Our Yorkshire Farm returns to TV tonight for a new series
A new series following the lives of the Owen family at Ravenseat Farm in the Dales will air at 8pm on November 5.
The first series was shown last November and was hugely popular with viewers, who were charmed by the simple, device-free existence of Clive and Amanda Owen and their nine children.
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Hide AdYorkshire Shepherdess Amanda Owen on the harsh reality of life in Upper SwaledaleThey share their remote 2,000-acre farm with their flock of sheep and have few close neighbours.
As mobile phone signal and broadband coverage at the farm is poor, the family have few gadgets and instead spend their time outdoors.
In the summer, they serve cream teas to visitors and rent out a shepherd's hut as overnight accommodation for walkers.
"Modern technology doesn't rule our lives", says Amanda OwenAmanda's story - raised in suburban Huddersfield, she decided to became a farmer after reading the James Herriot books, and moved into an isolated hill farm after meeting Clive - is well-known thanks to the several bestselling books she has written and her popular Yorkshire Shepherdess social media accounts.
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Hide AdDespite sharing his name with a Hollywood actor, her husband Clive Owen has a much lower profile and often stays out of the limelight. He's a father of 11, as he was already divorced with two children when he met Amanda in 1996, when she was 21.
Summer at Ravenseat Farm in eight photographsThen working as a contract shepherd, she was sent to collect a ram from Clive's tenanted sheep farm, Ravenseat near Keld in Swaledale, and love blossomed. Amanda described the cottage as rundown with damp carpets and smoke-stained wallpaper, and she compared it to a TV programme called The Dale That Died. But she realised its potential to become a warm family home and was desperate to bring life back to it.
Amanda admits she was more concerned with looking for a sheepdog than a boyfriend when she met Clive, who is also from a non-farming background and has never been to London. He had been living on the farm, which dates back to the Viking period, since 1989, moving from a farm in Stainmore which he ran alone. He chose Ravenseat because of its position in the heart of Swaledale and associations with the breed of the same name.
In an interview with The Telegraph, she spoke of how Clive was so concerned with his flock that he survived on pies and cornflakes, and used one of his living rooms to keep feed bins in.
She says they didn't plan such a large family, but that each addition to their brood fits in well with their free-range life on the farm.