Joyce Campbell: Taking inspiration from some farming heroes By Joyce Campbell
Joyce with her husband Ian Macleay, left, and James Rebanks on the right.
They say never meet your heroes but I met two of mine this week and I wasn’t disappointed.
It was quite the reverse – both they, and their families, were all amazing, sharing their time, ideas and passions.
We’re on a short holiday to the Lake District, and on a mission to deliver this year’s clip of our North Country Cheviot hogg wool to a truly inspirational lady – Maria Benjamin from Dodgson Wood.
Maria along with Gloria Mazzer, an Italian based in London, reached out to me on social media to discuss the possibility of doing more with our wool.
10 Books about Food and Farming to Read This Summer
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The genie is out of the bottle, people want to know more history : National Trust boss Hilary McGrady
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The Butchers: novel set in Irish BSE crisis wins Ondaatje prize Alison Flood
Ruth Gilligan’s literary thriller The Butchers, set in the Irish borderlands during the BSE crisis, has won the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje prize for books that “best evoke the spirit of a place”.
Gilligan’s novel beat titles including James Rebanks’ memoir of his family farm, English Pastoral, and Nina Mingya Powles’ poetry collection Magnolia, 木蘭 to the £10,000 prize. The Butchers opens with an ancient curse that decrees that eight men must touch every cow in Ireland as it dies, and follows a group of eight men as they roam rural Ireland in the 1990s, slaughtering the cows of those who still believe in the old ways. The novel unpicks the mysterious death of one of the Butchers, whose corpse is found suspended from a meat hook.
PREMIUM
A farmer harvests hay in the Scottish Borders. (Photo by Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor via Getty Images). ONE summer when I was a student, I got onto a country train in Wiltshire. It was a slow, rattly journey in the sort of coach you see in war-time films: two rows of frowsy seats facing each other, with no way out between halts except by a wooden door onto the tracks. The scene was like a chapter in The Darling Buds of May – trees in full leaf, sunshine sparkling on streams, fields of grazing cows. Surrounding me were local women heading to the nearest market town. Clutching baskets on their knees, they were dressed in much the same way as their grandmothers and maybe even their great-grandmothers.