MY FAMILY & OTHER ANIMALS
It’s lambing season and there’s a ewe in trouble at Ravenseat Farm in the Dales. Step forward the Yorkshire Shepherdess – hill farmer, TV star, bestselling author and mother of nine…
We meet Amanda Owen, the Yorkshire Shepherdess – hill farmer, TV star, bestselling author and mother of nine
It’s the dead of night. While the rest of her family sleep soundly in the farmhouse, Amanda Owen is on the nightshift out in the barn. Underneath a warm coat and wellies, she’s still in her pyjama bottoms, keeping watch over a poorly ewe. The sheep’s in trouble. She’s heavily pregnant but has a serious prolapse, making it impossible to give birth safely by herself. Amanda, working with the deft calmness of a midwife on a busy maternity ward, inserts a clean hand into the ewe, hoping to find signs of life. “You’re alright,” she reassures the mother-to-be as the ewe bleats in discomfort. “You’re alright, darlin’.”
Quickly and confidently, Amanda finds the front legs of the lamb and eases them out and downwards, the animal slipping easily onto the straw. With one hand comforting and steadying the mother, and the other hand briskly rubbing the new lamb with straw to coax it to life, Amanda seems unflappable. “There you go, lass,” she soothes as she pulls a second lamb from the ewe. Both newborns are alive and well, and their mother, too. “Well, that was a flipping miracle,” she whispers to herself,
knowing only too well how quickly things can go wrong when it comes to lambing.
And yet Amanda Owen, also known as the Yorkshire Shepherdess (and star of Channel 5’s Our Yorkshire Farm), wouldn’t be anywhere else. She, her husband Clive and their nine children relish life at Ravenseat, one of the most remote hill farms in the country. In the very north of the Yorkshire Dales in Swaledale, their ancient stone farmhouse sits at over 13,000 feet above sea level and is surrounded by wild, peaty moorland. Winters can be brutal and waist-deep in snow, cutting the farm off from the rest of the dale, but, come Easter time and the warming of the land, few places can claim to have such a rugged, startling beauty.
For the Owens, the Easter weeks are no holiday. It’s lambing season and it’s all hands on deck. The children – aged between two and 17 – are off school but lessons continue, out in the fields and up on the moors, helping with livestock and other farm duties. Along with about a thousand sheep, the family also care for “three terriers, Chalky, Pippen and young pup Sprout, a whole host of sheepdogs, a peacock, too many hens to count, three horses, an aged pony and a small herd of cows.” It’s what Amanda calls her “school of life”, an environment that provides endless opportunities for her children to learn new skills and practical rural know-how. It was the children who prepared the barn, for example, ready for the pregnant ewes; putting down fresh straw, lashing the hurdles together and getting the milk bottles filled for the orphan lambs.
Most of the farm’s ewes, however, won’t lamb indoors or need any human intervention. The Owens’ pregnant flock of Swaledale sheep are out on the moors, scattered across Ravenseat’s 2,000acre plot. They roam freely, ‘hefted’ to the land, a natural instinct that means they stick to their own home range. A handful of breeds, including Swaledales, have a distinct sense of place
and are so imprinted on a particular area that shepherds can let their flocks graze without fences. The sheep get to know the boundaries of their land, where the grass is particularly good and where to find shelter, and this information is passed from ewe to lamb over successive generations.
The pregnant ewes prefer to give birth outdoors, on their own terms. The Swaledale breed, which is thought to date back to the 12th century, is known for its hardiness; but they are also good mothers, often raising one lamb carefully rather than the twins of conventional, lowland breeds. It’s mothering as nature intended, but this freedom can come at a cost – new lambs occasionally fall foul of the becks, bogs and gulleys that zigzag the moorland. Luckily, the sheep have Amanda, Clive and the children to keep a beady eye out for any stragglers or sickly lambs.
Amanda is clearly a natural. From the outside, she looks born to it – comfortable with the hardships and endurance needed for working on a hill farm and deeply wedded to both the landscape and the lifestyle. And yet it wasn’t always like this. She was born and raised in Huddersfield, a bustling West Yorkshire mill town, to an engineer father and a mum who’d modelled. She found farming through James Herriot’s books, which she pored over as a child, and as a teenager, in the dazzling photographs of Dales life portrayed in Hill Shepherd by John and Eliza Forder. The school careers service, however, didn’t have a book on ‘how to be a shepherdess’, so
Amanda made it up as she went along – cycling miles on her pushbike, offering labour, free at first, to farmers. The work was gruelling but she learned tractor driving, dry-stone walling, milking cows and, most importantly, how to look after sheep. Contract shepherding followed and it was in 1996, during a visit to Ravenseat to collect a ram, that she met farmer Clive.
Serendipity is clearly a seam that runs through Amanda’s life at Ravenseat; the farm sits almost exactly midway along the coast-to-coast path that runs from the Lake District to the North Yorkshire seaside. Every year, thousands of walkers amble past Ravenseat, chatting to Amanda as they go. It was through one of these chance encounters that the opportunity to do a spot of filming with Julia Bradbury came up, which led to the ITV series The Dales. Next came Ben Fogle: New
Lives in the Wild, followed by book deals, public speaking and two series of Our Yorkshire Farm on Channel 5.
Life in the spotlight could faze even the most hardened of public figures, but Amanda seems remarkably equable about her new-found fame or what might next be in store. “What’s the worst thing that can go wrong?” she quips, with a smile, demonstrating the sturdy optimism and authenticity that make her so appealing. “As Clive would say, life’s too short to worry about the ‘what ifs’ – you’re not supposed to know what’s in the future.” And, when there’s a barn of mewling lambs, a large family and a farmful of animals who demand your attention in the here and now, you can completely see her point.
ADVENTURES OF THE YORKSHIRE SHEPHERDESS is published in paperback by Pan Macmillan at £8.99.
Amanda discovered farming through James Herriot’s books