4 ideas
Herdwick ewes on unfenced common fell stay on their own patch of hillside, their heft or heaf, because each ewe learned its boundaries from its mother as a lamb. That knowledge lives only in the flock and passes down the generations. If a hefted flock is wiped out, as happened when the 2001 foot-and-mouth epidemic brought mass culls across Cumbria, new sheep cannot simply be bought in to replace it. The land has to be painstakingly re-taught.
Rebanks left his Penrith comprehensive at about fifteen, contemptuous of teachers who assumed farm children should aspire to escape the land. He worked on the family farm and taught himself through reading. He then studied for A-levels at evening classes and won a place at Oxford to read history. Afterwards he chose to go back to the fell and the sheep, treating the education as something that served the farming life rather than an exit from it.
Since Wordsworth and the Romantics, the Lake District has been framed as scenery to be looked at, a place for solitary contemplation of wild nature. Seen from the farm, the same fells are a worked, owned and shared landscape. They are shaped by centuries of grazing, walls, common rights and families who have farmed them. Their beauty comes from that labour. Asking 'whose landscape is this and who made it?' reveals a working community where the visitor's frame sees only emptiness.
In a traditional hill-farming community, a person's worth is judged by the quality of their sheep, their work and their conduct at shepherds' meets, shows and sales. It is not judged by wealth or formal education. Skill is passed on by apprenticeship, as Rebanks learned from his grandfather and father by working beside them. Respect accumulates publicly over years, so the farming culture reproduces itself through standards everyone can see and judge.