We catch up with you as the UK emerges from lockdown – how has it been for you and what are you looking forward to most as restrictions ease?

I’m so lucky to live where I live; in the countryside and on a small holding with a farm down the road which I also help run, and nature and animals don’t stop for lockdown. My husband, Ludo, is a director and cameraman and we’ve been working together a lot. In many respects, life hasn’t been that different, but the thing I’ve missed – which I suspect will resonate with everybody – is just sitting around the kitchen table with my mates. I’m a hugger and I’ve found it really difficult not being able to hug.

You’ve been busy writing your latest book, A Year of Living Simply – tell us all about it and why you wrote it.

I literally disappeared for the whole of January last year with my dog and stayed in a little cabin in West Wales, and just wrote for a month to get the book finished. The book celebrates a lot of the things that people have rediscovered in lockdown – simplicity and the joys that come with it.

One of the things that we’ve done as a society is confuse the idea of convenience with simplicity. The simplest way to have a loaf of bread on the table is to go and buy one at the supermarket, but there’s no achievement in that, there’s no fun in that, there’s no control over that, there’s no joy to be had from that. The joy of making a loaf of bread is infinite. There’s something absolutely wonderful about taking raw, very simple ingredients, mixing them together and making them into something you can eat.

The book is about my journey to try and bring more simplicity into my life and more joy with it. I fundamentally felt that I had got life out of kilter. I was working incredibly hard and, yes, I could buy things if I wanted them, but actually I didn’t want to buy anything – I just wanted more time to be in my garden and go for a walk.

I think what this book encourages people to do is open up space in their lives to allow these simple pleasures – whether it’s making things from scratch, growing things or mending things.

Those very simple pleasures – people have realised in lockdown how unbelievably therapeutic and important they are to all of us.

We’re all looking for happiness, yet attaining it has become anything but simple – what are some of the things that make you happy?

Being able to see the sky – just being outside, day or night. There is something absolutely wonderful about the night sky and getting up first thing in the morning and just seeing the sky above you – having that uninterrupted view. The other thing is cooking for people – there is nothing more convivial than putting some food together for a group of people you love. It doesn’t have to be a feast and it doesn’t have to be anything fancy. It can literally be apples and a piece of cheese and some bread you’ve made. And just being amongst animals – whether it’s farm animals, the animals that are in my care or wildlife. I will see deer most days, I might see a badger or a fox, and hear birds singing. I love going for a walk with my dog and we’ll just sit in the woods and see what happens. Being immersed in the natural environment is really important for my general sense of wellbeing.

What are your earliest memories as a child of experiencing nature?

My mum used to cut the crusts of the bread for our toast in the morning. We had a sparrow called Martha that knew this, and she would come and peck on the kitchen window and share our toast with us. I just remember this lovely feeling of seeing this wild bird popping into the kitchen.

We also had a hedge that grew along the back of the house which had beautiful pink blossom. Blackbirds always nested in it and it was always a good place to look for snails. I vividly remember seeing the blackbirds flying in and out of the hedge, and my dad showing me these beautiful blue eggs, and then being aware of a blackbird coming back with things in her beak and seeing these funny, awkward, slightly ugly fledgelings appear from my hedge. The wonderful thing would be finding the little bits of shell that had been tossed out of the nest and I remember having endless matchboxes lined with bits of cottonwool with the shell being my special treasure.

You left school and home at 18 and funded a year of travelling around Africa with odd jobs – what made you do that and have you always possessed an adventurer’s spirit?

I just had this irrepressible wanderlust – I really wanted to go and see other parts of the world. I still don’t like flying and I was completely scared of it back then, but I found school and the way that we were taught incredibly restrictive. I went to a very academic school and essentially all I was taught to do was pass exams. I wasn’t taught anything that made me then think, I know about this and I want to know more. It sounds precocious, and perhaps it was, but I just thought, this isn’t education and I’m not getting anything out of this.

So, I hightailed it away from education as quickly as I possibly could and thought I’ll kind of teach myself, and the way I felt I was going to learn the most was to travel, meet different people living in different circumstances, and be open-minded and curious.

Whenever anyone asks, “How do I get your job?”, I say there really is no secret apart from the fact that you have always got to be curious, always ask questions, be open-minded and embrace what’s in front of you. However difficult, overwhelming and scary, just go for it.

