The Yorkshire Shepherdess

by Amanda Owen

  Our sheep were finished, the light had gone as the nights were already drawing in, and I was in the farmyard putting the dogs to bed when I saw a car approaching. A young man got out and jogged up the yard, introducing himself as a runner for the BBC. He asked if we had seen Julia and the crew. I looked at him blankly and said that I had seen and heard nothing, not a sign. He was almost having a panic attack: as far as he was concerned, they were lost, in awful conditions. There is no mobile coverage in our area so there was no way of knowing where they were; all he knew was that they had left Kirkby Stephen that morning and no one had seen them since.

  ‘Calm down, I’ll fetch Clive,’ I said. That’s my answer to emergencies: get Clive, he’ll do summat.

  ‘I’ll ga an’ see if I can spot ’em,’ Clive said.

  He jumped on the quad bike and set off in the direction of Whitsundale, following the Coast to Coast route. It’s a real wilderness up there: remote, boggy and heathery, hard-going for walkers at the best of times. Clive had to skirt Fawcetts intake (one of our fields) on the bike because it’s full of grips and tussocks, and took a detour round the wire corner (it’s a route we use when gathering sheep). At the stile at the far side he found them. One of the crew had twisted her ankle badly, and they were sitting there in the rain, with no mobile signal, unable to contact anyone, at the mercy of the elements.

  What people don’t realize when they watch programmes like the TV series The Dales, in which we have featured, or Wainwright’s Walks, is that filming takes a long time. On the walks programmes you see Julia striding out with a small backpack, and you get the impression that the whole thing is filmed as she goes along. But in fact it’s: ‘Do it again, Julia . . . Just go back up there again . . . Let’s try that again.’

  And while Julia isn’t carrying much, the crew are lugging all the gear. It’s not as easy as they make it look.

  Anyway, they were very relieved to see Clive. The hero of the hour got his priorities right and put Julia, the glamorous star of the show, on the back of the bike and brought her back down to Ravenseat before going up with the bike trailer to bring the others down. Julia jumped on the bike, sitting astride behind Clive and holding on for dear life. This impressed Clive.

  ‘Look wha’ I’ve found at t’moor. Can I keep it?’ he said when he brought her back, clinging to him and soaking wet.

  ‘Nooooo, Clive, you can’t . . .’

  We sat by the fire, warming up and drinking tea, while he rescued the others. After arranging the next day’s filming at Ravenseat, they headed off to their hotel for the night.

  Fortunately the next day dawned bright and clear and we filmed a small piece down at the picnic benches with baby Edith in the papoose.

  Our bit is only a short segment of the film, but it has made our picnic benches a must-visit part of the Coast to Coast for those who have watched it. Julia’s series of Wainwright’s Walks have sold very well on DVD; they are classics for walkers because they tell it like it is, a true reflection of what it’s like doing the walk in foul or fair weather. We get a lot of Julia fans – we have learned that Clive is one of a not-very-exclusive club. They want to know where she sat and what she said. The most popular question is: ‘Did she actually walk it?’

  The answer is yes, but filming takes bloody ages so it’s not, for her, like doing it as a normal walker.

  Anyway, I never heard the last of it from Clive. It was Julia this, Julia that, for the next few days. Then a few weeks later I got an email from her: she wanted to know if we would mind her writing about Clive rescuing her for an article in the Countryfile magazine. She has to write a piece every month, and she wanted to feature her knight in shining armour, the man with the quad.

  Clive said, ‘Yeah, yeah, not a problem.’ Obviously.

  A couple of weeks later he was at a cattle sale at Kirkby Stephen auction, and he came home puzzled.

  ‘They call’t mi Colin, all day lang.’

  ‘What do you mean, they called you Colin?’

  ‘They aren’t calling mi Clive, they’re calling mi Colin, they seem to think it’s funny.’ He was perplexed.

  We soon discovered that Julia had written a lovely, glowing article about him for the magazine, but all the way through she called him Colin. There was a picture of him with the caption: ‘My knight in shining armour, Colin.’

