Shepherdess, mother of nine and media star Amanda Owen talks to Maureen Paton about the joys of rural life and why she wants Angelina Jolie to play her on the big screen.
Amanda Owen – known better by her moniker The Yorkshire Shepherdess – has just been head-butted by a sheep. ‘I have the remains of a black eye,’ she giggles over the phone from her isolated 2,000-acre farm, Ravenseat, in the Dales, 1,300 feet above sea level. ‘But after wrestling sheep out of a bog where they could easily drown, I’m strong,’ she reassures me.
‘Yesterday the cows escaped. I ran down the road, panicking that they would get into the campsite, and managed to put them all back in the pasture. But while I was there I found a wealth of raspberry bushes, so got the kids foraging so I can make a raspberry pudding. I haven’t got any soft cheese so I’ll make do with yogurt and Philadelphia,’ says the best-selling author, TV star and mother of nine, who regularly improvises a feast from scratch and whose latest book (her seventh) includes her own recipes such as gipsy lamb stew and hedgerow nutty crumble. She even makes pizzas and naan bread.
All the book’s spectacular photographs of the farm and the surrounding landscape through the seasons were taken by Owen, and show the reality of her life in the iciest of temperatures. ‘You just have to weather the storm – and if there’s anything I’m good at, it’s weathering the storm,’ she says in her sunny way. A Yorkshire Shepherdess calendar will be published next year.
Meanwhile the Channel 5 documentary series Our Yorkshire Farm, which shows the Owen family at work and play, has just returned for a fifth season on Friday nights (there are only two episodes left but it’s available on the My5 catch-up service along with previous seasons).
Owen’s public life began when a walker who passed through her ‘back yard’ – along the glorious coast-to-coast Alfred Wainwright Walk from the Lake District to Robin Hood’s Bay – rang up to ask if she could do a bit of filming at the farm. That led to Pan Macmillan, publisher of the James Herriot books, asking Owen to write one about her life as a shepherdess. It was published in 2014 and the film rights were soon snapped up.
The next year the family appeared on Ben Fogle’s programme New Lives in the Wild UK, about people who have given up the rat race, which led to the commissioning of Our Yorkshire Farm.
As for finding time to write, Owen waits until the children – in ascending order: : Nancy, Clemmie, Annas, Sidney, Violet, Edith, Miles, Reuben, Raven ‘ – are asleep before switching on her iPad.
So who would she like to play her on the big screen? ‘I would love Angelina Jolie to play me because of her cheekbones, and because she’s already got a cast of her six children waiting in the wings!’ she jokes. ‘Or Kate Winslet. But any actress would need a handdouble if they have small dainty ones – they would need big blokey hands like mine.’
The fame that has come from her books and TV appearances has attracted hundreds of thousands of Instagram and Twitter followers, but none of it seems to have turned Owen’s head. To call her a breath of fresh air doesn’t do her justice. Listening to her mile-a-minute chatter – ‘I’ve skived off, I’m hiding, the family don’t know where I am’ – feels like being transported on gale-force winds blown by puff-cheeked cherubs on a medieval map, except that she’s much too down-to-earth for such a fanciful image.
Until the multi-tasking Owen burst on to our screens the only other female farmer to have become a TV phenomenon was the pioneering Hannah Hauxwell, who died in 2018 at the age of 91. Hauxwell’s struggles as a lone farmer in a remote part of the Pennines, captured in documentaries between the early 1970s and the 1990s, made her the subject of This is Your Life in 1992 and eventually globally famous.
Owen, who knew and visited Hauxwell in her later years, is cut from the same rugged cloth – if rather more photogenic than many people’s old-fashioned idea of a female farmer. ‘That stereotype grates a bit,’ admits Owen.
At 46, she’s a 6ft 2in glamazon, the daughter of an engineer and a model who has herself dabbled in modelling in the past and sometimes wears a miniskirt or an off-the-shoulder top during the summer.
‘People say of me “she’s too glamorous to be a shepherdess”, but I love my make-up,’ she protests.
‘Hopefully I’ve always retained some femininity despite working in a man’s world – even if the only soul I’m going to see all day is fleecy and woolly! I’m doing it for me. There’s no way I’m not going to spend five minutes putting on make-up – it’s about taking a pride in yourself, it’s not vanity. I make the children get in the bath, put some moisturiser on and clean their teeth, and look after their skin and hair. ‘
Owen may look like a chestnut-haired Thomas Hardy heroine on her traditional, pesticide-free farm, but she’s a thoroughly modern woman. A former teenage Goth, she turned up on her future husband Clive Owen’s doorstep in 1996 as a contract shepherdess. He is 21 years older than her, with a grownup family from his first marriage, but they clicked immediately as two people who had fallen in love with the farming life despite both coming from non-rural backgrounds.
