Woodston: The Biography of an English Farm

by John Lewis-Stempel

In the beginning was the earth...

From the Paleozoic volcanoes that stained its soil, to the Saxons who occupied it, to the Tudors who traded its wool, to the Land Girls of wartime, John Lewis-Stempel charts a sweeping, lyrical history of Woodston: the quintessential English farm.

With his combined skills of farmer and historian, Lewis-Stempel digs deep into written records, the memories of relatives, and the landscape itself to celebrate the farmland his family have been bound to for millennia. Through Woodston's life, we feel the joyful arrival of oxen ploughing; we see pigs rootling in the medieval apple orchard; and take in the sharp, drowsy fragrance of hops on Edwardian air. He draws upon his wealth of historical knowledge and his innate sense of place to create a passionate, fascinating biography of farming in England.

Woodston not only reminds us of the rural riches buried beneath our feet but of our shared roots that tie us to the land.

Genres: Nature, Nonfiction, History, Natural History, Memoir, Gardening

Hardcover

First published July 1, 2021

Reviews

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

interesting book charting the history of a farm in Worcestershire and generally farming

[Ivan Monckton · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book that grows on you as you read it. The first 100 pages are interesting and informative, but are the geology, prehistory and early history of a vast area rather than a particular farm. There are too many instances of the usual farmer’s whine about supposed state interference in rural affairs, which is strange given the author’s stance on modern farming practices, and Lewis-Stempel’s over dependency on the internet leads to some basic errors: the confusion over the Worcestershire and Cambridgeshire Stourbridges is mentioned in other reviews; the method of dating hedges he promotes has been rubbished by local and landscape historians for more years than he has been writing books; the use of commons by the labouring classes before enclosure is nowhere near as clear cut as maintained.
Having said all that, there is a huge amount of local and general agricultural history that is very well presented, and all the better for being laid out by a practising farmer.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very interesting, informative and enjoyable read. If you have read any of John Lewis-Stempels previous books you know what to expect from his writing.

Humorous in parts and very remarkable how farming and the countryside has changed over the centuries, sometimes for the good and the bad - often at the expense of the farmers and workers.

I look forward to whatever is next from this author, so far all I have read have been thoroughly enjoyable and this one is no different.

This book also completes my reading challenge of 50 books for the year.

[Sophy H · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very well put together book about the history of one family farm, and when I say history, I mean dating back from the Big Bang to the present day!

John Lewis-Stempel makes this book fascinating by investigating the changing practices in land management, the types of dominating wildlife and managed herds, the treeline, the crops, and the attitudes and values of people towards nature and farming.

It is funny how nothing and yet everything has changed. Ancient wisdom has made a "comeback" in the teaching of traditional organic farming.

Lewis-Stempel farms traditionally, resting the land when it needs to rest, hand scything, using an old saddle "sit-on" tractor instead of a modern computerised behemoth. If only more farming was done like this, instead of factory farmed, overfed, pumped full of chemical animals being treated abysmally.

A great overall read (although I took off one star for the talk of shooting animals, not honourable at all).

[Pea · Rating 2 out of 5]

Less of a biography of a farm, more of a story of his grandparents really. Not what I expected nor appreciated.I much prefer his shorter works that are about specific species.it was a slog to finish. For someone who loves nature so much, I’m surprised at his distain for conservationists and find him to be rather narcissistic. Written in his usual style, plenty of poetry and quotes, good descriptive terminology, lovely illustrations & a very aesthetically pleasing sleeve- it will look nice on the book shelf

[Howard Cracknell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Following on from La Vie I had an inclination of what I was in store from this and it didn’t disappoint. A whistle-stop re-telling of Britain from the big-bang to the modern day with the sinuous narrative of the Woodston Family Farm at its heart.

It can be oddly sporadic at times with periods of seemingly disjointed facts and notes poured over but I won’t pretend I didn’t enjoy these forays either, especially as it all seems bound together with such lyricism.

I’m not exactly of the farming ilk as I gaze across my 0.33 acres of England I call my own, but take great pleasure in the experiences here and the ratiocination of the authors ultimate rejection of the modern day farming practices and back to a time when there was seemingly more care and consideration. Ultimately supply and demand dictates that farming at that level will never be sustainable but the theory and inclination is honourable.