  He was devastated. Clearly, he wasn’t as memorable to her as she was to him . . . But I have to admit that I had to turn my back to enjoy a secret smile.

  Every day at Ravenseat starts at 6 a.m., for everyone. There are jobs that have to be done every day, jobs that have to be done every week, and jobs that change with the seasons. In the winter there’s a lot of feeding to do. ‘Bullocking up’ is what we call the everyday feeding of every animal that is incarcerated in the barns around the farmyard: the horses, cattle, calves, sheep, lambs and pigs. The majority of the sheep are outside but are still fed once or twice a day on hay and cake. We work it between us, I have my sheep and Clive has his. We only have one quad bike, so he’ll go out first thing while I’m seeing to the kids, and then when he’s back for his breakfast, I’ll go out. Plus, of course, I have to feed the humans, including anyone who’s working or visiting, which takes a bit of forward planning.

  The rest of the year there’s lambing, clipping, dipping, trips to the auction, not to mention household chores. I do loads of washing. It’s a filthy job, farming, and I like everyone to at least start off spick and span in the morning, but I never iron anything: I try to hang things straight on the line or flake (that’s an old local name for a clothes rack, and like other bits of Yorkshire dialect, it’s originally a Norse word). Then I fold it, and it’s the job of one of the children (Miles at the moment) to put it away. Miles is a good choice, as he’s a very tidy, organized child.

  For me and Clive the day usually ends about 9 p.m., when we try to have an hour on the sofa together, catching up about the kids and the farm. We’re never off duty. Occasionally we socialize with our neighbours and other farmers over a meal, but it’s rare. We have a chance to catch up with everyone at the auctions, and when we’re gathering sheep and taking strays back. There are also big events like weddings and funerals. I’m not great at funerals, so Clive always goes as our representative. He loves singing hymns.

  It’s very unusual that we do days out but sometimes we have to, like a trip to Darlington to buy some school shoes. But our trips usually seem to tie in with looking at sheep. Once, when Clive knew I had a scan appointment at the hospital, he said, ‘You wouldn’t tek some sheep to Arthur’s field, would yer?’

  We have a friend who has some land bordering Teeside Airport and every winter we take him a trailerload of sheep to look after.

  Being an idiot, I said yes, of course I would take the sheep. So there I was, trying to park a long-wheelbase Land Rover with a triple-axle trailer on the back and forty-five sheep in it, in a hospital car park. I did three circuits, couldn’t find anywhere to put it, so in the end pulled into an ambulance bay. I was sure when I came out that I would have been clamped, but clearly everybody who saw it thought there must have been a terrible agricultural emergency. Why else would anyone park a trailerload of forty-five bleating sheep in a hospital car park?

  I took Edith and Raven to the county hall at Northallerton a couple of years ago when I was asked to speak at a rally opposing the downgrading of the maternity and children’s services at the Friarage Hospital. William Hague, our local MP and the Foreign Secretary, was talking immediately after me. He had security men with him, and there was someone between him and the window at all times. It was very much frowned upon when I made a joke about there being a grassy knoll directly opposite the balcony from which we were making our speeches.

  Afterwards I took Raven and Edith to the shops, but they’re no more interested in shopping than I am. They’re not used to shops and don’t really know how to behave in them. I remember one incident outside WH Smith. I was looking through the window when one
of the children, who shall remain nameless, squatted down to have a wee on the pavement, because that is what you do when nature calls at Ravenseat. Carrying a baby on your back makes getting round the shops far easier than using a cumbersome pushchair but also means that you can be entirely oblivious to the baby’s shoplifting activities. After leaving a shop on the High Street I realized with horror that one of my little ones had swiped a very cheap-looking, badly made thong from a discount store, and was waving it aloft for all he was worth. It had obviously caught his eye.

