Our Yorkshire Farm's Amanda Owen's brutal admission over ex Clive

Amanda Owen, aka The Yorkshire Shepherdess, and her husband Clive, who first met in 1996 when 21-year-old Amanda visited Ravenseat Farm to collect a ram, spent more than a decade as a golden couple of the countryside. As the stars of Channel 5’s hugely popular series Our Yorkshire Farm , viewers watched them become parents of nine children – Raven, Reuben, Miles, Edith, Violet, Sidney, Annas, Clemmy, and Nancy – all while tending to their idyllic but demanding slice of stunning Yorkshire land.

While the couple are now separated, they continue to farm and co-parent together, and, as a nation, we seem no less fascinated by their life. When we catch up to talk about her new children’s book Christmas Tales From The Farm , Amanda, who thinks she’s now 51 but admits she’s “useless when it comes to birthdays” – has had something of a typically manic morning.

The youngest children have gone back to school this week and the first hour of the day was filled with a flood of queries relating to missing school shoes and bus timetables, topping up quadbikes with oil and hunting for various lunch boxes.

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That said, Amanda still manages to looks like a woman in full control – even rather glamorous, with a dash of mascara and some pink lipstick. “Oh, those are non-negotiables for me,” she laughs. “I need five minutes every day to put on a bit of mascara and lip colour. If it gets to dinner time and I haven’t done it, I don’t feel like myself. It’s just who I am.

“It’s a slippery slope, though. I always swore I’d never wear joggers, but the other day I did borrow a pair of Sidney’s jogging pants to throw over a pair of leggings. I’m alright with things with holes in them or wearing things back to front. I do have leggings at the moment with a hole in them… a cow tried to eat them.”

Amanda’s conversation is regularly peppered with fabulous, frequently hilarious tidbits into the realities of farm life. The family’s hat and scarf collection, she points out, is a little “crispy”, due to it spending months on the back of the range cooker.

“I paint my nails, too, but it’s more a case of hiding what’s beneath,” she smiles. “Oh, and I have a sore finger because I got it squashed by the skid steer when I was moving a log for the fire.”

She also adds a “big bruise” on her leg to the list of workplace injuries, which she tells us was the work of an unwilling sheep during shearing. “So yes, I’ve got nice strong arms, but don’t look too closely because you’ll find I’ve got lumps taken out of them and bruises everywhere.”

Amanda has long shed the expectation that she should behave or dress like a “stereotypical” farmer’s wife – whatever that may look like, nowadays. She wears her mascara and lippy come rain or shine – sheep or no sheep – and is determined for Ravenseat to remain a come-as-you-like safe space, where there’s “certainly no place for misogyny”.

“I took a video call in the sheep pens the other day, which I can do now that we have WiFi in there,” she says. “The person on the line said, ‘Goodness me, you don’t like you’re dressed for working in there.’ At that point I had a sheep between my knees, because I was midway through shearing.

“Clemmy had the sheep in a headlock, too, and was tipping it up ready for me. She was holding it with one hand, because technique is more than body strength. She had on proper wellies with steel-toes, not those festival wellies that last about three seconds on a farm, and what to all intents and purposes was a prom dress with a big bow around the middle.

“It really doesn’t matter a hoot what you wear or look like, the proof is in the pudding. When I’m out and about, people will ask if I’ve brought my sheepdog. Why would I do that? I don’t have to prove anything to anyone. You don’t expect a doctor to walk about with a stethoscope around their neck to prove they do their job, do you? The saying ‘all the gear and no idea’ definitely applies, and the farming fraternity can sniff out b******t at a thousand paces.”

Amanda appears to be at something of a crossroads at the moment. The farming industry, she says, is facing a lot of uncertainty, with conversations around best use of our farmland and countryside, and ongoing debates about water quality, environmental impact, animal welfare and, of course, the consumer prices of our farmed goods.

Interestingly, though, she says the stresses these conversations can put on farmers is still rarely talked about. She can clearly remember the social devastation caused by the 2001 foot and mouth disease epidemic –which led to the culling of somewhere between 6.5 million and 10 million animals in the UK – and still worries about the future of her chosen career path.

“There’s great awareness of the stresses and strains – and resulting mental health – of everyday life, but quite often the focus is on those in the cities. But there are just as many pressures, albeit different ones, in the countryside.

