CELEBRATING THE SEASONS
Pan Macmillan |Paperback £8.99 |4th October 2022
Author of five Sunday Times Bestselling books and star of Channel 5’s highest-rated factual series Our Yorkshire Farm, Amanda Owen is known to millions as The Yorkshire Shepherdess.
Amanda runs a two thousand-acre hill farm in Swaledale in North Yorkshire, fifty miles from the nearest large town. She is a full-time shepherdess tending a thousand sheep and nine children aged 5 to 21. Her life is dominated by the seasons, feeding, clipping, dipping, herding, rescuing, and lambing her flock in one of the most remotely beautiful yet tough spots in the country.
In Celebrating the Seasons, Amanda Owen shares funny and charming stories from across the farming year with her family and their many four-legged charges, from lambing in spring, to haymaking and shearing in summer and feeding the flock in midwinter. In this updated paperback edition, featuring additional material taking us up to February 2022, Amanda learns why pig-feeders are best left in situ, camps out overnight in a moorland sheep-fold, and finds a new super-size friend for Tony the pony.
Celebrating the Seasons vividly evokes the Swaledale landscape where Amanda lives, with its sweeping moors, rare wildflowers, and elusive hares glimpsed in the fields. Amanda believes in using good, seasonal ingredients when it comes to feeding her family, and includes her favourite recipes here: from wild garlic lamb with Hasselback new potatoes to rhubarb and custard crumble cake and Yorkshire curd tart.
Part recipe book and part memoir, the paperback of Celebrating the Seasons includes 36 stunning photographs taken by Amanda showcasing the bleak and beautiful landscape she calls home, opening up a window into a life lived on one of the country’s highest, wildest moors – a land so inaccessible that in places it can only be reached on foot.
Amanda’s love of photography came out of a desire to keep a lasting record of family life on the farm – taking natural, honest, and spontaneous pictures of spectacular scenery, and providing a real insight into the unique joys and challenges of daily life.
Written month by month, Amanda takes the reader on her personal journey through the seasons, describing the age-old cycles of a farming year and the constant challenges the family face.
Reading has always been a big part of Amanda’s life – she was inspired to follow her farming dream by the works of James Herriot and credits the photography book Hill Shepherd by John and Eliza Forder as the book that sparked her interest in shepherding and sheep. Just as Hill Shepherd was written as a lasting tribute to a traditional way of life, Celebrating the Seasons is a tribute to a simpler way of life that has been lost to many.
About Amanda Owen
Amanda Owen grew up in Huddersfield but was inspired by the James Herriot books to leave her town life behind and head to the countryside. After a period of milking cows and working as a contract shepherdess and alpaca shearer, she eventually settled down in Swaledale, North Yorkshire, living and working in one of the highest and most remote places in England, where she has been for over 25 years.
Amanda is the mother of nine children, a passionate photographer, and the author of the top ten bestsellers The Yorkshire Shepherdess, A Year in the Life of the Yorkshire Shepherdess, The Adventures of the Yorkshire Shepherdess, Tales from the Farm, and Celebrating the Seasons, which was the biggest selling Hardback Non-Fiction title of 2022 and was shortlisted for Non-Fiction Lifestyle Book of the Year at the 2022 British Book Awards. She has also regularly appeared on TV in shows such as The Dales, Winter Walks, New Lives in the Wild, Springtime on the Farm, and Our Yorkshire Farm.
