Moving to a farm cottage 700ft up in the Pennines, surrounded by sheep and serenaded by curlews, and conscious of the dawn-to-dusk regime of the family next door, one begins to understand life on a small mixed farm. It is unrelenting work.
No wonder Richard Benson preferred the glitzy attractions of Grub Street. But if he had not abandoned his patrimony, we would not have this quite moving memoir of change on the Yorkshire wolds, the county’s least appreciated hinterland. The undulating hills can be as bleak as Hardy’s ‘starve-acre’ Flintcombe Ash with the same flint and chalk, yet as pastoral as Talbothayes.
When Benson was nobbut a lad in the 1960s the wolds had many small farms raising pigs and a few milker cows, growing turnips, with a barnful of rusty machinery and a coal fire halfway up the back of the farmhouse kitchen.
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