In The Place of Tides, farmer James Rebanks strays far from the land and work with which we have come to associate him. In the bestselling The Shepherd’s Life (2015) and English Pastoral (2021), Rebanks detailed his exploits as a sheep farmer in the north-eastern fells of the Lake District. Now, in his third book, he leaves the English countryside altogether.
The book is an account of the time Rebanks spent on Fjærøy, a tiny, usually uninhabited island in the Vega archipelago on Norway’s west coast, just below the Arctic Circle. He is there, from April to July, to learn the trade of Anna Måsøy, a wonderfully named “duck woman”, who each year travels from her home on the archipelago’s largest island to continue her family’s ancient tradition of gathering “a rare and precious product”: the down of the eider duck.
