The Yorkshire Shepherdess

by Amanda Owen

  A wood-burning stove was installed with a tiny oven and hotplate, a bookcase full of shepherd’s guides and flock books, a Mouseman milking stool, crooks and sticks and all manner of things that seemed to fit the bill. I am still adding bits and pieces to it, whenever I see something that looks right.

  Viewers saw us putting up curtain rails, cast-iron ones shaped like shepherd’s crooks, but what they didn’t see was me working like mad the night before making curtains out of hessian material to resemble sacking. I commented on camera somewhat wryly that DIY was not our strongest point but there were one or two things that really had to be done correctly.

  ‘They’ve got to be straight,’ I said and Clive was nodding away in agreement. Then the drill bit fell out because I hadn’t put it in properly. We looked pretty amateur and you could see the camera shaking as the cameraman was laughing so much. When I stood back to admire my handiwork, they definitely were not level . . .

  Clive was filmed spending a night in there, to test it out and see how good it would be for our guests. He had no complaints, he was quite happy – what was there not to like? Peace and quiet, books on sheep and, to top it all, a full English breakfast in the morning. In fact, in the second series of The Dales Ade Edmondson, who presents the programmes, stayed there. Many people didn’t believe that he really stayed the night in the shepherd’s hut, they thought it was set up just for the cameras, but they are wrong: he did stay the night and then shared his breakfast in the morning with Chalky the terrier.

  Twice I’ve been filmed entering my scones at a local show, and twice I’ve been filmed losing. What would happen is that I’d take my time and bake a really good batch, and then we would get some cream-tea customers and I would serve the perfect scones to them. Then I’d hastily make some more for the show which, inevitably, would not be quite as perfect. Honestly, I’m not making excuses. Clive says my scones are renowned as the best locally, so he thinks it’s amusing that I always lose. I actually market them now as non-prize winning scones.

  When the first series was filmed Violet was a baby, and I was carrying her everywhere on my front in the papoose. One day, a friend rang up and told me they had just shown a clip of me serving cream teas with her on my front on Loose Women, the lunchtime programme. Apparently Ade was on, talking about The Dales, and a snippet of the programme was shown. The women presenters seemed to think there was something unusual about working while having a baby strapped to you. The truth is that serving cream teas is one of the easier jobs that I do while carrying a baby. It’s second nature for me now.

  They also filmed us taking the children camping. I bought a cheap tent on eBay; the instructions said it was easy for two capable adults to assemble due to its simple colour-coded poles. Two snags: the poles that came with it were not colour coded, and the ‘two capable adults’ were me and Clive . . .

  The kids were really excited as we loaded up the car, and kept asking, ‘Where are we going?’

  Luckily, they weren’t disappointed when we drove down to West End field, one of our fields at the far end of the farm: it was the thrill of sleeping out that was the attraction for them. We did about twenty trips back to the farmhouse for things we’d forgotten, and we couldn’t find a pump that fitted the airbeds, so I was light-headed after blowing them all up. After finally putting up the darn tent we did have a wonderful barbecue, but our sleep was disturbed by the terriers Pippen and Chalky trying to get into the tent with us, which was quite unnerving until we realized it was them. I can rough it with the best of ’em, but I’m not so sure that Clive enjoyed it much: he likes his home comforts. And what the kids didn’t know was that the next morning was Tuesday, auction day, and a massive rush to get the trailer on, the lambs sorted, the licences filled in. So it was a very short holiday.

  Every small segment about us on the programme takes hours to film. We don’t mind, but it’s a bit annoying that at the start of filming the children are pristine, and by the time they finish they’re covered in dirt, as usual. On the day they filmed Raven going to school they were here at 6 a.m. to record her doing her chores before school, and they were still here at 7 p.m. Admittedly, though, they do get their best footage when things are not going quite according to plan.

