The Sheep Stell: Memoirs of a Shepherd

‘One woman’s gloriously lyrical account of life and love as a shepherdess’ Mail on Sunday

‘Janet White’s unfailingly enjoyable book … taps into a widespread feeling that we have become cut off from the natural world’ TLS

‘A book to share or even fight over if necessary’ Rosamund Young, author of The Secret Life of Cows

‘An immensely enjoyable and heartfelt book: it makes you want to run for the hills’ The Lady

With an introduction by Colin Thubron

As a child in wartime England, Janet White decided that she wanted to live somewhere wild and supremely beautiful, to inhabit and work the landscape. She imagined searching the whole world for a place, high and remote as a sheep stell, quiet as a monastery, challenging and virginal, untouched and unknown.

Turning her back on convention, Janet’s desire to carve out her own pastoral Eden has taken her from the Cheviot Hills to Sussex and Somerset, via the savage beauty of rural New Zealand.

The Sheep Stell tells the tale of a woman before her time; a woman with incredible courage and determination, truly devoted to the land and its creatures. Evocative, unaffected and profound, it is a lost classic.

‘An extraordinary memoir … The Sheep Stell is pure joy, one of the most moving books I’ve read in a long time’ Philip Marsden, author of Rising Ground

‘This is a strange and lovely book, and quiet as it is, it makes you gasp at the profoundly lived quality of the life it so modestly describes’ Jenny Diski

‘A hymn to country solitude, lyrical, unpretentious and deeply felt’ Colin Thubron