  I do want to give the children a normal childhood. We’ve always had it in our minds that we should try to give them a proper beach holiday, take them to the seaside and watch them dig in the sand. And we’ve tried, we really have. Before Edith was born we actually booked a weekend in a hotel in Blackpool for us all. Clive had spoken very highly of Blackpool, he had many happy memories of times spent there as a youngster. Later I discovered that Clive’s recollections were based on boozy trips with a bunch of mates when he was eighteen or nineteen to watch the Miss Blackpool beauty pageant, his memories distorted by the copious quantities of beer taken on board. Not quite the same as going with the missus and three kids in tow.

  The place just didn’t do it for us. We don’t really like the manufactured fun, but we thought the children might like it, just because it’s the complete opposite of what they are used to. In the event, they didn’t like it any more than we did. Staying in the hotel was a nightmare, with other people complaining about the noise of the kids, banging on the ceiling. It wasn’t a child-friendly hotel, which is odd in a town supposed to be designed for family fun. We walked miles up and down the seafront in the rain, looking out onto the muddy shoreline and counting the worm casts. They weren’t even impressed with the donkeys – and why would they be, when we have our own ponies at home that they can ride whenever they want and as fast as they want. As Clive says, ‘Blackpool’s just not us. It’s fine for them that likes it, there’s nothing wrong wi’ it. It just isn’t us.’

  So we came home. Early.

  It’s not always a total fiasco. We decided to take the kids to Edinburgh once. I looked through a brochure and found a flat that looked spacious, in a good central location, opposite a park and with a lovely view across Princes Street to the castle. It was cheap, too, and I thought, That’ll do nicely.

  We went on the train and at Waverley station all piled into a taxi. I told the driver the address and he looked puzzled.

  ‘I knaw Edinburgh like back’o my hand but I dinnae knaw what holiday flat ye’re goin’ to.’

  ‘Honestly, it’s the right address.’ I was starting to get worried now.

  Then the mist lifted.

  ‘I’ve got it now, I knaw where you’re stopping, wee hen’.’

  We found out why he was confused when he dropped us off: the holiday flat was above a sex shop, and there was a nightclub next door. This wasn’t mentioned in the brochure and, admittedly, when I rang up to make the booking, I didn’t specify that I didn’t want to be next to a nightclub and above a sex shop. But the apartment was brilliant, once we were inside. Every time we went in or out we had to shield Reuben’s eyes: he wanted to peer through the door at the display of nipple tassles, and the grubby-looking men in raincoats who were thumbing through magazines in there.

  But we liked Edinburgh, and once we crossed the main road the children had space to run around in the park. Late at night Clive and I amused ourselves watching from our window the drunks coming out of the club trying to climb over the road-work barricades, round the area where the new tramlines were going. Edinburgh was a success.

  Then there was the day out to Whitby, when Edith was a toddler. This was Clive’s great idea. He saw an advert in the local newspaper for a day trip by rail to Whitby. Great, he thought. Let the train take the strain, and all that. Well, it was the day out from hell.

  First of all, we had to get to Bishop Auckland by 8 a.m. to catch the train. That’s an hour’s drive for a start and what with getting everything packed up for the day, and doing all the usual farm jobs, it meant an early start even by our standards.

  Then we discovered that what the glowing advert failed to mention was that the train stopped at every station along the way. It even went back down a branch line at one stage to pick up more passengers, making it a three-hour journey. The train got more and more crowded, the kids got more and more bored. Our kids are used to being able to wander outside, doing their own thing. They don’t know about being confined like that, and there’s only so long a colouring book will keep them amused. I lost count of the number of times we heard ‘Are we nearly there yet?’ as I slowly lost the will to live. All I could think about was how we were going to have to repeat the same journey later in the day.

  At last, at noon, we arrived in Whitby. It was cold, and it was raining, and we only had a few hours there because we had to be back on the train at 3 p.m. for the nightmarish journey home. What a disaster. We couldn’t see the place through the rain, we were all miserable. All in all we spent two hours in the car, six hours on the train, and three hours there, eating fish and chips behind a windbreak. It was a memorable day at the seaside for all the wrong reasons.