  One bugbear for Clive is that when they film him they often do a cutaway to some sheep. But they’re not necessarily his sheep. And sometimes they aren’t even Swaledale sheep! He stands there shouting at the telly while I try and appease him by reminding him that only a very few people would be sheep-savvy enough to know the difference between a Dalesbred sheep and a Swaledale sheep.

  After the first series it was odd to suddenly be recognized by strangers. This would frequently happen when I was picking up provisions in Hawes, which is a small, quaint market town. If people were coming on holiday to the Yorkshire Dales, then it was highly likely they had watched The Dales, and when they saw me in the street they would come up to say hello. I don’t travel much – like the sheep, I’m hefted to Ravenseat – and when I do go to Hawes and Kirkby Stephen for auctions I know a lot of people anyway, so being approached by complete strangers took a bit of getting used to.

  When we first filmed for The Dales we had no idea, of course, that it would be such a successful series, and neither did the production team. We’ve had a lot of fun making the programmes. They filmed us making a fifty-mile round trip to have my five-month scan when I was expecting my sixth baby, and they filmed us going to a photography exhibition of pictures by Stuart Howat, a friend of ours who had asked to do our portraits. They filmed Miles’s first day at school, and Raven in her first riding competition at Reeth Show, with my horse Meg (where my scones lost out again . . .).

  One programme showed me taking the children with me to an auction to sell the lambs, something I do regularly. The children are a familiar sight in the canteen at the auction at Hawes. At the Christmas poultry auction Miles put a bid in for a turkey by mistake. He was having some kind of heated debate with one of the other children and raised his arm to make a point. Raymond the auctioneer took this as a bid, said, ‘Bid up yonder,’ and banged his gavel down. Miles was rigid with fear and the other children suddenly became very silent.

  I called out, ‘Book it down to Ravenseat,’ more to save face than anything else. I’m happy to buy an extra turkey if the price is right, then put it in the freezer and cook it at hay time or another busy period when I have a lot of people to feed.

  Clive was quite worried about us looking rather amateurish on TV but I told him there was no need to stress about it as that was why people enjoyed watching the programme. Things don’t always go right in life and the viewers at home could relate to just that.

  The overriding feeling we had about The Dales was that it would be a lovely thing for the children to look back on in years to come. We’ve all listened to tales of what things were like ‘back in the day’, and they would actually be able to see for themselves, for real.

  We attract some interesting visitors to Ravenseat.

  We have occasional visits from a group of aviation historians who come here to look at the remains of a crashed World War Two Hurricane. One of these enthusiasts was called Dick Barton. If he had not handed me his card or told me his name I could still have guessed where his interests lay: he had the neatest handlebar moustache, a side parting, a yellow spotted cravat and a comb peeping from the top pocket of his blazer. He and his three fellow enthusiasts arrived on what can only be described as the day from hell. The rain was pouring and the sky was filled with dark clouds, so we agreed to help them out by taking them up to the crash site on the quad bike and trailer. We went as far as we could on the bike and then, due to the boggy terrain, the last leg of the journey was on foot. It was as we were crossing a particularly waterlogged area that we noticed one of Dick’s friends was in some difficulty behind us. When we turned back to assist him we were astonished to discover that under his ankle-length trench coat he had two artificial legs, which had become detached and wer
e firmly stuck in the mud. He was manhandled onto drier ground and the legs were extricated from the bog. They took some uprooting, but finally he and his legs were reunited.

  He walked so well that we had not realized. Clive and I were thunderstruck, we just didn’t know what to say. Then, sensing our surprise and guessing what we were thinking he (Douglas Bader) said, before anyone asked, ‘No, a combine harvester, actually.’

