After two hundred years of farming in Yorkshire, the Benson family were forced to sell up. They found - like so many other farmers - that big business was wiping out a way of life they had known for generations.

Farming had not come naturally to Richard Benson - he had fled to London long ago. But when he returned to help, he found himself caught up in memories of his childhood in the countryside. Recalling a lost world of pigs digging up the neighbour's lawn, love affairs among haystacks and men who wrestled bulls to prove a point, he tells of othe changing English landscape, of the people affected - and how his family adapt to a new life after being forced to give up their birthright.

(p) 2006 Orion Publishing Group