'The space is great - until you're alone with your thoughts': Inside Yorkshire Shepherdess Amanda Owen's marriage split, the mid-life collapse that led to her eating disorder... and why she's finally feeling strong again

Yorkshire Shepherdess Amanda Owen is asking her ex Clive – the man with whom she shares nine children, a farm and, today at least, custody of a tractor – whether he remembers that time she hung her bra out of a window, turning it into a makeshift home for a family of nesting house martins.

The story has made it into her new children’s book, Cosy Bedtime Stories From The Farm, the bra becoming an unlikely heroine, saving all the baby chicks. Clive, nursing a cup of tea, is a bit hazy about both the house martins and the bra.

‘It was a coloured one,’ Amanda clarifies. ‘Probably a heat-of-the- moment purchase, and an unwise one. But maybe I haven’t learned because I still have a red bra.’ She does! She has it on today, one scarlet strap on show as she and Clive bicker about who needs the tractor most urgently.

It is eight years since I first met the matriarch of Britain’s first family of farming, just as the Channel 5 series Our Yorkshire Farm was turning her and her brood into household names. Even then, Amanda – the daughter of a model and an engineer – was a force of nature.

One abiding memory is discovering that her glamour wasn’t just for the cameras; she always wore a full face of make-up, even when it was only her and the sheep. She still does. ‘It’s about your own self-worth, isn’t it?’

She was presented as a real-life Supermum then, but this became an albatross. ‘When it comes to perfect parenting, it’s not happening. When people say “role model”, that’s the worst, because I’m not.’

Even now, having had nine opportunities to get motherhood right, she messes up. She tells me of 15-year-old Sidney missing dinner recently. ‘He said, “What’s for tea?” and I said, “Were you not here for tea?” He said, “No.” So I said, “Oh well, everyone’s had tea. You’ll have to make yourself summat then.”’

Her eldest daughter Raven has delivered her own verdict on Amanda’s parenting style. ‘Raven is a scientist,’ Amanda says proudly. ‘She’s 25. Is she 25? I think she’s 25. Anyway, the other day, Raven said, “You made me independent and strong… by being dragged up.”’

No hope then that her seventh book – a collection of charming adventure stories involving intruder hedgehogs, snails in jars and ‘bivvying’ (wild camping) – is a thinly disguised parenting guide? ‘Nobody needs more preachy flipping parenting-style books,’ she says. ‘We’ve got TikTok for that. My first piece of parenting advice would be don’t listen to those people. Well, you can, but it’s better to go your own way.’

The other Owen children are Reuben, 23, Miles, 20, Edith, 18, Violet, 16, Annas, 13, Clemmy, 11, and Nancy, nine. They’re all back on our TV screens in a new series of Our Farm Next Door, bringing viewers into a more complicated world as she and Clive – who split up in 2022 after 22 years of marriage – co-parent.

How do they do it? Answer: chaotically. This time the cameras feature Amanda (who lives in the family’s rental cottage, while Clive has remained at Ravenseat Farm) arranging a surprise for the children – a new puppy.

Yet unbeknown to her, Clive has had the same idea – except he arrives with two. ‘Of course both of us were like, “Well, I’m not backtracking. I’m not giving in.”’ So Ravenseat ended up with three pups by default.

It is their marriage in miniature: emphatically over, yet with their lives hopelessly entwined with children, livestock, land and machinery. The saga of their split threatened to destroy the family’s TV career, particularly the feverish coverage of Amanda’s relationship with web designer Rob Davies.

Amanda and Clive later united to give a different account: that the marriage had already ended, that Clive knew about it, and that he too was dating. Still. The Waltons this was not.

What now? While Clive now has a new partner (‘Do I get on with her? Yes! Why would I not?’) Amanda, 52, is single. ‘I’m not in a relationship. I’m not looking. I’m not not looking. I’m just seeing what happens.’

She may yet be ‘swept off my feet by somebody’, she starts to say, then laughs. ‘I say “swept”, but he wants to bring a real flipping brush if he does, because I’ve just seen the biscuit wrappers under the sofa.’

This is the Amanda Owen viewers fell for: funny, frank, quick to correct any impression she might take herself too seriously. There’s a moment today when one of the children wanders in to put sheep vaccine in the fridge and Amanda laughs at herself bellowing instructions to put it next to the sugar cane. ‘That sounds so spot-on. I sound like some wellness guru. I’m like Gwyneth Paltrow.’

