How do I become … a shepherd

http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/apr/10/how-become-shepherd

Version 0 of 1.

It was a coffee-table book in Huddersfield library that convinced city goth Amanda Owen that her future lay with sheep. "I had been glued to All Creatures Great and Small on TV, but unfortunately discovered that I wasn't academic enough to be a vet," she says. "I'd haunt the animal section in the library and one day picked up a beautiful book called Hill Shepherd full of the most evocative photos I could imagine – not just romantic views, but gritty pictures of the blood and the grime. I didn't realise that life still existed."

Two decades on Owens, 39, runs a 2,000-acre sheep farm in a Yorkshire Dales village so remote that it's been deserted by all inhabitants except her own large family. Each day she rises at dawn to care for 1,000 sheep and her seven children, the youngest of whom rides strapped to her body as she strides the wild hills rounding up her flock with her sheepdogs. All but two of the children were born en route to the hospital because it's two hours away over treacherous roads.

For a city girl born to a mechanic and a fashion model it's an extraordinary life. Each day is a battle with the elements that often brutalise this part of Yorkshire. The children rarely visit shops or cinemas and muck in with the farm work as soon as they're old enough to walk. "I've never done a jigsaw with my kids and sometimes that keeps me awake at night, but lambing with them is just as bonding," she says. Despite the grinding hours, there is very little money in it but Owens has never regretted that teenage resolve. "We don't often leave the farm because we find we're always looking for somewhere as good as here."

Her route in to shepherding, usually the preserve of farming families, relied on a mixture of bluff and stamina. On leaving school at 18, she enrolled for an NVQ in veterinary nursing and met an agricultural worker who offered to find her work experience. "I went about farms shovelling muck and disinfecting pens," she says. "You start at the bottom and see the rough side of farming."

The filth and the toil did not deter her; it merely reinforced her longing for an old-fashioned hill farm rather than intensive production in industrial-sized buildings. She read up on sheep farming and plastered her bedroom walls with charts of ovine diseases and body parts. When she saw a shepherding job advertised that specified that no sheepdog was needed, she applied.

"Thanks to a bit of bluff and Farmer's Weekly I managed to convince the farmer that knew what I was talking about," she says. She was offered a seasonal job lambing on a farm in Wiltshire where Cumbrian farmers sent their youngest lambs to overwinter in milder climes. When they arrived to collect their animals Owens returned with them. "I wanted a more rugged landscape and since lambing starts later in the colder north there was work for me up there."

She was housed in an elderly caravan in a farmyard and lent a hand on any farm that would take her. "I could so easily have given up then," she says. "I was on my own with no money working 24/7 and feeling like a skivvy because I had no qualifications so was given all the mucky jobs."

Her prospects improved when she was given a cottage for a peppercorn rent and the runt of a litter of puppies. "It looked suspiciously like a terrier and made no effort to help with the sheep until one day I was coming down the hill in the rain with a lamb over my shoulder and I was close to giving up because the sheep kept wandering back up the hill, when suddenly the dog started chasing the sheep and it was just a question of getting him to chase them in the right direction." From then on she owned a working sheepdog.

One night she was sent to a remote farm to collect a tup – a male sheep – which her employer loaned for breeding. She and the farmer bonded over the setting of a broken sheep leg and were married. Overnight she became mistress of a James Herriot-style farmhouse and 1,000 sheep.

Numerous courses exist on aspects of shepherding, but Owens reckons that hands-on experience is the surest way in for those without farming blood. "You need to get to the auctions and read all the farming papers for work opportunities, and you need to be a jack of all trades because there's a lot of IT involved in modern farming," she says. "If you're prepared to take on anything there'll be someone who will hire you and because of the different lambing seasons in the north and south you can find lambing work from Christmas to late April. To buy your own farm you'd have to win the lottery but once you've gained the experience and made the contacts there's always the chance of a tenancy."

Those lured by pastoral imagery can expect a brutal awakening. "People come to our farm on a sunny summer's day and think we live an idyll," she says."'But if you're trying to round up sheep in snow so deep you can't lift your legs or carrying a hay bale a mile through three-feet drifts or tying a sheep's prolapse with string because you're miles from a vet it's a different picture.

"You can spend hours looking for a lost sheep then find it drowned in a bog, because where there's livestock there's dead stock."

The compensations are the joy of working with nature in beautiful surroundings and of continuing centuries old traditions of husbandry. Owens, despite her city roots, feels she has come home. Recently she decided to buy a copy of the coffee-table book that had so long ago inspired her. "I realised that my now husband is actually in one of the photos that I'd gazed at in the library," she says. "I felt I'd come full circle."

• The Yorkshire Shepherdess by Amanda Owen was published by Jackson & Sedgwick on 10 April.