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“When Raven was born, foot-and-mouth disease was on the rampage, everything in the countryside was shutting down, it was panic stations and dead stuff,” Amanda says. Add to this the fact that Ravenseat was a two-hour drive from the nearest hospital and it becomes hair-raising. She doesn’t have contractions, her waters don’t break and her babies present face first. It was then that Amanda discovered that her labour comes on suddenly (usually very early) with scant warning. The birth of their first daughter, Raven, would have been enough to make many of us stop at one. Yet at the same time, you could feel that it had once had something else, been something more.
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“But there was a TV programme called The Dale that Died and that was how it felt. “I don’t want to say it was desolate,” she says. Smoke-stained wallpaper and carpets so damp that they squelched.
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It was a long journey deep into the dales, down dirt tracks, through a river, and at the end of it all was Clive Owen, her future husband. Her first glimpse of the place was on a cold October night in 1996, when she was 21 and was sent there by her boss to collect a ram. It just … happened.”įor her, the reason is all wrapped up in Ravenseat, the family farm. Was it Clive, her husband, who wanted children? “Oh God, no!” (Clive was divorced with two children of his own when they met.) “I don’t think we ever even talked about having children – or how many,” says Amanda. But did she at least want one child eventually? “I don’t even know if I did.” “I had no dream to have an enormous family,” says Amanda, 42.
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What’s less clear – or a little more woolly – is quite why Amanda has had such an enormous brood herself, when she insists that motherhood never even figured in her plans.Īmanda Owen at Ravenseat. (Hollywood have bought the rights.) Now she has written A Year in the Life of the Yorkshire Shepherdess, a gentle month-by-month account of her life. Her Twitter account – packed with sheep, snow, hail, stunning vistas and cherubic children – drew such a following that a book soon followed, The Yorkshire Shepherdess. Her passion for the shepherding life has opened many doors.
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She vividly recalls being transfixed by All Creatures Great and Small, the TV series based on the books of the Yorkshire vet James Herriot, and having her own flock was always her aim. After college, while her friends went to university, took jobs in banks, or got engaged, she cycled into the countryside to find farming jobs.
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In some ways, the Owens “rear” rather than “parent” – most of the children have free run of the place, plus jobs and responsibilities, while the babies go everywhere with Amanda, on her back, until they can walk.Īmanda was never one to follow the flock. All on one of the most exposed and remote farms in the Yorkshire dales. Nine, to be exact – aged from seven months to 15 years, along with dogs, horses, ponies and 1,000 sheep. A sign on the gate to Amanda and Clive Owen’s farm reads: “Slow Down, Free-Range Children.”