“I remember in 2001, the year Raven was born, there was a huge divide between the rural countryside and the urban population. What was happening was cataclysmic – like a Covid lockdown, but just for the country. I think people forget what life can be like on a farm. It isn’t always idyllic. And I know it’s a cliché, but this is a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week, 365-day-a-year job.”

With that in mind, she doesn’t expect “for one second” that all the children – who are aged between nine and 24 – will remain working at Ravenseat, which has been farmed for more than 1,000 years. She sees it more as a springboard, to give them the skills to excel in whatever path they choose.

And while it isn’t “always idyllic”, there are many aspects of the Owens’ life that do sound straight from the pages of a children’s book from a bygone era.

“I’ll often think, where’s so and so kid? And they’ll have just headed off somewhere,” she sighs, happily. “They’ve got such a freedom. It sounds very Enid Blyton, but usually they tend to come back from their expedition saying something stinks, and there’ll be a dead sheep at the bottom of a cliff.

“The other day one of them found an eyeball, then some helium balloons that someone had released with a photo and the name ‘Steve’ on them. Of course, they sat there until their voices went squeaky. Good, clean countryside fun!”

Some of the family’s funniest moments now feature in Amanda’s latest children’s book, Christmas Tales From The Farm . There’s the time they found an escaped reindeer in a field, and the three baby goats who like to munch on the kids’ homework and socks, as well as the family tradition of hosting their own Winter Olympics on the frozen land.

While the end product is a delightfully illustrated set of wholesome stories, Amanda admits, it didn’t start off that way.

“When I went to the publishers I had to say, ‘I don’t have any sort of presentation because I’ve just been busy chasing a reindeer around the farm,’ which became one of the stories in the book. And when it came to writing it, I was awful at keeping to deadlines. It would reach the point of getting threats from the publisher before I’d turn in the work! I’d go to bed with my laptop to write, then wake up in the morning with it on my chest, hoping that it had autosaved before the battery ran out.

“But it wasn’t ‘work’ as such, it was just a case of remembering some of the fun moments we’ve had and writing them down. Like the time someone left the doors open at night and we woke up to find a hedgehog running around downstairs... and the time we had to dig all the sheep out of the snow.”

And while Our Yorkshire Farm – the show that made Amanda and her family household names, pulling in more than 3 million viewers – ended in 2022, Amanda and her family are still on our screens renovating a ruined farmhouse with Channel 4 ’s Our Farm Next Door: Amanda, Clive And The Kids which has just been recommissioned for a further two series.

It came as a shock to many in 2022 when Amanda and Clive announced the end of their marriage – but not their working relationship or living arrangements. While both have dated after splitting, Amanda’s still single. But she’s not lonely, and even though she and Clive still live at the same address, there are often, quite literally, acres between them.

“I’m surrounded by people and obviously, one of them is Clive who I’m separated from, but sometimes it feels like I’m not,” she muses. “Like this morning, when I thought, ‘Why are your socks on the floor?’

“If we were all under one roof in a tiny space, we probably would’ve killed each other, with real clashes of character and all the rest of it. But our ‘home’ is pretty spacious, there are a lot of fields between us. It takes a whole day to walk the perimeter of the farm, so there’s plenty of room to lose yourself,” she says.

“I’ve got such a busy house I feel like I’m living life through my children. With nine kids, my home is never empty – the people have multiplied and there’s often someone random asleep on the couch! So, relationship-wise, it would take a certain person to be able to cope with the scenario. And my ex Clive still being an enormous part of my life. It would take a good sense of humour, too!”

Amanda’s “me time” is on her horse, she says. Her favourite moments are when she’s able to sneak out and tack up quietly enough that she can ride alone. Finding time for date nights might also pose a problem. The last film she saw at the cinema was Titanic (which came out in 1997) and, she says, “watching people drown for three hours wasn’t my bag”.

“Love is honestly not something I’m missing. If it happens, great, if it doesn’t, there’s plenty for me to be getting on with, isn’t there?!”

Christmas Tales From The Farm by Amanda Owen is out now (Puffin, £14.99),see waterstones.com. Amanda is on tour from 5 November to 7 December, seenothird.co.uk/live-shows/amanda-owen/

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