THE delight at the Yorkshire Shepherdess’s arrival in Hexham was palpable. Fans were talking excitedly as they went in.

And it’s not surprising, for when this 6ft 2ins, confident farmer and now mother of nine strides on stage and the interviewer begins to list her very many credits and attributes, and the photographs rolling behind them reveal Amanda Owen is an accomplished photographer too, you feel like you’re in the presence of Wonder Woman.

But her down-to-earth attitude – swaddled in a big, warm sense of humour – is the real reason people have taken her to their hearts.

Two biographies and one fly-on-the-wall television series in and they feel like they know her. The second series of Channel 5’s Our Yorkshire Farm is being filmed as we speak, she said. “Yes, the cameras are back.

“When the crew are coming up the valley, I ask them to bring fresh fruit, which my children crave. They can always get their hands on packets of biscuits, but fruit...it’s all back to front in our house!”

That farmhouse, on their now almost-famous Ravenseat farm, is miles from anywhere, in the uppermost reaches of Swaledale.

While Ravenseat’s 2,000 acres, which rise up to 1,800ft above sea level, are bang on Wainwright’s Coast-to-Coast trail, that’s the only thing they’re close to.

It’s a two-hour bus journey to school for most of her household, and don’t get her started on the proximity of the nearest hospital!

The story of how she delivered her eighth baby, Clementine, alone in the middle of the night, while her husband and the rest of the children slept upstairs, went everywhere. “People admonished me, saying ‘that’s a no, no’, but it’s my life,” she said.

“I was fed up going to hospital which, because they kept closing them, was getting further and further away. I was supposed to go to Middlesbrough on that occasion, but it was two hours away.

“After having six babies at the side of the road, because my labours are so quick, I didn’t want to do that anymore. I just thought ‘right, I’m staying at home’.”

She didn’t tell anyone in advance, even husband Clive, in case they tried to stop her. “I had Clemmie on the rug downstairs, wrapped her up and went upstairs to show Clive and he sat up and said something I can’t repeat here.” She laughed.

Neither she nor Clive were born into farming. She hails from Huddersfield and Clive from Doncaster, but the latter had got a taste for farming during a spell in Cumbria. He was already the tenant at Ravenseat when she met him.

“It’s very Wuthering Heights,” she said. “We’re high up on the edge of the moors. We have a thousand Swaledale sheep which, because they’re native, breed well. The majority of them will lamb outside on their own and have just one lamb, so it’s pretty much back to basics with us.

“We don’t lamb until April 15 – that’s when the weather dictates it’s good enough to give it a go, and there’s enough grass around. You don’t go against nature, you try to go with it.”

She also has 40 cows, six dogs, four ponies, two bestselling books and almost 58,000 Twitter followers.

Social media has made her the subject of criticism that, frankly, she has no time for. “I put a picture up of Reuben riding the quad bike without a helmet on and there was a Twitter backlash,” she sighed with impatience. “But there always is, isn’t there?

“There was another when one of my daughters didn’t have a riding hat on. But she didn’t have a saddle or bridle either, so how upset do you want to get?

“People say ‘but this could go wrong/it’s dangerous’, but I don’t think bare-back riding or swimming outdoors is a problem.

“What is, I think, is the growing mental health problems being caused by children being locked away, indoors, too frightened to go out and do anything.”

She chuckles over the anecdote about daughter Annas and her first school swimming lesson. “She came home that afternoon and said ‘mum, you’ll never guess what – the water is in a house’.”

The theatre rings with laughter, too, when she talks about the Burberry fashion shoot her 19-year-old daughter Raven didn’t really want to do (“She had the perfect sulky face for the shoot”) and the day walking guru-cum-television presenter Julia Bradbury got lost on their moors (“That suited Clive very well - he went and rescued her on his quad bike”).

Life was idyllic for the most part at Ravenseat, certainly on spring and summer days. But when howling winter winds forced snow through their sash windows and the cold seeped into their bones, it could be tough. Even then, she still loved Ravenseat.

“We’re not like the Waltons though,” she said. “I’ve never set to paint a rosy picture. We do argue.

“I think that’s been the good thing about the TV programme – it isn’t airbrushed. I was mortified when they filmed me finding a dead sheep in a stream, because it made me look like a rubbish shepherd, but that’s life, that happens.”