“I wanted to be that person standing on a hill. It wasn’t about owning a farm. It was about having that freedom”
The Yorkshire Shepherdhess, aka Amanda Owen, had a very particular life in mind when she moved to a remote hill farm, as she tells Rachael Henry
Next to the packhorse bridge over the beck that flows in front of Ravenseat Farm, there’s a hand-chalked sign. ‘Closed,’ it says (on the days when they’re not open for cream teas). ‘ Please feel free to use the toilet, water tap and picnic tables.’
For full-bladdered coast-to-coast walkers used to encountering signs that say things more like ‘ Private’, ‘ Keep Out’ and ‘No Trespassing’ on their trans-Pennine rambles, it must be a refreshing (and relieving) change. If they’re familiar with Ravenseat Farm from its many television appearances, they’ll feel even more refreshed when they walk into a farmyard busy with toddlers, toys and terriers. This slightly chaotic, bohemian idyll is Amanda Owen’s real life. And she’s genuinely happy to share it.
“What you see is what you get,” says Amanda, aka The Yorkshire Shepherdess, whose third book, chronicling life on a Swaledale hill farm with her husband, nine children, four horses, seven dogs, 45 cows and 1,000 sheep has just been published.
“We are not fake. Visitors come here and say ‘ I can’t believe it’s real.’ But don’t you think that truth is sometimes stranger than fiction?”
ACCESS ALL AREAS
It’s her straightforward telling of extraordinary stories that makes Amanda’s books so captivating. The rat that launches itself at her while she’s on the loo in the middle of the night; the picnicker eating a Scotch egg while peering into the hastily parked ambulance where she’s giving birth to her fourth child; her husband, Clive, turning down the chance to appear in Andrea Arnold’s film adaptation of Wuthering Heights because he’s entering a prize sheep at the Hawes sale (where he eventually sells it for £28,000). Lambing sheep; working sheepdogs; wild swimming in icy, peaty tarns. It’s all a long way from the Huddersfield semi where Amanda grew up in the 70s and 80s.
Her dream of a rural life first took shape when she read her grandparent’s James Herriot books (the post-war memoirs of a Yorkshire Dales vet, later immortalised in the television series All Creatures
Great and Small). But she didn’t have the grades to train as a vet: “I wasn’t a very studious kid, but I wasn’t a bad kid either,” she says. “I was one of the middling ones that floats around and nobody ever remembers.”
To anyone who’s ever encountered the six-foot-two shepherdess at Ravenseat Farm, riding her quad bike or serving cream teas to walkers with a baby strapped to her back, it’s hard to understand how she could fail to make an impression. She, Clive and their evergrowing brood certainly made an impression on the makers and viewers of television shows such as Julia Bradbury’s Wainwright Walks: Coast to Coast in 2009 and The Dales in 2011. The openness and good humour with which they invited the cameras to follow them tending their Swaledale sheep on one of the highest and most remote hill farms in England struck a chord.
“With us it’s all about accessibility,” says Amanda, who reckons that a big part of their appeal is that she and Clive are both “offcumdens” – incomers. Clive was born in Doncaster, south Yorkshire, the son of a joiner, later moving to Cumbria. Aged 12, he started rearing calves in a field next to his parents’ house, and after years of graft and contract farming, successfully applied for the tenancy of Ravenseat Farm, which is
part of a 32,000-acre shooting estate owned by the Duty Free Shops billionaire Robert Miller.
“The fact that we are not born and bred to this makes a difference, because we know where we’ve come from,” Amanda says. She comes over with such authentic warmth on camera that a female walker once knocked on her door to ask if she could spare a tampon. “It’s easy for a farmer to say: ‘ Why on earth are townies coming here and tramping through my fields?’ But that’s where we come from, so we see things differently.”