But there is a vulnerability now. Last year Amanda spoke openly about suffering from an eating disorder. ‘I just shut down,’ she said. ‘Depression, paranoia, agoraphobia and an eating disorder were all smooshed into one.’ She ended up in and out of hospital, struggling to swallow and vomiting blood.

She describes not one dramatic event but ‘an accumulation’. She feels the term ‘burnout’ is ‘too office-y’ to describe what she went through, but we’re talking about a mid-life collapse. ‘Things do get on top of you,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t take much to get to tipping point where you can’t cope.’

Rural life, she says, can bring ‘isolation on top of isolation’. And there is a certain irony in the fact that all the wellness gurus suggest getting out into nature as a cure for mental illness.

‘The idea of green space as being a healing space is all well and good – unless your problem is the green space and you are in charge of it, and it’s green because something has died in it,’ she says bluntly.

‘It’s all great until you’re alone with your thoughts and they are not good ones.’

So loneliness exists even when you have nine children, a glossy Instagram and a packed diary? ‘There are times you don’t want company and people doing your head in, and there are times you could do with some company and the silence is deafening.’

She looks well today, if more fragile than I remember her, but how does she feel? ‘I’m not going to say I’m skipping about, happy as anything. That wouldn’t be real. But I’m here. I’m well. I’m feeling strong. I’ve come through it.’

Her children, friends and work have helped. Her horses ‘have played a massive part. I’ve been doing more riding. Before, I never got to ride much – it was more shovelling what came out the back end.’

And Clive? He’s disappeared off with the tractor now, but when I suggest he was a vital part of the support network, she tuts. ‘Oh yeah, but obviously we split up, so he was part of the cause of it. Let’s be honest here.’

How does his famously straightforward brain deal with something as fiendish as an eating disorder? ‘He gets very blunt. They don’t mince their words. He says it in farmer’s speak, like, “She’s mobilised the back fat.” It means “she’s got thinner”, like when you’ve got stock that is ailing.’

The most astonishing part of Amanda’s recovery is that she’s had to grapple with this while maintaining her social media accounts – feeding the beast. Her fans can be hugely supportive – and the opposite. ‘You get one person saying, “Oh look at you, posing all the time. Why do you do it?” Then the next says, “I can’t stand your hair. Why can’t you do something with it.”’

She’s been asked if she’s had work done (‘No, but I’ve done work on myself. I’ve learned to accept my inadequacies’). She was particularly irked by the fan who posted: ‘I liked you before.’

‘OK, random person, I will go back to being who I used to be for you, person I don’t know.’

She is mostly bewildered that she feels punished for breaking the rules – when Amanda Owen was all about rule-breaking.

‘We are very good at saying, “You must express yourself, aim high, be yourself”, but when you do, they stand there, hands on hips and say, “Who do you think you are?”’

Now the show is back, there’s the continued dilemma of how much of her family’s life to share. Back in the day there was mostly an appetite for cute lambs; now people want to see the real reality.

She shakes her head. ‘It’s not a soap opera. We as a family have given everything in putting our lives out there. It would be stupid and hypocritical to say, “Oh, leave us alone.” But we have to have, to a certain degree, a part of us that is behind closed doors. It’s not Big Brother.’

Amanda’s own childhood was utterly alien to all this. She grew up in suburban Huddersfield and insists it was neither unhappy nor difficult. She was simply unremarkable.

‘I wasn’t naughty. It’s easy if you excel – you will be helped and patted on the head. If you are naughty, you’ll probably also get attention. If you are middle of the road, you can get lost.’

It’s interesting that when she joined Friends Reunited, years later, barely anyone remembered her from school.

There was a seismic event, though. When she was 18, her father Maurice died from cancer, with Amanda there at the end. It was her first experience of death. ‘Very visceral,’ she says.

‘Here now with the children and my life here, you’re surrounded by birth and death and the sex bit in between. Nothing is sort of hidden away from view. Then it was staring death in the face for the first time. Wow.’

His death also delivered, in her words, ‘a kick up the backside’.

‘Right, OK, I need to get on. Life’s for living. You have got to get on. You don’t know when you’re going to drop off this mortal coil, do you?’

Now, she sees her dad in her children, particularly in Reuben, which is comforting. ‘I do wish I’d listened to him and his words of wisdom more,’ she admits.

What were his words of wisdom? She reverts to a joke, which is very Amanda. ‘Never EVER be without a compressor in your life.’

Amanda Owen’s Cosy Bedtime Stories From The Farm and Christmas Tales From The Farm are out now. The new series of Our Farm Next Door: Amanda, Clive And Kids starts Monday at 9pm on More4.