Cold comfort on the wolds

Moving to a farm cottage 700ft up in the Pennines, surrounded by sheep and serenaded by curlews, and conscious of the dawn-to-dusk regime of the family next door, one begins to understand life on a small mixed farm. It is unrelenting work.

No wonder Richard Benson preferred the glitzy attractions of Grub Street. But if he had not abandoned his patrimony, we would not have this quite moving memoir of change on the Yorkshire wolds, the county’s least appreciated hinterland. The undulating hills can be as bleak as Hardy’s ‘starve-acre’ Flintcombe Ash with the same flint and chalk, yet as pastoral as Talbothayes.

When Benson was nobbut a lad in the 1960s the wolds had many small farms raising pigs and a few milker cows, growing turnips, with a barnful of rusty machinery and a coal fire halfway up the back of the farmhouse kitchen. Not any more. The sugar-beet barons and the agri-industrialists have taken over. The farmhouse is a swish property owned by a stockbroker from Leeds and the barns have been converted to holiday flats.

The Bensons, Gordon and Pauline, moved to the fictionalised wolds village of Sowthistle from the south Yorkshire coalfield to bring up their family. People forget that mining was a semi-rural industry. Pits were not in towns, because they were dirty and took up too much room. As a boy myself, in a west Yorkshire colliery village, I used to rise early on summer Sunday mornings and tramp the countryside towards Pontefract, knocking on farmhouse doors and asking to look round. One family in Purston even took me to the Great Yorkshire Show in grand Harrogate. That wasn’t my idea of ‘the farm’ —machines of daunting size and manicured prize Jerseys.

Happily, the smell of the soil still clings to Benson’s The Farm.