A Year In The Life Of The Yorkshire Shepherdess – Amanda Owen (1)

It’s an old-fashioned method that calms a horse down almost instantly, releasing endorphins that make the animal sleepy and compliant. The only other choice would have been to postpone the whole procedure until we got a sedative from the vet’s. I wasn’t enthralled with the idea of injecting Queenie, who I suspected was possibly in foal, with any kind of drugs. The twitch was the lesser of two evils. Holding the wooden twitch steady and keeping the rope right on her lip, Steve soon had Queenie dozy, standing quietly almost in a trance.

He was able to dress her rear hooves, trim them back and rasp until the angle of her pasterns was corrected. It was truly marvellous to see her afterwards standing correctly. Once the twitch was released she snapped back out of her hypnotic trance and showed us a clean pair of heels as she was turned back into the garth.

Slowly, as the weeks went by, Queenie changed. The painstaking application of salve did its job, coupled with brushes and baths with Dermoline, and she began to blossom. She found a new lease of life, galloping to the top of the field and back again just for the sheer pleasure of it. She was biddable, got to know her name and began to trust us.

By the time winter came she was happy to be rugged up, and the smaller children could lead her in and out of the stables to water her. During these winter months it became obvious that, like Josie, Queenie was definitely in foal, and we had to loosen her rug by letting out more of the surcingle to accommodate her swelling tummy. After tea sometimes we’d take Queenie out for a walk on the lead rope to graze in the garden.

Violet and Edith would stand close beside her, their ears pressed against her sides, listening for the foal: they were delighted if they saw or felt a kick. We watched her carefully, looking for the tiny droplets of waxy milk on her udder that would signal the foal’s arrival within twenty-four hours. It was a cold March morning when she gave birth to a filly, beige and white, strong and healthy. We decided to call her Princess. I was worried about Queenie having enough milk to feed her, knowing that she’d lost her last foal.

I reckoned that it would make sense to help things along and bottle-feed Princess with a mare’s milk replacer.

‘Thoo won’t rein sa lang up the’er, mi lass,’ said one old boy at the auction leaning over a gate whilst charging his pipe. ‘It’s as bleak an’ as godforsaken spot as thoo could wish for.’ It is now more than twenty years since I first arrived at Ravenseat, and the beauty of the place comes fresh to me every time I climb the moor and look back across this broad sweep of Yorkshire countryside, with the ancient stone farmhouse and its outbuildings below me.

It is tough terrain, bleak and unforgiving in winter. But it is grand and inspiring, a place where the seasons and unpredictable weather dictate to us every day of our lives, but where the rewards of life far exceed the difficulties. It is the place where my husband Clive and I rear sheep, cattle and, especially, children. When I first arrived here, I was twenty-one. I’d been working as a contract shepherdess, living in a tiny cottage in Cumbria with my sheepdogs, a handful of over-indulged pet sheep, a delinquent goat and a couple of horses.

I’d found my vocation: I had shunned the urban life that my childhood in Huddersfield had prepared me for and followed my dream to work in the great outdoors, with a dog at my feet and a stick in my hand, out on the hills, shepherding sheep. When I met and fell in love with Clive I realized I wanted something more: a family.

We didn’t set out to create a supersize family, but somehow the openness and freedom of this wild, untamed place imprints itself, and filling the farmhouse with the noise and chaos of children seemed the right thing to do. Clive and I work alongside each other on our 2,000-acre farm, caring for our 900 sheep and thirty cattle.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 15658ad82e00b555
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 4,333,351 bytes (4.133 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 306
• Language: English (en)

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• Estimated Reading Time: 566.64 minutes
• Total Words: 113,328
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• Average Characters per Page: 2002.55

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