[Elizabeth King · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating history of a farm written with love and happy memories

[Annie Carr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing-a wander through a landscape and the history of farming. The relevance of land to people and people on landscape.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Readable but my goodness, what a biased, ‘rose-tinted spectacles’ account of farming and farmers!

[Kenneth S]

A nice book but he seems to have got Woodston near Peterborough confused with Woodston in Herefordshire. He mentions Stourbridge Fair which was held in Cambridge as being 25 miles from Woodston. Well it is from Woodston near Peterborough but not Woodston in Herefordshire. He mentions that the fair was held alongside the river Cam so he’s not talking about a different Stourbridge Fair. It is the fair where Newton bought his prisms for light experiments.

[Mary Koepke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Once you get over the first chapter it is very readable. The only thing slightly annoying is the author's often pretentious pseudo-poetic prose that makes him often sound quite condescending. He's also got a clear contempt for people living in cities because they don't understand farming life and aren't 'part' of the community. The fact that being able to grow up in it live on a farm is a position of elite financial and often hereditary privilege is never addressed.

[Snoakes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm always happy when a John Lewis-Stempel book works its way up the virtual TBR pile - I simply love the way he writes about our custodianship of the natural world.

As a farmer and a historian he is well placed to write a biography of a farm, from the formation of the rocks under its soil to the modern conversion of the unused hop kilns into swish apartments. Each chapter covers a different age of farming, starting with the prehistoric clearing of much of the wildwood surrounding Woodston. Subsequent chapters cover the feudal system and its decline, the wool trade, the agricultural revolution, hop harvesting and sheaves of other topics.

He is a farmer and this is unashamedly from a farmer's point of view - albeit one who believes in a greater connection to the land. He mourns the overuse of chemicals, the destruction of hedges and the subsequent decline in farmland birdlife, saying:

"Difficult, I think, to see how the current mania for planting trees in Britain in re-creation of wolfy wildwood will improve the lot of the corn bunting, which requires open, arable fields. I should probably have confessed at the outset of this book that it is an unashamed defence of farming, and the English farmed landscape."

He indulges in some experimental archaeology in order to understand the lives of those who farmed the land before him. In the most extreme of these experiments he spends a week working as a peasant farmer in the 1300s would have. It's an exhausting feat of manual labour from dawn to dusk - and he does this on a medieval diet too.

Ultimately though Woodston is a fascinating social history with some beautiful descriptive writing. You can smell the hops drying, feel the soil crumble between your fingers, hear the bleating of the ewes at lambing and taste the cider in the flagons discarded in the hedgerows.

"The wood; at night it exhales its animals; at dawn it inhales them in. The dog and I have now gone from the world of black-and-white into the world of colour. The stars … they have melted away. Under my feet, the emerald green of arable weeds: groundsel, mouse-ear, docks, thistles. The bright yellow of hawkbit. We complete our traverse, reach the stone track. I open my hand, the dog takes the cheese. A dog’s nose in the hand; it is a familiar feeling, perhaps twenty thousand years old."

[Don · Rating 4 out of 5]

This ‘biography of an English farm’ is comprehensive, starting in geological times, well-researched (with extensive footnotes and a generous bibliography), and personal – the farm and district have long-standing family connections for the author. He writes in an appealing, sympathetic style; although many of the chapters are divided into more-or-less disjointed sections, the book is little the worse for that.

Although the author has an observant and appreciative eye for nature, he is first and foremost a farmer, and the book is unashamedly presented from a farmer’s perspective. That said, he advocates such things as maintaining physical links with the land, arguing that many modern farm workers, enclosed in their tractor cabs, are too separated from the weather and the soil to fully engage with what is going on. He also argues, amongst much else, for the ethical treatment of farm animals, although some would argue that it would be yet more ethical for farmers to stick to plants. Nevertheless, if (as a non-farmer) one wishes to get a feeling for the farming life, and its place in the development and maintenance of the English countryside, and in English society, this is not a bad place to start.

[Rob Sedgwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like the idea of this book. I often wonder (for places I know well) what it looked like 100 years ago, 200 years, 500 years, 1000 years, pre-history and in pre-human times. This is essentially what Woodston is. Because it's about a farm, which has been a farm for millennia, this makes the job a bit easier than say a house because it's got recorded history and you can also look at the current land usage for clues. The author's family have also worked on the farm for several generations so he has his own oral history and family records to draw on.

