Amanda Owen: “Always thrang.”
As her updated story of the Swaledale seasons hits the bookshelves, the nation’s favourite shepherdess explains why walkers will always be welcome on her family’s famous farm.
It’s been raining all morning at Ravenseat Farm, and Amanda Owen is drenched. When Country Walking calls for a chat, she’s standing by the fire in “the thickest, comfiest proper Guernsey jumper in the world” and waiting for her leggings to dry.
“The switch has been flicked and winter’s come,” she says.
“November is like new year if you’re a shepherd. This is where it starts.”
The Yorkshire Shepherdess: Celebrating the Seasons (Pan Macmillan) is out now in paperback, priced £8.99.
You can read as much in Amanda’s book, Celebrating the Seasons. Compiled during lockdown and illustrated with Amanda’s own photos, it documents the turn of the seasons at Ravenseat, high on the moors at the uppermost reach of Swaledale in the Yorkshire Dales.
Published last year in hardback, it became a Christmas bestseller (”it got beaten to Non-Fiction Book of the Year by Paul McCartney’s lyrics,” she says, “I suppose anyone can lose to Paul McCartney”) and has now been updated for its paperback launch.
That a story about life on a Pennine hillside should end up vying for Book of the Year won’t surprise anyone who has watched Our Yorkshire Farm. Shepherdess, nature lover, drystone waller, wild swimmer, mother of nine: Amanda’s story is unique, and her storytelling even more so. As she puts it: “I don’t overthink anything. I am what I am: a shepherdess, a sherpa and a shoveler of… y’know. I just write or talk about what I know, and take photos, and that’s it.”
That’s equally true when she talks about walking. When she recorded a sublimely beautiful walk in Wensleydale for BBC Four’s Winter Walks, she pointed out what a rarity the experience was for her. Her opening line was: “As a shepherd or a hill farmer, you do NOT set out on a walk for no reason, so this is a bit of an adventure.” Little wonder she finished by saying, “I need to do more of this. I think we all do”.
For that reason, she explains to CW, she was especially eager to show that walking is for anyone.
“Originally the BBC sent me a list of all the kit I should wear – boots, rucksacks and so on – and I said no, I’m comfortable in my wellies, that’s what I’ll walk in.
“I'm not having anybody go out and buy a pair of walking boots on my account, especially if they’re just dipping a first toe in the outdoors. If someone looks at the programme and thinks ‘that looks lovely but it looks like you need lots of posh kit’, then we’ve gone wrong. Walking is low-cost. Make up a sandwich box and go get whatever it is you’re looking for: exhilaration, excitement, quietness. It’s all out there, and it shouldn't have to be big budget.”
She may not get to be a walker much, but she certainly knows plenty of them – and she loves them. Way before the TV shows and books, Amanda’s love for communicating with people was born from serving afternoon teas to exhausted hikers coming over the hill to Ravenseat. She started over 20 years ago, and it’s still a fixture of life on the farm, 11am to 4pm each day from (roughly) May to October.
“Whenever someone asks, ‘how on earth did you end up doing the books and the television and all this?’ I say it’s all down to walkers. It’s all their fault,” she laughs.
“We’d be talking to them, and telling the stories behind different aspects of the farm or the landscape, and they’d say ‘wow’. It was all those lovely conversations that led to everything that came after. That’s why we will never stop serving afternoon teas, come hell or high water.
“It’s our cycle: six months of sheep, six months of people. The perfect split.”
Like scores of walkers in the summer months, Country Walking deputy editor Nick popped into Ravenseat while on the Coast to Coast in 2019.
Pre-fame, the majority of Amanda’s summer customers were Coast to Coast walkers, as the classic route comes right past Ravenseat. Others are on circular walks from Keld, or heading to or from famous landmarks like Nine Standards Rigg or the Tan Hill Inn. (”A brew at Ravenseat and a pint in England’s highest pub, what’s not to like?”)
Lately, of course, a lot of custom comes from fans. “Yes, there are some who arrive by car,” she says. “But the best thing is when they’ve decided that okay, they’d like to come to Ravenseat – but they’re going to make it part of a wonderful walk.”
That said, she’s careful to add that she’s not sure there is such a thing as a ‘walker’.
“Very few people define themselves by one single trait or interest. People don’t really say, ‘I'm outdoorsy, I'm a hiker, I'm a rambler, I'm a bird watcher, I’m a runner’.
“We’re humans, we’re broader than that. What we all have in common is a need to enjoy being outdoors, to let the wildness rub off on us – which it will. It can give you peace, it can inspire you, it can infuriate you. It can make you feel small, but at the same time give you strength. That’s what we’re all looking for.”
Seasonal images from a year on Ravenseat Farm.
With that in mind, Amanda is proud to say that Ravenseat is now accessible to everyone. She is the patron of new charity Access the Dales, which was set up by her friend Debbie North, a wheelchair user who established the charity in memory of her late husband and carer, Andy. Ravenseat is one of several sites across the Dales where disabled visitors can make use of all-terrain wheelchairs to explore the hills in just the same way as Amanda and her family.
Amanda with Debbie North.
“We’re on what’s billed as one of the highest, remotest hill farms in the country, and if we can make our farm accessible to everybody, I'm really proud of that,” she says.
