It must be frustrating for Jake Fiennes that reviews of his book will, as this one does, inevitably start with mention of his more celebrated siblings. Jacob Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes is one of six children – his older brother is the actor Ralph and his twin brother is Joseph. A more relevant familial connection might be made with his cousin, the writer William Fiennes. Jake shares with the author of The Snow Geese and The Music Room an almost preternatural ability to summon nature on the page, to interweave human and animal life in a landscape with elegance and compassion. Land Healer is a deeply felt, often very moving book about farming; it is also a celebration of the British landscape and a record of Fiennes’s strange, itinerant life.
I first came across him a decade ago, while researching a piece for the Guardian’s Country Diary. He was at the time a gamekeeper known for his radical ideas about ecology and biodiversity. Since then, he has become conservation manager at the vast and beautiful Holkham estate in north Norfolk, where his ideas about sustainable agriculture and landscape management have been put into practice on a massive scale.
