Bonus Post - the tweeting shepherd
How @herdyshepherd1 won Twitter
Chapter Three, which covers the rise of social media, finishes with a portrait of someone who mastered this new form of communication and saw his life transformed as a result.
A decade ago James Rebanks was a Lakeland shepherd struggling to make a living from his flock of Herdwicks on the fells near Ullswater where his family had farmed for generations. He was and remains sceptical about technology. When the iPhone came out in 2007 he remembers thinking Apple was “a weird cult” and the worship of its products insane and nonsensical.
But in 2012 some friends suggested he should try out Twitter. Choosing the handle @herdyshepherd1 and not revealing his real name, he began documenting his daily life on the fells. Here’s an extract from the book:
His early tweets, most of them featuring excellent photos of sheep and the landscape, make it clear he was a man on a didactic mission to tell his followers about farming and its role in preserving the countryside. ‘This time of year is all about maintaining the condition of our ewes, whilst they are in lamb,’ was his first message that January. He must have had a response. A few days later he tweeted this: ‘It’s really encouraging that people are interested in what we do. At times it can feel that many people would rather we disappeared.’
What he had to share was both beautiful and compelling: a daily picture of his working life through the seasons – the hard times when the snow came and dozens of his ewes were in danger, the sheer exhaustion of lambing through the nights in April, the exhilaration of leading his flock up onto the fell for summer grazing. In between came an often passionate and angry view of hill farming’s place in modern Britain, with occasional clashes with those who saw it either as antiquated or, in the case of the Guardian columnist George Monbiot, as an active threat to the environment of the Lake District, reducing it to a treeless waste. At first, with no phone signal on the fells, he tweeted from home in breaks in his working day. Then, as reception improved, he was snapping photos on his iPhone of everything he saw as he roamed the hills.
Rebanks soon had thousands of followers, including me. In 2013 the American magazine the Atlantic spotted him and asked him to write something about being a tweeting shepherd. ‘Wow @ herdyshepherd1 has made it across the Atlantic!’, I tweeted, and he replied, ‘It’s the internet Rory, it’s brilliant, u can send emails and everything!’ His article, bylined with his Twitter handle because he still wanted to remain anonymous, described how despite his distrust of technology he had come to realize what a powerful combination a smartphone and a social media account could be:
I was a little behind the curve on getting an iPhone, and accepted it reluctantly as a free ‘upgrade’ when my perfectly fine old mobile died after years of good service. I hated the cult of Apple: I was going to resist.
But whatever I wanted to happen, I suddenly had a camera and Twitter app in my pocket whilst I worked. And though it took me a while to realize it, I had the tools to connect to thousands of people around the world.
The article brought a new surge of followers, while also revealing that here was a gifted writer with something to say about a world which was both fascinating and little understood. Publishers took note.
In 2015 I travelled to his farm in the Lakes for an exhilarating day, spent mostly in the trailer of his quad bike, filming him for a BBC Breakfast piece. ‘I didn’t really understand how Twitter worked at first,’ he told me, “but quite quickly I realized that there is a huge number of people that are really interested in what we do. It is an interesting story and that’s been shown through Twitter. I think people really do want to know about where their food comes from and about farming.”
Here’s a video I made of that day with @herdyshepherd1.
By then his first book The Shepherd’s Life had been published - there had been a bidding war after the article in the Atlantic, and the book went on to sell more than half a million copies and was translated into 16 languages.
In 2020, I returned to see him and talk about his new book English Pastoral, which became another bestseller. He was still cynical about social media, abandoning Twitter from time to time when he got sick of the angry tone of the exchanges about farming. But he and his wife Helen, who was now becoming something of an Instagram influencer as @theshepherdswife, accepted that their lives had been transformed in a way which would not have been possible without social media.
Always On is published on May 13th and I’m hearing that it has made it into some bookshops a couple of days early. You can order it here or here. Or ask your local bookshop to stock it..