Cows in culture and soil

From Cuyp's paintings, to Wordsworth's wanderings to modern dairy management and soil fertility via Victorian Industrial farming and talking Swiss satirical cows - Cumbrian farmer James Rebanks joins Matthew Sweet in a programme marking the anniversary of the poet Wordsworth, who helped shape attitudes to landscape. Other guests include New Generation Thinker Seán Williams from the University of Sheffield and Professor Karen Sayer from Leeds Trinity University who is writing Farm Animals in Britain, 1850-2001 and is part of a team of academics working on the project https://field-wt.co.uk/

James Rebanks is the author of English Pastoral: An Inheritance; The Shepherd's Life and The Illustrated Herdwick Shepherd. An exhibition of paintings by Cuyp (1620–1691) at the Dordrechts Museum in Holland will now run from 3 October 2021– 6 March 2022

Sean read his own translation from the 1850 Novel "The Cheese Dairy in Cattlejoy" by Jeremias Gotthelf.

The contemporary cow-art Karen mentions is in an online exhibition at Reading's Museum of English Rural Life https://merl.reading.ac.uk/explore/online-exhibitions/sire/

Producer: Alex Mansfield

You might also be interested in the Free Thinking Collection of episodes Green Thinking which includes discussions about soil, Rachel Carson's influential book Silent Spring, a Free Thinking festival discussion with James Rebanks and anthropologist Veronica Strang, Peter Wohlleben on trees, George Monbiot on the Green Man myth, Chris Packham on music https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07zg0r2 Our Woolly episode looks at sheep from medieval wool merchants and images of the lamb of God to Sean the Sheep on screen https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0009bw4

You can find a discussion about Wordsworth with the directors of Lancaster University's Wordsworth Centre for the Study of Poetry https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p087kr4n

Radio 3 is broadcasting new writing from the 2020 Contains Strong Language Festival in Cumbria on The Verb and as the Radio 3 Drama.