When I did Who do you Think you Are? a few years ago, I found out that my mum’s father, who died when I was 10, was a big adventurer and ended up being part of The Great Escape. None of us knew that. My other grandfather was a test pilot, so an unbelievably brave man who also had impossible wanderlust. Mum always blamed them for my genes, which have basically made me a restless soul.

Did you always dream of becoming a TV presenter and what was your first big break?

As a younger teenager, I did harbour ambitions to be an actress and I did audition for the National Youth Theatre. I got a second audition, but then I didn’t get in and kind of gave up. I didn’t really have any career plan. I’ve always loved writing – the only prize I ever won was a creative writing prize when I was eight – and I love reading. I was always just very nosey and curious.

When I went travelling, I did all sorts of jobs – I was probably the world’s worst model for a couple of months, I worked on a crocodile farm, I drove a truck for a safari company, I did all sorts of things. If I’d stayed in Africa (I ran out of money), what I really wanted was to be a ranger and work with wildlife.

When I came back to the UK, I had this idea that I wanted to work in telly – I really have no idea why as I hadn’t really grown up watching TV but I liked the thought of finding out about things. I started as a runner and then a production assistant, and then I became a researcher – and that was a job that I really loved. The presenting came about entirely by accident; I had started writing travel articles for The Telegraph and working at the BBC. My wanderlust got me a job on a holiday programme, and I was asked to do a screen test, even though I wasn’t particularly interested back then. But I suppose what I did bring to being a presenter was understanding how programmes were made because I’d done all the background stuff, so I could be a proper functioning member of a team – and that’s probably helped me continue to do it to after 25 years or so.

You must be incredibly busy – how do you like to spend your spare time?

Going for a walk is everything – it’s my therapy, its my quiet time, it’s exercise, it’s the simplest and most rewarding of pleasures.  Hand on heart, if I had five days free now, I would take my dog and a rucksack with a tent in it, and I would walk across the Brecon Beacons, which is a walk I have wanted to do for a very long time but have never had enough time to do it in one fail swoop. About three or four years ago, I did manage to walk along the River Wye, which is about 136 miles long, with my dog and that was just a wonderful thing to do.

What was the inspiration for Humble by Nature, your rural skills school in the Wye Valley?

We took on a council-owned farm of just over 100 acres, which was going to be broken up and sold off because they thought it was unviable, but Ludo and I thought we should try to keep it as a working tenanted farm and that you just need to think outside the box. One of the things we realised when we moved to Wales and a small holding was that, although both of us had been brought up in the countryside, neither of us had been responsible for livestock before and there was nowhere to learn.

We thought there must be lots of people like us and we could set up a business alongside the farm that brings it more income, and that’s where the idea for the rural skills school came from. It’s a livestock farm, we’re quite high up and exposed so predominantly there are sheep and cattle but we also rear a few pigs, goats, hens and ducks. There’s a lot of really great artisans around us and it’s quite a collaborative place.

You’ve made many TV programmes and are an accomplished author with four narrative books under your belt – what’s your proudest moment?

When I was working on Spring Watch many years ago, we had a wonderful local circus, Giffords Circus, and I went with my husband. We were having a drink in the interval standing in the field, and I could see a woman with her 10-year-old boy who wanted to come over. He was really shy and he came up to me and he said, “Are you the Spring Watch lady – can I tell you about the hedgehog in my garden?” And that for me was such a lovely moment. I thought, how fantastic – here is a little boy who is so excited about noticing something amazing in his garden. It was so lovely to know that I’d been able to do something that showed a child just how special nature is – that’s the future of our planet, right there.

What’s coming up for 2021 that you’re particularly excited about?

We’ve made another series on the farm of Escape to the Farm and I’m filming another series of A Country Life, which follows people making some courageous moves to an entirely different part of the country and a different way of life. We have some amazing families, and it doesn’t always work out. Apart from that, I’m just really excited about enjoying a cider with my friends at the pub.

This article features in the Jimmys Farm Magazine, see the latest issue here.

Photography by Clare Richardson

Kate’s book, A Year of Living Simply, is available from all good book shops and Amazon now.