LIVING THE DREAM
Amanda didn’t become a shepherdess by accident, though. After A levels, while studying for an NVQ in veterinary nursing, she borrowed a book from the library that changed the course of her life. It was called Hill Shepherd, by John and Eliza Forder, a ‘photographic essay’ from 1989 full of evocative images of fells and dales and snow and sheepdogs. “I wanted to be that person standing on the hill in the Lake District or the Dales, with the dog and the stick, the whole landscape in front of me,” she says. “It wasn’t about owning a farm. It was about being that person who had that freedom.”
She scoured the farming press for contract work, taking anything that came along. She ended up in Cumbria’s Eden Valley, living in a whitewashed cottage, helping her landlord with lambing and taking every opportunity to learn skills, from sheep shearing to drystone walling, to ensure she would always remain employable.
That’s how she found herself driving over to Swaledale on a dark October night – a climb that’s hair-raising enough in broad daylight without a sheep trailer attached to your pickup – to collect a tup (male sheep) from Swaledale breeder Clive Owen.
His first words to her, recounted in her first bestselling book, The Yorkshire Shepherdess, were: “Away in, mi lass, and I’ll get t’kettle on.” Six months later, she moved in with him. She was 21; he was 42, divorced with two children.
“I never dwelt on the age gap . . . and I still don’t,” she writes. “We both knew we just fit together somehow.”
RAISING HER FLOCK
The couple now have nine children together. Raven, the eldest, has just done her A levels and plans to study medicine; Nancy, the youngest, is still in nappies. As detailed in nerve-shredding episodes throughout her books, bringing children into the world and raising them in a location that’s barely hospitable to sheep, let alone humans, has rarely been straightforward. There’s tiny Reuben, who was born 10 weeks prematurely at home and wrapped in tinfoil to be driven to the nearest maternity unit two hours away. There’s baby Miles, with a vengeful ferret’s teeth planted in his cheek. There’s the terror of driving a desperately sick Violet to the nearest A& E with suspected meningitis because the weather’s too foul for an emergency helicopter to land.
These stories all have happy endings, but Amanda doesn’t shield her children – or her readers – from nature’s crueller side. “There’s no better way to teach them the dangers of drowning than fishing a dead lamb out of a bog,” she says, showing me the photographic evidence that she’s about to put on
“The fact that we are not born and bred to this makes a difference because we know where we’ve come from”
Twitter. “Living somewhere like here gives you a different mindset. When you haven’t got this safety system of having somebody at your beck and call to mend things, to pick up the pieces, you develop a sense of independence.”
The children’s free-range lifestyle, all trailer rides and hay bales and bottle-fed orphan lambs, looks idyllic to Amanda’s 58,000 Twitter followers and the 16,000-plus visitors who pass through Ravenseat every year. But the last role she wants to be cast in is that of a parenting guru. “I’m not some sort of Earth mother,” she says ( handing out bags of Monster Munch to her kids as if to prove it). “I don’t go out there to say I’m wonder woman. The minute you get yourself a soapbox and start going all preachy, saying this is how you should do things. . . Well, I’ve avoided that.”
So you won’t find overt politics in Amanda’s books. No commentary about the financial plight of hill farmers or cuts to rural transport or the rewilding debate. “I’m not qualified to do that. There are people who sit in offices who can throw facts and figures around, who are experts in their field. My fields are these kind of fields outside and I can talk very eloquently about what goes on in them. Don’t you think that if people stuck to writing and talking about what they know, we’d be in a better spot, generally?
FROM HUDDERSFIELD TO HAY
The girl who got an E in her GCSE English exam is now a bestselling author who sells out at literary festivals and hangs out in green rooms with the likes of Stephen Fry.
“A lot of what I’ve done has been down to luck,” she says, although she describes as “hell” the actual process of writing the books, late at night once all the children and animals were settled.
Does she think her books could be the James Herriots of our time, inspiring the next generation to grab life by the (rams’) horns? “I hope so. If anyone takes anything away from them, I’d hope that it would be to give something a go, because otherwise how do you know if you’re any good at it? There’s always people who’ll tell you you can’t do this, you can’t do that, you can’t write a book because you’ll never have time. Well, do you know what? It depends how driven you are and how much you want it.” Adventures of the Yorkshire Shepherdess