The Lake District has a special place in my affections. In the first 20 years of my life, I lived in 7 places, all over England, but every Easter we had a family holiday at the same place in the Lakes, so it became a fixed point in my experience as I grew up. When I was 17, I worked there during the summer, in the tourist industry, leading walks in the hills; an amazing experience. The Lake District was an important place for my parents as well, they lived in Carlisle when they were first married and my brother was born there. My father's work for the ministry of agriculture took him out round the farms in the area, on his BSA motorbike, so he knew the area and the people intimately. As my father's work was with farming, I learnt from a young age that the beautiful landscapes that we walked in were created and maintained by working farmers and that without the sheep the Lake District would be a very different place. This book explains in incredible detail about those sheep and what it means to be a sheep farmer in the hills. At times it is a bit much, the complete obsession, but then that's a bit the point. The book could have been pared down to make it more readable, but the sheer volume of words about sheep is necessary to impress on the reader the astonishing expertise and knowledge of the shepherd and the central, overriding role of the sheep in the farmers' existence.