Review: ‘I Bought a Mountain’ by Thomas Firbank

If I was a lecturer at an agricultural college, this book would be top of the reading list. I’d tell the students that there was no need to lug the Agricultural Notebook in, that John Nix can stay at home this week and please don’t bring anything to write with. Just read this, I’d say: Thomas Firbank’s ‘I Bought a Mountain.’

Rewind first. My uncle was a shepherd on a hill farm. By virtue of some fall out I’m unclear on coupled with a character who was happier with a dog and stick than with family, I didn’t meet my uncle until my mother’s 40th birthday party when I was 10. He invited me to go to the farm where he worked. I remember the fire and the branding iron to stamp the horn of the sheep. I remember the smell, the smell that gets on your chest. He must have seen my face.

‘It gets yer! It’s n’wonder these farriers can drink.’

I remember gathering sheep with him and Michael Harness. He cast out one way, a dot in the distance, and we the other way to meet back on the old A640 road connecting Yorkshire and Lancashire. The snow started falling, the sheep licked the salt from the road, the cars blared their horns. We bunkered down for a bit of dinner under a small bridge. 

‘Here lad, sup this. Bloody cars blaring. These sheep were here ‘afore them.’ 

Fast forward. I deliver milk before school with another farmer, and I learn to shear with him as well, and then on one day the uncle gives me a chance in shearing some of their sheep. Then I go to agricultural college, and at the end of my first year on a lovely June evening I get a call from home. He has died. He collapsed in the big shed at the farm and Michael found him.

And that’s it then. You can’t learn anything from someone who isn’t around any more. And all you ever wanted was to know him. To understand him and be friends with him perhaps, to be part of it. But you never were. The only thing that’s there now is a crook he gave you behind the door, and a tightening of the chest sometimes when you think back. That is all that can be said for that.

Back to the book. I’d tell the students to come prepared to drink tea and talk all about how wonderful the book is, how even almost 75 years after it was first published there is something very relevant in here for anyone who cares to get into it. “The man who can strike a mean is the man who makes a dull success of what he undertakes,’ says Firbank “yet the ordinary people who move with the ungoverned swings of the pendulum live foolishly and fully. My pendulum was at the extremity of its arc when I came to Dyffryn.” 

You may manage to buy a copy here 

He had worked in Canada in the ‘30’s and heard about a hill farm for sale near Snowdon. He starts his story with the purchase - “I first saw Dyffryn in a November gale. As I rounded a spur of a hill to turn into the long valley the full power of the storm caught the car. The rain was being driven horizontally, and struck on the windscreen. It poured in torrents over the bonnet, but left me dry. I liked that weather.” Firbank, with no farming experience at all, buys “a sheep farm of 2400 acres, lying in a long rectangle with its upper boundary some 3300 feet up and its lower boundary the flooding river parallel with the road. A good house, 2 cottages, plenty of farm buildings and the price was £5000.”

The book takes you through the farming year, and if it was just that would probably only be of interest to hardened agriculturalists. It is much more than that, because Firbank is so honest and writes with such passion that you are likely to get through a big chunk of it in one sitting. He learns after some time that he must just work very hard, but that everyone will help him if only he asks them. “As the excitements of the life flooded my consciousness, so that I worked and worried and ask questions from daybreak till dark, the hillmen, my neighbours, sensed at once the change of heart and admitted me more and more to their circle.”  

I like the book because the focus is on shepherding through the year - and if you consider hill farming, there isn’t a tremendous amount that has changed in practice. On lambing time he notes that “we have been privileged, for the gods have performed before us the great play of life. We feel we have assisted at a miracle. And, of course, we have.” You hear further about shearing, preparing for the annual sale and buying rams from Firbank who seems in control of the operation, but with some sense of philosophical detachment from the process at the same time. That is probably why the book works so well. 

My copy has been around a while

I could go on and on about this book. For me reading it again recently, I am surprised by the parallels between farming then and farming today. One chapter talks about the big snow of 1937, where they dug sheep out of snow drifts and pulled their last one out on day 21. “The more we mortals build,” says Firbank, “the more there is for the fates to destroy.” Looking at the year that hill farms have had this year, I think the experience that Firbank had at Dyffryn all those years ago would resonate with many sheep farmers today.

A lovely thread throughout the book which almost underpins it, is the relationship that Firbank has with his wife Esme who joins him at Dyffryn a short time after the purchase. “The gods thought fit for me to meet Esme” he says. “In early spring when the grass was a-rustle with growth, and the trees gave budding promise, and the birds and the beasts preened and stretched in the luxury of the sun, Esme came back with me to Dyffryn.” Esme is the driving force behind a lot of ideas, and it is clear that there is no way that Firbank could have done it without her. The story of Esme is probably another book in itself, and if you read this you will see from a quick internet search that the story of ‘I Bought a Mountain’ most certainly didn’t stop with the publication of the book. I will leave that chapter for you to discover yourself.

The debates we are having in agriculture now, especially in relation to hill farming, could be pulled directly from this book. The weather I have already covered, but Firbank plays with diversifying his income with varying degrees of success through pigs, poultry and a cafe for tourists. He  sets up a hydro-electric system to power the farm (renewable energy to cut costs? Interesting!) talks about the need to produce more food from the hills (this sounds familiar) to invest in agriculture as the basis for economic growth in the rest of the country (I have heard this before somewhere) and of the need for more people to work in agriculture and that the future is bright (hang on, what year are we in?). 

Whilst we must remember this was written at the beginning of the war and at a bleak time in the country, Firbank finishes by noting that “men are loath just now to return to the land. The life is hard, the wage small, and the instinct of husbandry is dead in them. But man was born of husbandry, and he may again turn to his only sure help, the soil. He will readjust his values, and may taste in the end the ultimate joy of tending Nature in her labour.”  

Everything changes, yet everything stays the same.