Trees <\/a>when walking through that part of the world:<\/p>\n

The naturalist WH Hudson, noted how the local plants had adapted by growing as low as possible to avoid the attentions of the sheep.\u00a0 I was a great admirer of Hudson and had visited the house where he was born in Argentina, overshadowed by an enormous ombu<\/em> tree:\u00a0 a strange tree which is more like a giant shrub, and needs to have its branches supported on crutches across the ground, so that it resembles a giant spider.<\/p>\n

He brought to his studies of England, in particular A Shepherd\u2019s Life <\/em>about these Dorset and Wiltshire Downs, a sense that England was just as strange and exotic as the pampas;\u00a0 also a sense of how short rural memories are.\u00a0 He told an odd story of how a farmer he had met had puzzled over finding a disused well full of sheep heads with horns, when none of the local breeds were horned;\u00a0 and that Hudson had had to tell him about the old Wiltshire breed of sheep, with horns, which had only died out a generation or so before.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not often that an obvious stand-out classic arrives in the rather over populated world of nature history writing at the moment. Last year it was Meadowland by John Lewis-Stempel. This year it is definitely The Shepherd’s Life: A Tale of the Lake District by\u00a0James Rebanks\u00a0, who already has a large following from his Twitter account […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[42,65],"tags":[127],"class_list":["post-2678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-literature","tag-sheep"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2678"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2678\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2682,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2678\/revisions\/2682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}