Swimming in natural pools and playing in caves, Amanda Owen’s youngest children are “feral” at the moment, she happily declares.
But the mum-of-nine, whose family life on a 2,000-acre working farm has been chronicled in the TV series Our Yorkshire Farm and Our Farm Next Door, insists the unparalleled freedom her children enjoy is an invaluable lesson for the rest of their lives.
“Life here prepares you for life anywhere,” she says. “It gives you a can-do mindset, common sense, and a work ethic. It teaches you that you can turn your hand to anything, that you won’t give up, and that sometimes life is hard and you don’t get the results you want, no matter how hard you try.”
Owen, 50, has children Raven, Reuben, Miles, Edith, Violet, Sidney, Annas, Clementine and Nancy with ex-husband Clive, with whom she’s currently renovating a 200-year-old property near the family farm in Swaledale in the Yorkshire Dales, as documented in a new series of More4’s Our Farm Next Door.
She says some of the kids have recently been playing “extreme hide and seek”, and explains: “They’ve got places to climb, and they’ve even got a cave. They said ‘You’ll never guess where we’ve been – we’ve been caving’. I said ‘That’s fantastic. I bet you didn’t have all the caving kit on.’
“That’s the absolute joy of it, just being able to give them that freedom. We’re blessed because we’ve got this space around us.”
But in today’s culture of over-protective parents and ‘cotton-wool kids’, doesn’t Owen worry about her children – and particularly the youngest ones – Nancy, aged eight, Clemmy, nine, and Annas, 11?
“Yeah, course I do,” she admits. “You want to keep your child safe, of course. But danger comes in many forms, whether it’s vehicles, fast-flowing rivers, things with teeth and hooves, or even through a small screen. Who knows where the danger’s coming from, but you can’t live your life being risk-averse, and I wouldn’t teach that or champion it.
“Just learn how to live your life and have a sense of practicality as well,” she advises. “You will to some degree have to be fearless if you’re going to get on in life – you have to be someone who takes steps forward, not someone who shies away.”
She recalls her own childhood in urban Huddersfield, and how she was “scooting between cars and goodness knows what” on roller skates and on her Chopper bike, and points out: “That would be lethal for these guys – they’d step out into the traffic in about three seconds. It’s about horses for courses. They know this patch, and keeping them away from the dangers of life doesn’t make them safer – I think it has the opposite effect.
“Skills are adopted throughout your childhood, so obviously there are some things that are lethal, and we avoid those by learning about them – whether it’s cold water shock, falling from a height, what could potentially happen if…
“It’s seeing it and negating that danger, it’s not keeping them entirely away from it, because you learn the respect and how to operate, and those lessons are probably learned as well as anything here.”
And just because her kids are being raised in a rural idyll doesn’t mean Owen expects them to completely forego the tech most modern kids are obsessed with. One of the children, 13-year-old Sidney, is home-educated, and uses online tuition, but although the kids do have screens, Wi-Fi only works inside the house, so when they’re outside, they’re screen-free.
“Tech has its place, and for us here, in our isolated position, where would we be without that connectivity?” asks Owen, who has 533k followers on her @Yorkshireshepherdess Instagram account (she wrote a book called The Yorkshire Shepherdess). “It’s about channelling that and using it for good purposes.
“It’s opened up a wealth of opportunities, and to take that away from the children and say no screens, no phones, would be very hypocritical from somebody who’s been on social media for such a long time, and utilises the internet for keeping the farm and the family going forward.
“But I’m blessed in that when they go out, nothing works, there’s not even a single bar. Well, we’ve got the baaas,” (she does a sheep impression), “but not bars for network coverage. I’m sure there’s lots of parents who’d quite enjoy that. All things in moderation, right?”
Although she clearly adores her farming life, Owen isn’t from a farming background herself. She became a shepherdess after working as a general farm worker, inspired by reading and watching James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small, and then reading another book called Hill Shepherd.
“It was James Herriot’s fault,” she says with a laugh. “I came into it as an absolute blank canvas. I didn’t know anything about anything, because I had that disinterested mindset of a child – you don’t know what you want to do. You need to get your teeth into something to inspire you, and finding a book about shepherding sheep was what did it for me. That was the start of a bit of an obsession – a weird one.”
Becoming a shepherdess isn’t what most teenage girls would aspire to though, and Owen agrees.
“My parents probably thought it was just a bit of a phase. Maybe most people don’t go through a shepherding sheep stage and upset the apple cart, but I suppose pig-headedness and that Yorkshire grit, or maybe just awkwardness, meant that once I’d decided, I wasn’t going to be put off.
“And that’s what I wanted to pass on to my kids. You’ve got to say ‘You need to find that thing’, and sometimes you don’t know where it’s going to come from, that passion and exhilaration that makes you get up in the morning, that thing that makes you want to step to the day.”
And what’s making Owen step to the day at the moment – apart from looking after her brood of kids and the farm’s sheep, goats, cows, horses, chickens and dogs – is renovating Anty John’s, a derelict farmhouse near their Ravenseat Farm. Owen and her then-husband Clive, who she split from amicably in 2022, bought the property (named after its former owner, Anthony John Clarkson) in 2020. The onerous renovation project is being documented in Our Farm Next Door.
“It’s about farming, but it’s also a renovation project, and history, all rolled into one, in an amazing backdrop,” says Owen proudly.
“It’s a heck of an undertaking. The one thing I’m always short of is time, and a project like this makes you aware of the passing of time, and I feel like making these programmes has been the kick up the bum to do it.
“It’s all-consuming – so many questions and so much making it up as I go along, and that’s probably why people can relate to it, because I’m not going in there as somebody who knows what they’re doing.”
Will it ever be finished?
“That’s a very open-ended question,” she admits. “It’s a bit like painting the Forth Bridge, it’s a never-ending task putting everything back together again – slowly but surely it’s one step forwards, three backwards.”
Our Farm Next Door: Amanda, Clive and Kids is on More4 from April 29 at 9pm.
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