'Gabriel Oak dressed up a bit but not as much as he would have been for church' look
Apart from the fact that Gabriel Oak is a rock of reliability, saver of hay ricks and sheep with bloat, and utterly hands-on and a worker!
I mean, Gabriel would never have let the apple crop rot in the orchards or failed to make the cider, whatever else was going on in his life.
Incidentally, the Haye Farm episode of the podcast, in which BC says that the Walkers never made any cider over the whole five years they lived at Haye, reminds me again of what I always thought was a deeply odd moment in TWS, when the Walkers, just back (purportedly) from their Icelandic walk, note that the apples are ready to be picked and that 'soon the cider season would begin'. Then there's a storm, lots of the trees are stripped and apples left lying in the orchard grass, and there's the following exchange:
‘What a waste. These need to be off the ground and into the cider barn before they rot.’ Moth squatted under a tree picking a few undamaged apples from the ground and putting them in a bucket. ‘We’ll have to just pick up what we can. What else can we do?’
‘Just me and you? We’ll never do it; there’s too many. We can pick up a few but the bulk of these will be lost. What a mess.’
We looked across the orchard at the devastation; we couldn’t possibly pick them all up before they began to rot, but who could possibly help us? I was sure Sam would, but he was tied-up with life two hundred miles away. It seemed as if there was no one to ask.
After which, apparently unsought, a crowd of local volunteers show up to pick.
But my question is -- what were the Walkers expecting to happen? Their tenancy agreement was that they would handle the orchards and the cider-making. Why had they no plan for the apple harvest? Why would they think of asking their London-based landlord for help, when the whole point of him taking them on as tenants was for them to manage the cider-making?
And then we're told, after the volunteers show up to pick:
Within days the loft of the cider barn was stacked with hessian sacks full of salvaged apples, and freshly pressed juice began to fill the barrels
Note the use of the passive voice. The volunteers appear to have done the picking, and presumably the young cider-making couple are the ones pressing the juice? While TWS makes it look as if it's the Walkers lovingly picking and pressing.
Especially as the next chapter, the final one in TWS, implies that it's the wholesome physical labour of managing the orchards and making cider that is saving TW:
No drugs or doctors could help Moth, but he didn’t need them. Simply by living as he was built to, his body had found a way to sidestep the failures and go on. As surely as removing heavy human interference from the land was allowing the wildlife to return to the farm, so Moth was surviving by returning to a more natural state of existence.
And yet, by the time of writing of LL, this wholesome outdoor life of physical labour in nature is no longer working, and he's rapidly deteriorating and needs to be taken off to Cape Wrath to walk a famously challenging trail, despite being at death's door, collapsing in a pool of his own urine, falling in the orchard, unable to walk two easy miles. Because 'Moth is fine. We're not doing anything new, just pottering' doesn't sell books.
Interesting too that BC told CH on the podcast that he and the Walkers had been planning to go into business together on the farm 50/50, and that this (implicitly wellness/rewilding etc) was going to be the subject of her next book. Until it wasn't...