“You can't go on television or write about this place and say, ‘hey, look at all these wonderful things; caves, becks, scree slopes and waterfalls – oh, but you can’t come and see it for yourself’.”
She dedicates the first words of her book – there is no mountain you can’t climb – to Debbie.
“Whenever people suggest that what I do is unusual or hard, I talk about Deb, because she is genuinely unstoppable,” she explains.
“Andy’s wish was to create this charity, and Deb has done it. The day Andy died, she came up to Birkdale Tarn and swam with me. We had the funeral on the farm, and the charity came to life after that. That’s triumph out of tragedy, and I am in awe of Deb because of it.”
Amanda says some people are surprised to discover she is not Swaledale born and bred; in fact she grew up in urban Huddersfield. Her passion for the Dales came from the works of hallowed author and vet Alf Wight, better known as James Herriot, creator of All Creatures Great and Small.
One work in particular.
“It was a book called James Herriot’s Yorkshire, which I think is in every charity shop in the country,” she explains.
“As a kid I would immerse myself in that book and imagine and dream. It actually has Birkdale Tarn in it, the same tarn we swim in. He talks about it being a favourite place where he had picnics with his children. Here I am, all these years later, being the person who can walk out of the door and go and tend the sheep up here, and swim in that tarn. I’ve walked there with his daughter Rosemary; the next best thing to being there with Alf himself.
“I go to literary festivals and people ask me, ‘who influenced you, was it the Brontës?’ And I’m always honest and say – nope, Herriot all the way.”
Her children, of course, have grown up streets ahead in terms of farming nous and nature knowledge.
“They learn on the go and they’ve got plenty of books, but of course kids these days have it all at the tap of a screen,” she says.
“They’re out on the fell and they see things, then they come back to the house – the only place where tablets and phones work – and find out what they’ve been looking at. You can say, particularly to Annas, ‘Take me to a nest’ and she’ll say, ‘What kind of nest do you want to see? Would you like to see a lapwing nest? Would you like to see meadow pipits? Come and see where we get ring ouzels’. And I’m like, how does she know all this? And most of it has come from being able to look things up online.
“That’s the good part of the internet. Obviously there’s a bad side, especially when it comes to mental health. I won’t ever fully trust the internet and I hope they won’t either. But if you can find a good balance, that’s the way to go.”
Mental health remains a focal point for Amanda. She frequently says that ‘Doctor Green’ is the greatest physician of them all, for animal and human; physical health and mental health. And she feels that a big part of the appeal of her books and TV shows is the simplicity of them: a gentle counter-argument to the mayhem of the modern world. That was especially true during the peak of Covid.
“One of the few good things to come out of lockdown was that people reconnected with nature a lot more,” she explains. “I’m actually quite worried that we’re already forgetting some of those good things we learned back in 2020. The joy we get from being outside, the ability to celebrate what we have on our doorstep. With all these new crises happening now, we should remember those little wins and keep that connection going.”
Life doesn’t get any less hectic, of course. Take a look at Amanda’s Twitter feed and you’ll see that her biography line says ‘always thrang’ – thrang being Yorkshire for busy. Next up is a Channel 4 series titled Amanda Owen’s Extraordinary Farming, in which she meets farmers across the UK who have found unique and innovative ways to diversify or cope with the intense pressures of agricultural life. It’s due on More4 soon.
For now, it’s back to winter on the farm. The cows are in, the tups are out, and Amanda’s leggings have finally dried.
“Right, on we go,” she says.
“There’s always summat needs doing.”
The Yorkshire Shepherdess: Celebrating the Seasons (Pan Macmillan) is out now in paperback, priced £8.99. Winter Walks: Amanda Owen and Our Yorkshire Farm are available on BBC iPlayer and My5 respectively. Find out more about Amanda’s work at www.yorkshireshepherdess.com
THREE QUICK QUESTIONS
If you could go for a walk with anyone, real or fictional, who would it be?
James Herriot. I’d love to have gone for a walk with him in real life. That would’ve been amazing.
Is there a particular place where you stand still and think, yes, I'm happy here?
There’s a point right at the top of Ravenseat where you can look out and it's completely timeless, there's nothing to tell you what century you're in. Nothing in the world has changed. Unless a plane flies over, which slightly wrecks it, but never mind.
And what’s the perfect walking snack?
Radishes. I eat radishes like you wouldn’t believe. I always have a pack in my pocket. The children reckon there’s something wrong with me, but it’s how I keep my bikini body, y’know?
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STAR WALKER: AMANDA OWEN
Born Huddersfield, 1974.
Farms at 2000-acre Ravenseat in Whitsun Dale at the far north-western head of Swaledale.
Mum of nine: Raven, Reuben, Miles, Edith, Violet, Sidney, Annas, Clementine and Nancy. Earlier this year Amanda announced she had separated from husband Clive, but they continue to work on the farm and co-parent together.
TV: The family first appeared on ITV series The Dales in 2011 (with Adrian Edmondson), and featured on Julia Bradbury’s Coast to Coast and New Lives in the Wild with Ben Fogle, before getting their own Channel 5 show Our Yorkshire Farm in 2018.
Books: Five so far, including The Yorkshire Shepherdess, Adventures of the Yorkshire Shepherdess and Celebrating the Seasons.
