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show that we were always tough people who often had more than one occupation. The farms were too small to keep everyone. There’s knowingness to our obsession with independence.
    Farmers from elsewhere have bought the surplus breeding stock produced here for many centuries, as the northern fells are a kind of nursery for the national sheep flock. My grandfather sold sheep each autumn to farms as far afield as Somerset or Kent. It has long been a trading economy; a thousand years ago we were part of a Viking trading world that stretched across the North Atlantic.
    Unfortunately, it was normal for farmers like my grandfather to borrow money. It is how we buy land we can scarcely afford (“Well, they won’t be making any more of it, so we better had”), and this meant they were connected to the bank and the rest of the world through interest rates. So the waves of prosperity or hardship that affected farming here were often created by global events like the industrial revolution, world wars, the Great Depression, or the massive expansion of farming in the American West in the nineteenth century. It is a sad logic, but wars were generally considered by the old men to be “good for farming.” Events like the Napoleonic Wars had stopped the cheap imports that undermined our way of life and reminded politicians that producing food at home mattered. Then afterwards they’d forget and things would get gradually worse. But we too were often sucked into the wars that affected the rest of the world.
    There is a little cemetery on the Somme, full of local lads, many of them farmers’ sons from here who enlisted and died together in July 1916. One of my grandmother’s uncles had been shell-shocked, recovered enough to come home and work on the farm, but had broken down a few years later when working in the fields pulling turnips with his brothers. He had lain down sobbing in the brown soil, surrounded by the turnip leaves. They had carried him back to the farm, and later, he was taken away to a lunatic asylum in Lancaster. The war went on for him for his whole long life. He was still spoken of affectionately when I was a child, because visiting him was a fresh memory for my elders. My grandfather’s uncle was one of the best shots in his regiment. My son now carries his name, Isaac.

 
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    As soon as I could toddle I’d be packed into Granddad’s Land Rover and we would go off to do a job on the farm. My mother would be left fretting whether I’d be properly looked after, and about what he would feed me. For some reason I never figured out, my granddad always called us “us two old men.”
    â€œUs two old men will go and get them sheep.”
    I’d ride with him, looking out of the open Land Rover window. One day the door wasn’t latched properly and when he braked, I swung out, holding the window for grim death until I was rescued from midair. I vaguely recall escaping various other painful and imminent deaths at auction marts, clambering up the railings to escape wild cattle or feeling the air whoosh past as a bullock kicked out and just missed me.
    The world I was born into extended between our two farms; the outer limits of civilization were friends who did similar things to us, some as far afield as the Pennines or the valleys of the Lake District. Those were the outer boundaries of my known universe.
    I was always curious about other places, but I had no desire to go to any of them. And we didn’t do holidays. Instead, I’d be packed off with my granddad to stay on their farm, where I would follow him around all day, and climb into their bed at night.

 
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    Early summer has quieter moments when we all breathe a little easier after the slog of lambing. My grandmother and grandfather would “take the sheepdogs for a walk.” This was a walk for maybe a mile up the lane beneath the fell where they lived. In reality it was all about enjoying the