She has compiled quite a CV since her childhood days in Newsome.
Farmer’s wife, shepherdess to almost 1,000 sheep, mother to seven children and TV star.
Now Amanda Owen can add author to her impressive record.
The woman who left Huddersfield as a teenager for a farming life firstly in the Lake District then in a remote part of the Yorkshire Dales is back, somewhat reluctantly, in the spotlight.
She has a round of media interviews in Manchester and in London before the formal launch of her book , The Yorkshire Shepherdess, at The Richmond Station on April 11.
The book, which she admits was “quite a challenge”, follows the success of the TV series The Dales, fronted by comedian Adrian Edmondson.
He interviewed Amanda, 39, and her husband Clive at their remote farm at Ravenseat in Swaledale and she became an overnight sensation, not least because she was bringing up a clutch of young children.
Now she has seven, aged from eight months to 12, having given birth to three of them in a layby as she lives two hours from the nearest hospital.
She has never taken maternity leave, and simply straps the youngest of her family into a back-pack and carries on with the day to day routine of sheep-farming in an area exposed to the extremes of the British weather.
So how did the book come about?
““The publishers got in touch with me and floated the idea and I thought: ‘They can’t mean me’.
“I had looked in bookshop windows while in town and seen Alex Ferguson’s autobiography and a book about a woman brought up in the Ecuador rainforest, and wondered who would want to read about a lass from Newsome who ended up on a Yorkshire farm.
“But I thought if I didn’t give it a go I would regret it for the rest of my life.
“It was one of those things that sometimes came very easily and other times was impossibly hard.
“I could sit in front of my iPad and nothing would come and at other times I would be out in the fields with the sheep and an idea came to me. I wrote so many things down on scraps of paper and bills of sale from the sheep auctions.
“When I started I had 6¾ children as well the best part of 1,000 sheep to look after in the Dales.
“I wanted to cover everything, right from those schooldays in Huddersfield and the jobs on the farms in places like Flockton and Holmfirth, to what made me move to the Dales.
“Clive and I were both ‘townies’ when we took on this place. He’s from Doncaster and I’m from urban Huddersfield but people think we were brought up in farming communities.
“It is hard work but so is everything. Writing the book was a challenge but the publishers were brilliant. They gave me deadlines and then extended them and there were professionals there who would help me when needed.
“I’m a Yorkshirewoman and I appreciate value for money so everything had to go into the book; the kids, the farm work, the visitors, the TV show.
“I would scare myself silly thinking no-one would want to read about it but they assured me people would.
“I have tried to explain what’s it like to be a farmer’s wife in a place like this, where there are two such different seasons.
“For half the year we have lots of visitors and tourists, and people passing through to chat to, and the animals are out in the fields. For the other half, it’s a day to day log feeding all the animals and you hardly see a soul.
“I’m in the kitchen now in April and I can see snow on the hills outside.
“I’m delighted it’s finished but I’m dreading going to the previews in London. That’s not me at all.
“I just hope people like it and realise that you can achieve a dream, achieve the impossible.”
So what if the film companies come knocking?
“I’d love Brian Blessed to play Clive, all big voice and boisterous.
“As for the actress to play me, it would have to be someone really glamorous”, laughed Amanda in her Huddersfield accent.
The Yorkshire Shepherdess is published on April 10 by Sidgwick & Jackson, £16.99
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