The Yorkshire Shepherdess is going on tour and this is when you can see her live

Yorkshire hill farmer and mother-of-nine Amanda Owen is embarking on a nationwide theatre tour this summer.
Amanda Owen on her Swaledale farmAmanda Owen on her Swaledale farm
Amanda Owen on her Swaledale farm

The public speaking events are timed to coincide with the release of her new book, Adventures of a Yorkshire Shepherdess, which is due to be published on June 15.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

The only Yorkshire date is an appearance at King's Hall in Ilkley on Friday June 28 at 7.30pm. Tickets are £18.

Other dates throughout June and July include Bristol, Lincoln, Northampton, Scunthorpe, Cheltenham, Basingstoke, Sale, Bury St Edmunds and London.

During the events, Amanda will talk about her journey from urban Huddersfield teenager to shepherdess and TV star. The anecdotes include tales of her life on her upland sheep farm at Ravenseat in the Yorkshire Dales. There will also be readings from her books, photo slideshows and a Q&A session.

Amanda, 45, and her family starred in Channel 5's Our Yorkshire Farm in 2018. She has a large social media following and has written three books.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Meet Clive Owen - husband of the Yorkshire ShepherdessThe 6'2'' farmer hasn't been to the hairdresser's for more than 30 years - although she has been asked to model in country fashion shoots.

She and husband Clive have bought a farmhouse in Swaledale to move into when their tenancy at Ravenseat ends. The property is currently let as a holiday home, and they also run a B&B in a traditional shepherd's hut.

Tickets are available directly from venues. To buy tickets for the Ilkley event, click here.

Amanda Owen - the incredible life of the Yorkshire Shepherdess

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

The hardy herdswoman has lived on the Swaledale hill farm - where she tends over 1,000 sheep - since her early 20s, when she met and married tenant farmer husband Clive.

Since then, the couple have had nine children, including one who was born in the living room while Amanda was alone and Clive asleep upstairs. Several more births have happened in cars and ambulances at the side of the road during the two-hour trip to hospital.

Our Yorkshire Farm viewers react to images of heartwarming rural childhood without mobile phones or TVAmanda is not actually from a rural background - her mother was a model and she grew up in Huddersfield, but she fell in love with country life after reading the James Herriot books. She offered her services as a labourer and shepherd at farms in the Dales before finding work and meeting Clive.

During heavy snowfalls, the family are often stranded on their remote property - when the Beast from the East struck in the winter of 2018, they struggled to even open their front door, and faced huge logistical challenges in getting feed to their livestock.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Amanda admits she hasn't visited a hair salon since the age of 12 and laughed when she was asked to appear in a Burberry fashion shoot - although she does wear make-up while tending to her flock.

The TV show focused on her experiences parenting her free-range children, who face a journey of several hours just to get to school. Although the older ones have mobile phones, the farmhouse has no mobile signal or broadband coverage, so they are unable to spend time on social media at home. Their interests include fixing tractors, helping out with the animals and going off for picnics by themselves in the Swaledale countryside. Her eldest son once received a deactivated World War One bomb as a Christmas present.

Despite 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.

Then 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.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

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.

Amanda has written several books about her life on the farm and has also appeared at the Countryside Live event in Harrogate.