  The aviation enthusiasts aren’t the only visitors we get with unusual hobbies. When we hosted a field trip for the North of England Pteridological Society (fern appreciation) we didn’t think there would be a big turnout, but we were wrong. About thirty people turned up. There were even a few hangers-on, one being an entomologist who specialized in wood lice and a conchologist. I showed my ignorance by commenting that his medical career must be incredibly stressful; he looked at me with a certain amount of derision and told me that a conchologist is not a doctor but an expert in slugs and snails. Trying to redeem myself by saying something more appropriate, I came up with, ‘It’ll ’ave bin a crackin’ year for t’slugs, what with all t’rain – that’ll ’ave brought ’em out.’

  He said flatly that the rain was good for common slugs, but not for the rare specimens he was seeking.

  ‘Really? I didn’t know that rare slugs existed.’

  It turned out that he had a hit list of twenty slugs he wanted to see before he died and, unfortunately, it wasn’t his day because I don’t think he found any of them here.

  One ecology expert who visits us occasionally always tells us, slightly disparagingly, that our newts are ‘common’ newts, our sandpipers are ‘common’ sandpipers and our shrews are ‘common’ shrews. Clive dared to suggest that perhaps his wife was also of the ‘common’ variety.

  But the botanists and wild-flower experts never go away disappointed. At the far end of the Close Hills there is a ghyll with very steep, near-vertical sides and a river running through the bottom, making it virtually inaccessible to man or beast. You have to walk along the riverbed when it’s dry to get down into it. As a result, animals don’t often get in there and the plants have a chance to grow without any interference: there is a plant growing there that experts believed had died out in the Ice Age. This magical little place has now been designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), which makes it a magnet for the plant experts.

  Another reason the ghyll has been left alone for centuries is that the local children never dared venture there: its nickname is Boggle Hole. A boggle is a ghost, and in the old days when the Ravenseat children were making their way back across the hills from school in Keld, they would hear the wind groaning and moaning down the ghyll, and hear the water tumbling and falling many feet below in the inky blackness. They were terrified, especially on dark winter evenings. They would run past as fast as they could; it was never a place to play and explore.

  We’ve had one or two sheep crag-fast down there, which means they are stranded on a rocky ledge, unable to get back up or get back down. We leave them for a couple of days to see whether they extricate themselves and if they don’t we call in the Swaledale Mountain Rescue: they like nothing better than a crag-fast sheep to practise on. And as if rescuing a sheep trapped halfway down a hundred-foot cliff isn’t exciting enough, they usually defer the rescue until dark, to make it as difficult for themselves as possible.

  We had a hogg stuck down there once, on a ledge that allowed it to move a few feet in each direction. We watched it for three days, hoping it would find a way out. It had some grass above it and below it, so it wasn’t starving. In the end Clive’s friend Alec decided he’d rescue it. Alec loves a challenge. If there’s something you want doing, just tell Alec it’s impossible, and the next thing you know, he’ll have done it.

  Anyway, Clive and another friend, Edwin, anchored a rope to a large rock and then lowered Alec down the cliff face. The health and safety people would have had a fit: Alec’s only safety device was to pass the rope through his body-warmer, supposedly to prevent the rope from becoming detached. The children and I were on the other side of the ghyll, watching and shouting directions because Clive and Edwin couldn’t see below them to judge where Alec was in relation to the hogg. We were pointing and calling out, ‘Left a bit, right a bit . . .’ and the damned sheep was moving away every time, dodging him. This went on for a very long time and eventually the sun began to set and we had to give up. We decided to call Mountain Rescue the next day, but when we went to look, the sheep had gone. We were convinced it had fallen to its death, there was such a huge drop below it. But a couple of weeks later, the hogg turned up in the field. It must have fallen but, miraculously, it was unharmed.

  It’s not just Boggle Hole that fascinates the botanists. Swaledale is famous for its wildflower meadows and in late June the upper dale is a glorious kaleidoscope of colour. Our traditional, natural ways of farming, which don’t rely on chemical fertilizers, mean that the meadow flowers have survived. Ravenseat has many examples of rare types, with unusual varieties of marsh marigold, devil’s bit, scabious, yellow rattle, saxifrage, globeflower, and many others.

