Amanda’s story – raised in suburban Huddersfield, she decided to became a farmer after reading the James Herriot books, moved into an isolated hill farm and bore nine children – is well-known thanks to the several bestselling books she has written and her popular US Shepherdess social media accounts.

Despite sharing his name with a Hollywood actor, her husband Clive Owen has a much lower profile and often stays out of the limelight. He’s a father of 11, as he was already divorced with two children when he met Amanda in 1996, when she was 21.

Then working as a contract shepherd, she was sent to collect a ram from Clive’s tenanted sheep farm, Ravenseat near Keld in Swaledale, and love blossomed. Amanda described the cottage as rundown with damp carpets and smoke-stained wallpaper, and she compared it to a TV programme called The Dale That Died.

But she realised its potential to become a warm family home and was desperate to bring life back to it.

Amanda admits she was more concerned with looking for a sheepdog than a boyfriend when she met Clive, who is also from a non-farming background and has never been to London. He had been living on the farm, which dates back to the Viking period, since 1989, moving from a farm in Stainmore which he ran alone.

He chose Ravenseat because of its position in the heart of Swaledale and associations with the breed of the same name.

In an interview with The Telegraph, she spoke of how Clive was so concerned with his flock that he survived on pies and cornflakes, and used one of his living rooms to keep feed bins in.

She says they didn’t plan such a large family, but that each addition to their brood fits in well with their free-range life on the farm.