An English western in the time of foot-and-mouth
THE BORROWED HILLS SCOTT PRESTON
272pp. John Murray. £16.99.
AS WE KNOW from Covid, case numbers are only one measure of a disease’s impact. In 2001 Britain experienced its worst-ever outbreak of foot-and-mouth. To stop the spread, farms were quarantined, areas of the countryside were locked down and millions of livestock animals were culled and burnt. By the time the disease was stopped in its tracks in October of that year, just 2,000 infections had been recorded. But the cost to farmers’ wallets and mental health was immense.
Scott Preston’s debut novel, The Borrowed Hills, is set in the epicentre of the outbreak: Cumbria. It begins in the early days of the crisis, in the middle of lambing season. Steve Elliman has been following all the government guidance: bringing his sheep in off the fells, isolating them. But it isn’t enough. Soon he is visited by men in “white rubber spaceman” suits, come to murder his flock. “First kills went fine, far as killing goes, one pop, one thud, sometimes a bleat, and the sheepdog waiting by their side to keep them still.” Then the sheep scatter, and the spacemen are “chasing on foot and shooting where they stood against walls or feed troughs or other bodies. Pouncing on the back of ewes with knives to bleed through, pulling twohanded when they got stuck, jamming rods in their skulls, using the rams’ horns as handles”. When they are done, and the corpses are burnt, the “only sign they’d been [on Steve’s farm] was the blood spilling along the road on their way out”.
Discovering one lamb they missed, Steve tries to find a home for it at Caldhithe, the farm of William Herne. But it is much the same story there. Total slaughter. And so he leaves. “I had to get out. Not just Caldhithe but Cumbria. At the time I thought maybe forever.” He takes a job as a lorry driver and – in a section that evokes Nabokov’s Lolita in its exhilarating panorama of a country’s underbelly viewed from the road – spends three lonely years among those as ignored and degraded as he is: “families standing fast with all they had left and folk who thought sticking it out meant waiting to rot”.
On his return Steve is recruited by William for a sheep-rustling operation: to “get back at” those who “took everything from us”. The job, whose target is a thriving agritourism farm down south, comes off, with only a few (incredibly tense) minor hitches. But they are not out of the woods yet. Back in Cumbria the man who helped them with th