  Not only is there an abundance of rare plants, but there is also a rich diversity of wildlife, including birds, hares, stoats, shrews, newts and bats. We have recently been visited by bat fanatics, who arrive at dusk armed with their sonic listening devices. They walk around the barns listening for the inaudible noises that bats make and unfortunately sometimes leave the gates open. Our two shorthorn cows, Felicity and Freda, escaped one night from their barn and sprinted around the hayfields before wandering back up into the farmyard and having a good scratch on the Land Rover. The car alarm went off, the horn beeping, hazard lights flashing. We sat bolt upright in bed and heard the sound of cows galloping past the bedroom window. Clive opened the window, bellowing into the night that Batman should, ‘Bog off back to Gotham City.’

  That wasn’t the first time Clive has conducted operations from the bedroom window. There was once a very large brown rat who made his home in our rhubarb patch and would run along the garden wall and then bask in the sunshine, preening himself in full view of everyone. After several failed attempts at dispatching the rat, Clive announced that he was going to take him out once and for all by shooting him from a terrific vantage point, the bedroom window. Unfortunately, Clive is not a great marksman and after giving him both barrels the rat ambled off, completely unharmed. We were left to scrape up rhubarb shrapnel from the surrounding area. It did rid us of the rat, but only because Clive had destroyed his home.

  Clive has a bit of history with rats. While we were living in the caravan, when the front of the house was off, someone else moved into the farmhouse . . . Roland! When they put the front wall back, Roland was trapped inside. I kept telling the builders there was something in there, but they took no notice. We called it a ‘mouse’ in front of the children, but we knew damned well it was a rat. We just didn’t want them using that word at school.

  It always woke up and started scratching around the house just as I was going to sleep. I sleep lightly because I’m always listening for the children. I’d be saying to Clive, ‘Can yer ’ear it?’

  ‘Shut up, will ta? I were nearly asleep . . .’

  He’s a bit deaf, sometimes selectively so, but he really genuinely couldn’t hear the thing. I could hear it gnawing and could track its every move as it cavorted around the house. It went behind the skirting boards, along the beams and one night even played the piano, running over the keys. I could hear it going up and downstairs, leaping up each step with a jump. It caused serious ructions between me and Clive – we were both getting a lot of elbow, me to wake him and give him a running commentary on its movements, him to tell me to shut up. You can’t rest while there’s something like that in the house, and I’d lie awake just waiting to hear it.

  Sometimes we’d be sitting in front of the fire in the evening and we’d see a shadow scuttling along, out of the corner of our eyes. We even ripped the skirting boar
ds off, looking for its den. The few people we confided in all had different theories about how we should catch it, what we should bait the trap with: pork pie, cheese, chocolate, bacon rind, peanut butter. Nothing worked.

  I attempted to hit it with a shovel on more than one occasion, but it always managed to dodge me.

  ‘If you are going to hit a rat with a shovel you need the shovel up high to start with, otherwise by the time you lift it t’rat’s long gone,’ Clive told me helpfully. Like I would walk around with a shovel above my head just in case I spotted the damned thing.

  One night I had lain awake in bed for long enough to know that Roland was in the sitting room. I could hear it and I thought if we could trap it in there sooner or later our paths would cross and that would be that. I woke a disgruntled Clive and we both crept down the stairs, me in my nightie and Clive in his pyjamas. Clive went in with a shovel, I went in with trepidation. Clive slammed the door behind us. Bad words were spoken, the air was blue. He was going to get this thing no matter what . . .

  But rats can squeeze themselves into unbelievably small places. As Clive moved the sofa it shot out from underneath and went for the door, and we were amazed when it scrunched itself up and got out through the sliver of a crack underneath. I had no idea a rat could make itself so thin. More angry, bad words.

  We decided it was time to call in the professionals and rang a pest control company. They sent out a representative.