The book is roughly chronological but does jump around a bit, with the present day intervening occasionally. The reason I don't give it 5 stars is it's such a big topic it's almost too much to take on without it becoming a bit of a ramble. Many topics are covered such as modern farming methods, the loss of habitat for our wildlife, mechanisation of farm machinery, and changes in crops and livestock as society changes.

Like much of Thomas Hardy's novels, in this book, there is an underlying sadness that traditional ways have been and are being lost, which I do have some sympathy with. That really infuses the book and it's more about that than the actual story of the farm in my opinion.

[A J HOOPER · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another beautiful poetic description of a special patch of the English countryside from the wonderful John Lewis-Stempel. Woodston the book details the history of Woodston the farm situated near to Tenbury Wells, starting with prehistory and systematically working its way through the historic periods. I found the Stone Age chapters fascinating. I'm always knocked out by how similar our Stone Age ancestors were to us. If we were forced to do without modern technology I can see us living in virtually the same way.
A fun aspect of this history is that Stempel attempts to carry out the physical side of farming, using the same methods described in each historical period. As in previous books he includes much that is personal; his walks at sunset, his dog training, his bird and plant spotting, plus he often brings his grandparents into the picture, his grandfather being an estate manager for Woodston.
I learn so much about grains, nutrition and agriculture, from this man. I thoroughly applaud his attempts to bring life back into English soil. But above all its his use of language that's so lyrical. A beautiful, beautiful book.

[Reader · Rating 2 out of 5]

I bought this book because of the author recommendation in the Sunday Times: 'Lewis-Stempel is one of our finest nature writers ... He writes with delicate observation and authority, giving us in Woodston a book teeming with fascinating details, anecdotes and penetrating insights into the real cost of our denatured countryside.' From this book I glean that Lewis-Stempel isn’t a nature writer at all - he’s all about farming and, in this book at least, seems to advocate our denatured countryside as a worthwhile trade for farmland.

Taking a swipe at another author ‘Trees are trees…’ (clearly a reference to Peter Wohlleben’s writing) was not cool with a prose that, for me at least, demonstrated an underlying, rather smug, ignorance towards the underlying fundamentals of our natural environment.

All of the former aside I found the book boring and put it down half way through - it really is just a book about the history of a farm. Yawn.

[Jack Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author is very open that this is an unashamedly pro-farming book, which is fine and a viewpoint that is often underrepresented. But I found some discussions on conservationism and rewilding quite reductive. There’s a couple times he makes comments along the lines of ‘all these conservationists and rewilders would get rid of farmers and livestock’, which seems either deliberately misleading or an uninformed view on rewilding, where often grazing livestock are key. Also seemed to be some shifting baseline syndrome on farming’s value to wildlife, such as when saying ‘if there was no farmland what would happen to farmland birds?’…. The birds have been around much longer than the farmland..

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting perspective on the history of farming in the UK, seen from the point of view of one farm, where the author’s grandparents were farm managers in the 1930-40s. The book gets better as it goes on, and where there are real historical references to underpin the story. It would have been better to edit out the whole of chapter 1, and most of Chapter 2, which is all too general and not about Woodston Farm itself. But from then on, the author has done a good job of interweaving the history and his reflections as a modern-day small-scale farmer.

[Sevket Akyildiz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Explains the history of the English landscape from prehistory and ancient times to the present day through the eyes of one village.
Clear and contemplative comparisons between old and new farming methods, and between the old (the traditional) and the new (the modern).
The book discusses how humankind interacts with Nature for good and bad.
Very well-written in simple English, an easy and worthwhile read.

[Mark Clavier]

I enjoyed this one, though it has the air of a book written fairly quickly. But it's an entertaining insight into how the same farm has changed over the centuries.

[Kharis · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very insightful book but not my fave by him. John SL is one of my fave naturewriters.

[Simon McCrum · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely gentle but very informative book that traces the historical line of a farm in England from the Romans to modern day. It's rather enchanting and very enjoyable.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 🌟

[Em Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

Classic Lewis-Stempel. I enjoyed the treatise of how farming has changed over the years.