In a moment of crisis for the industry, Heather Wildman tours the country helping farmers face up to the toughest of questions – not just about the future of their business, but about their family, their identity and even their mortality.
First published as a Guardian Long Read on 9th Jan 2024
I was asked to take some photographs for an exhibition on the theme of diversity for the January 2024 Oxford Farming Conference – ‘diversity’ meaning both social diversity, and diversity of farming enterprise. It was a treat of a job, an excuse to wander the length of Britain talking to and photographing extraordinary people. What began as a continuation of the images I’d already taken while researching Field Work billowed out into something closer to a record of farming now. Here’s a few.
At the Three Counties Show, the shearing competition is in full swing. Tucked into one corner of the vast showground in Malvern, Worcestershire, is a stage into which are fitted six little booths like the starting gates on a racecourse. Each one has a number, a chalked-up name and an electrical point into which the competitors fit their shears. Six men line up and on the signal each one opens the gate, extracts a sheep, flips it on to its back, wedges its head between their thighs, bends over and starts shearing, belly first. The ewes do not seem quite as happy with this arrangement as the audience does.
Each shearer is trying to remove the fleece as quick and clean as pulling off a jersey, no nicks or cuts, and no more than three minutes per sheep (the current British record stands at 30 seconds).
Three of us are sitting at the kitchen table at Billy and Isobel Muir’s farmhouse on North Ronaldsay: Robert, the photographer, me, and Billy. Isobel is making lunch. Or she’s trying to make lunch, but Billy keeps getting up and down to look for things, shifting the framed pictures of grandchildren from the mantelpiece, moving the Herd Register For Female Bovine Animals three inches to the left. He’s grumbling under his breath.
It’s a couple of days after the fire at the Glasgow School of Art when I first meet Thomas Joshua Cooper. Down on Sauchiehall Street people stop and look up Garnet Street, searching for the Mac’s familiar shape and seeing instead derelict window frames and the blackening imprints of flames on the brickwork. Cooper’s studio on Renfrew Street is a block along from the Mac, and to get there I have to skirt a cordon still pungent with the scent of smoking wood. On the doorstep, Thomas’s wife Kate Mooney is waiting with a mop and a bucket. She’s been cleaning off clots of soot and the after-effects of pissed spectators…
In the time since the idea of rewilding really took hold it’s generally been seen as a rural pursuit involving the withdrawal from farmland so that animals and vegetation can restore their own ecology. At its most herbivorous it includes allowing hedgerows or scrub to flourish unchecked and at its most primal it involves deliberately releasing animals such as beaver or wolves in the belief that the re-entry of a single alpha species brings with it a fall of ecological benefits. Either way, rewilding has come to be associated with big acreages, whether that be at Knepp Park in Sussex or at the 18,000 acre Glenfeshie estate in the Cairngorms. The perception is that it’s expensive, far away, and often inaccessible. It certainly isn’t something that just anyone can do.
I had a couple of head injuries when I was in my twenties, and soon after the second one I started to go deaf. For a while I did what any well-adjusted adult would do; I pretended it would all go away. When that was no longer possible, I went along to the local audiology department who told me that my hearing in both ears was already down about 50%. They issued me with a pair of analogue hearing aids, and that was pretty much it – I just went home and got on with life.
If the bureaucrats and the incomers saw this place horizontally then Bert saw it vertically. Down through the soil and deep through the generations. He saw the boundaries between his land and the next with the same us-and-them finality a Londoner might see the hidden borders of gang territories. This field here, this tree, this beast, was as intimate to him as family, but that field there belonging to his neighbour, that was foreign land, as far from him as the Arctic. This was home, that was away. For him, Rise wasn’t an income or a classification or a family or a business or a job. It was everything.
‘Whenever I smell salt water, I know that I am not farm from one of the works of my ancestors. The Bell Rock stands monument for my grandfather, the Skerry Vhor for my Uncle Alan, and when the lights come out at sundown along the shores of Scotland, I am proud to think they burn more brightly for the genius of my father.’ RLS, 1880
This is the biography of an extraordinary family, an impossible sea and an engineering miracle. Robert Louis Stevenson may have been the most famous of the Stevensons, but he was not the most productive. The Lighthouse Stevensons, all four generations of them, designed and built the great lights around Scotland, fighting storms, near-drownings, sickness and pressgangs along the way. They were lifesavers and pioneers, and their lives were as full of drama and adventure as anything RLS wrote. Here, for the first time, is their story.
‘Deeply accomplished… this splendid book preserves the memory of great deeds performed in a heroic era’
Frank McLynn, Sunday Times
‘Bella Bathurst has built a lamp herself: it illuminates the work of a literary hero, a family business, a habit of mind and a Scottish period… from the summit of this first terrific book she looks to become one of the best biographers of her generation’
Andrew O’Hagan, The Times
‘An enthralling story, vivaciously recounted… These were epic and scarifying adventures, indicative of an age when the taming of nature was a philosophical given, its execution a religious passion’
Alan Taylor, Observer
‘This is a grand book doing for lighthouses what Dava Sobel’s Longitude did for marine chronometers, and doing it, if comparisons are to be made, with considerably more panache’
Nicholas Bagnall, Sunday Telegraph
Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award 1999, shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award.
A fine shipwreck has always represented sport pleasure, treasure, and in many cases the differnce between living well and just getting by. From all around Britain, Bella Bathurst has uncovered the secret history of wrecking, from shoreline orgies so debauched that few participants survived until morning to remote crofts fitted with silver candelabra via cows hung with lanterns to lure unwary ships to ruin and the Cornish reputation for drowning survivors.
‘The beauty of this book is that Bathurst never forgets that the whole attraction of wrecking is its mystery. Rich in the lore of the sea, but steeped in the everyday experience of the people she meets.’ Observer.
‘Bathurst is a brave and talented writer. She is wry, perceptive, laconic, occasionally downright funny and uncannily skilled at recreating atmosphere … some of her most intense passages about the movement of water are breathtakingly novelistic and poetically precise.’ Daily Telegraph
‘Bathurst’s descriptions are preise and graphic, but also poignant … Striking and memorable’. Peter Ackroyd, The Times
Please fill in the contact form below. We will respond as soon as possible.
