top of page
Book Cover

James Rebanks

The Price of Tides

For those unfamiliar with the author, James Rebanks, he is a 50-year-old sheep farmer from Cumbria who also happens to have achieved 2 GCSEs at school and a double first in history at Oxford University. He is also a most eloquent writer about his love of the natural world. His previous two books, The Shepherd’s Life and English Pastoral, described the ups and downs of his life farming on the Fells.

This book, The Place of Tides, takes us on a journey to an even more remote and harsher environment, to a very small island off the coast of Norway where for many centuries the locals have maintained a traditional farming practice and way of life gathering the feathers from eider ducks, aka eiderdown.

Some 10 years ago, while working in an environmental consultancy, James was despatched to study how the Norwegians practised conservation and tourism. During that brief visit, he was taken by boat to visit the outlying small islands and here it was he first met Anna, the ‘Duck Woman’. The impression Anna left on his memory led to him some years later inviting himself to join her and her neighbour Ingrid for the 10 weeks spent carrying out this solitary work. James had found himself with something of a midlife crisis and he felt he needed to escape for a while from the pressures of farming and family life in the Fells of Cumbria.

This is a story of reverting to a simple life, preparing loads of nesting sites around the island to encourage the eider ducks to come ashore to nest and start their families in comparative safety. The three ‘duck farmers’ have a small very basic cottage in which to live and they have to adapt to moving quietly and gently around the island to give the eider confidence in the security they provide. Gradually the ducks begin to trust their human guardians and eventually, they start to come onto the island and to their newly constructed temporary homes in which to start their new families.

The ‘rent’ they pay for this accommodation is the down feather they leave behind as they eventually disperse to the oceans. The duck farmers go round gathering all the down from the nests and once they have returned to the comparative comfort of their own homes they will spend the winter months cleaning their precious product to make the most luxurious stuffing for duvets.

James also records witnessing the degradation of the natural world even in such a wild and remote location. The abundant fish stocks which have sustained Norwegians and the wildlife forever, are thinning out, consequently, the eider are hugely depleted in their numbers as are many of the other seabirds that used to call these barren islands their home. In addition, the islanders spend much of their precious time litter-collecting and James makes the point that so much of the plastic detritus he came across had originated from the shores of his own country.

I was surprised how much I enjoyed this remarkable book but then James Rebanks is a remarkable author.

John Gaye

Allen Lane

bottom of page