‘Yorkshire farming divorces can get bitter’

They were the couple at the heart of the nation’s favourite rural show. Guy Kelly asks how the Owens split might play out

I‘The thing about farms is that they’re asset-rich, but cash poor. That’s always the issue’

t’s not easy to explain how Our Yorkshire Farm, the Channel 5 series following the life of a sheep farmer, Amanda Owen, husband Clive, and their 2,000 acres, 1,000 sheep, 40 cows, six dogs, four ponies and flock of nine children – aged five to 21 – became quite such a TV phenomenon.

Owen, a 47-year-old former model also known as the Yorkshire Shepherdess, is a likeable, garrulous figure who’s a natural on camera.

Clive, 66, is pleasant but otherwise the opposite: monosyllabic and laid-back to the point of camera-shy.

Launched in 2018, the programme was quickly dubbed the “Kardashians of the Countryside”, and portrayed life on the Owens’s remote Upper Swaledale farm, Ravenseat, as both chaotic and reassuringly predictable.

Yes, the children are a handful and animals frequently die in howling gales, but month by month the seasons turn, the squalls calm, the sun beats down, and in God’s own country, everything turns out all right.

During lockdown, the series hit 2.7 million viewers, becoming Channel 5’s most successful ever. “People needed the birds and the sunrise,” Amanda said in an interview last year. “Having our liberty taken away has given people a desire to get into the countryside. It’s a good thing. Everyone needs peace and fresh air.”

It’s perhaps why this week’s news that the Owens have officially separated, after 22 years of marriage, caused such a flurry: the peace has been disturbed. And it could be an almighty mess to clear up. Once, we watched Our Yorkshire Farm wondering how on earth the Owens stayed together, with all they had to manage. Now we’re left wondering how on earth they’ll split up.

“This hasn’t been easy, but we both believe it’s the right choice for the future of our family,” read their joint statement on Thursday. “Although we are no longer a couple, we continue to work on the farm and co-parent together, with our number one priority the happiness and well-being of our children.”

The “hasn’t been easy” part is surely good, old-fashioned Yorkshire understatement. The Owens’s marriage has come under scrutiny before, as recently as last year. After rumours they had split, another statement clarified that “just like any marriage we have our stresses and strains, coupled with all the complexities of what we do on the farm and bringing up nine kids. We’re a normal family, and we’ve never said our marriage is perfect.”

But not many relationships undergo quite the change the Owens’s did. Amanda grew up in Huddersfield in a suburban semi with a mechanic father and a model mother. She dreamed of becoming a shepherdess and so took shearing jobs as a teenager. In 1996, aged 21, she arrived at Ravenseat to collect a lamb and met Clive, then 40, who was divorced with two children. “This six-foot-something woman knocked at the door – I was very taken with her. You couldn’t not be,” Clive has said. They married in 2000, and Amanda spent the next 15 years either pregnant or breastfeeding. Land Rovers, lay-bys, thunderstorms – she’s given birth in them all. According to one legend, she once went through labour at home without waking anyone up. The TV and literary career was accidental. Media people just happened upon the farm when they traipsed through it on the 182-mile Coast to Coast Walk. A willowy, charismatic shepherdess with that scenery was always going to be worth something; having nine “free range” children and an amusingly taciturn older husband made it an easy commission. Their parenting style, so laissez-faire it could have been an act to bait mollycoddling townie types, drew headlines and more.

“I got a yellow flag from social services,” Amanda told the Hay Festival this week. “I believe there is a happy medium whereby you do let the kids climb trees. Yes, they haven’t got harnesses on or hard hats, but I believe there are some lessons to be learnt that don’t necessarily result in instant death.”

Amanda, who now has more than 500,000 Instagram followers, was once asked whether fame had changed the family. “Has it s---!” she replied, but some have estimated that her media career has made over £1 million in recent years, which surely changed the priorities of the farm’s finances. In 2020 the family bought a remote farmhouse, a few miles from their home, which is rented.

Locals have said the couple had been living separately for almost a year. Now, they may be preparing to

carve the land and assets up – which, for a farming family, isn’t exactly easy.

The Ravenseat estate is owned by billionaire Robert Miller, who founded Duty Free Shops and is the father of 90s It-girls the Miller sisters (one is married to the heir of the now-defunct Greek monarchy; another was wed to Diane von Furstenberg’s son; a third married Christopher Getty), but even a symbolic carving-up of the land the couple farms could be acrimonious.

“I know some very, very bitter divorces in the farming world up here, because often one gets the farm, and the other walks away feeling they haven’t earned it,” says John Foster, 71, whose 600 acres of once dairy, now arable land in Bridlington, East Yorkshire, has been in the family for six generations. “The thing about farms is that they’re incredibly asset-wealthy, but cash poor. That’s always the issue.”

In the Owens’s case, they may have to determine how much of the farm’s income is thanks to Amanda’s work in publicising it, and how much is down to pure farming. Or maybe they won’t need to think about that, because they’ll stay separated and only separated.

Richard Benson, author of memoir, The Farm, about growing up in rural Yorkshire, says he knows one couple “who have been separated for so long that it makes no sense for them not to divorce, but I’m sure it’s because they don’t want to bother having to divide everything up.”

It’s a unique and intense job for a couple. “I can’t think of anything else where it’s such a two-person operation, you’re so totally enmeshed in it 24/7, and in often quite inhospitable conditions,” Benson adds.

Frequently, and unfairly, the lion’s share of credit is given to the man in the partnership, but then, that’s another area where the Owens’s farming marriage has been so unusual.

After 22 years of steady partnership, child-rearing and working the land, they may now “continue to work on the farm and co-parent together”, but they’ll presumably start to lead separate lives, too. Clive has apparently never been to London and has no intention of doing so. Amanda loves day trips to the capital, book festivals, speaking appearances and whatever else she can fit in around her flock.

If we never hear from Clive again, he’d probably quite like that. You sense the Yorkshire Shepherdess, on the other hand, is just getting started. Late last year she hosted a TV show, BBC Four’s Winter Walks, alone.

“It feels a bit strange [...] there’s nobody nipping at my heels, there’s nobody asking questions. That’s not to say that I don’t like being out and about with the family and the children – of course that’s great – but the old analogy, a dog being like its owner, is true,” she said. “Because sheep dogs can’t switch off. They just want to work, their minds are buzzing. That’s how I feel. So many different things coming at you from so many directions. A bit of headspace is good for everyone. As a shepherd and a hill farmer you do not set out on a walk for no reason – so this is a bit of an adventure, really.”

And off she goes.