All the children help out with chores – even Nancy, the youngest, at four – and learn to drive tractors when they’re old enough. ‘Our eldest, Raven, serves afternoon tea to people in the sunshine when she’s home from university – she’s very, very helpful. To make it work, everybody in the family unit has to play their part. We can all turn our hands to anything and cope with any spanner in the works, such as escaping cows. Clive and the children can rustle up meals if I’m not there. Miles, who wants to be a farmer, absolutely loves making cakes, and yesterday Violet made us a sausage casserole for tea,’ she explains.
Above: the nine Owen children
When an internet troll recently claimed that the way Owen is raising her brood is ‘unconventional’, she commented on Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s podcast that her children were getting ‘really good life lessons’ which can be taken anywhere.
Above: one of her daughters feeding a lamb
Surprisingly, she and Clive are still tenant farmers of Ravenseat, though they have bought a nearby house, The Firs, as a holiday home for tourists – they can also stay in the shepherd’s hut on their land. Yet she laughs at rumours that her media earnings have made her a millionaire.
‘We are happy as tenants. I’m not a millionaire, definitely not,’ she says. ‘If I was, there’d be no way I’d be selling cups of tea. But I’m rich in many ways. I’m a grafter, a worker, and from doing the books and TV I have invested in things such as an Airstream caravan, where we do the afternoon teas. We don’t go on holidays, though I might treat myself to a trip to Appleby Horse Fair.
That’s about the level we’re at – keeping it real. People have all kinds of ideas about what a shepherd’s life must be like, but I’m just myself.’
She clearly loves her four-legged charges, giving some of them names. ‘One ancient matriarch among the ewes fosters a lamb every year. I see them like people with their own traits, and some are more maternal than others. We use our sheep wool for environmental purposes, putting it back into the moor to stop flooding by making the soil hold more water. Our wool is sustainable – it doesn’t need to be flown in from the other side of the world like coconut coir matting.
‘Most of our animals are sold on to other farmers, either for breeding or for slaughter. It’s not my favourite part of the job, but I have to be realistic – if I eat meat, that’s where it comes from. I hate being at the slaughterhouse, but it’s more a case of acceptance than of getting upset. There’s an emotional attachment with the animals, don’t get me wrong, because you couldn’t do the job if you weren’t bothered. You want the best for your animals and that means a good life for them – and sometimes a good death. None of us is going to dodge death, but would you prefer to have a control over how it happens? There are more humane ways available for animals than there are for people,’ she says. It seems that being philosophical is all part of the farmer’s way of life.
‘I would always encourage more women to be farmers – we’ve seen a lot of role reversal – and I would absolutely recommend the farming life,’ she adds. ‘During the pandemic people have become more aware of supply chains. Farms like this were out of fashion at one time for being too traditional. Now more value is placed on pasture-fed animals. We have a burgeoning population – and they all need feeding.’
Yet she admits that traditional ways have been helped by technology. ‘My books wouldn’t be possible without it – and deliveries have become easier. I’ve finally managed to get the internet in here, bounced off various farm buildings, which cost a lot of money.
It’s two different worlds: the traditional shepherding and a 21st-century connection where I can speak to people the other side of the world. Another thing I couldn’t live without is my wetsuit, which means I can swim at any time of the year.’
The beautiful landscape of Ravenseat Farm.
The digital age has certainly given her a lot more creature comforts than Hannah Hauxwell. ‘I knew Hannah because her family had a connection with this farm, and I would go and see her,’ recalls Owen. ‘I helped clear her house out when she died. I don’t see myself as in any way a patch on her, but the most amazing thing to me was that she absolutely embraced the new direction her life had taken. When I spoke to her not long before she died, I asked where she would go in the world if she had the chance. I thought she would say “back to the farm” but instead she said “I would love to be in Vienna with Michael Aspel!”
‘There was so much more to her than farming. She must have had an indomitable strength to live that life, but she also lived another life. So why should you just have the one life and allow yourself to be pigeonholed?
Celebrating the Seasons with the Yorkshire Shepherdess by Amanda Owen is published by Pan Macmillan, price £20. Previous episodes of Our Yorkshire Farm are available on Channel 5’s catch-up service My5.