  I have come to the conclusion that holidays just aren’t for us. Our hearts are never very far from Ravenseat, even if we do fancy a change of scenery. It’s not only that we feel this place calling us back, but we also have a niggling feeling that while we are away something could be going wrong. As I’ve said before, you are never off duty when you live on a farm. Even when we decide on a lovely day to sit outside to eat our tea, one of us will look up the moor and say, ‘That gate’s down up there.’

  ‘No, it’s not.’

  ‘I’s sure it is . . .’

  Next thing, the field is full of sheep and you’re up there chasing them back out and fixing the gate. There’s always something going on and we like it that way.

  Even though the farmhouse was not looking at its best the first time I saw it, I could see it was a warm and homely place, a place that had a history and held echoes of the people who had lived here through the centuries. It needed renovation, but not modernizing: in fact, what it needed was to be restored to how it originally was. We need modern amenities like flush toilets, washing machines, fridges and freezers, but we also want the look and the feel of the place to be traditional.

  The first job was to make the place watertight. Until then, I shut the door and ignored the damp carpet in the living room. When we were able to lift the carpet we found underneath there were layers of felt stuck with bitumen tar to the original flagstones. It was hard work scraping it off, but worth it to uncover the perfect floor for a farmhouse. Now I just have two rag rugs down, very practical, and I don’t have to yell at the children when they come in with their muddy wellies on. The flagstones between the living room and the dairy have been worn away by the iron soles of clogs over many years. We thought that if we turned them over we could start afresh on the unworn side, but when we did it became apparent that one of our predecessors had had the same idea, and they’d been worn down on that side too!

  The children and I wear clogs during the summer months to give our feet a rest from wellies and they love making sparks with the iron corkers on the stone flags. In years gone by, particularly fine sand from around the edge of Birkdale Tarn, at a place called Lops Wath, was scattered onto the stone flags in the house and walked over by clog wearers, to clean the stone. I’m tempted to try this (anything to avoid scrubbing with caustic soda) but I suspect it would just be used to build sandcastles.

  The other living room was even more wrecked. It had been used as a proven (feed) store and had scribblings on the plaster-work detailing how many pounds of feed was to be given to the animals. It took a lot of digging around the exterior walls to prevent water seeping in, then a good deal of replastering before a habitable room emerged.

  There were originally four bedrooms but the bathroom was through a bedroom: it didn�
�t make sense so we’ve changed it round to get a good bathroom with a shower. Now we have two big bedrooms and one really substantial one. When I came there was no shower, just a bath. It wasn’t practical after a hard day’s work on the farm to come in and have a bath, especially when the water was heated by a back boiler on the open fire, which limited the amount available. The spring water was very, very brown, full of peat. It looked like we were being very generous with the whisky when someone asked for a Scotch and water. We were used to drinking it, but any newcomers would usually succumb to a bad attack of the heebie-jeebies for a few days until they got used to it. Now, although the water comes from the same spring, we have a filtration and cleaning system making it safe for anyone to drink. It still has a slightly brown tinge, but it’s 100 per cent pure: we just don’t want to pump in loads of chlorine to get rid of the discolouration.

  There was a double earth closet outside, and another single one across at the pig hulls. The double one amused me: who do you like well enough to sit next to them on the loo? I suppose I could have put a couple of the children on it, side by side. The earth closets are still there. The children went through a phase of using them, just to hear the long plop, but when I made them empty the bucket the novelty quickly wore off.

  A big thick wall runs through the middle of the house, which was the original outer wall. The farmhouse doubled in size when the newer bit was built at the back. But even this ‘new’ bit predates 1820, as I’ve found a reference in an old book to a Mr Cleasby, the farmer who decided he’d had enough of the cold and damp in Ravenseat farmhouse and built the other house where the gamekeeper now lives. He wrote that he hated the leaking valley gutter that ran between the roofs of the older part and the newer part. Even now it still leaks.