Jess paid tribute to her grandfather George in a new episode of Life in the Dales that aired on Tuesday, June 2, turning the latest outing for Reuben Owen and his family into a very personal goodbye. The moment came as Jess visited her grandfather’s site to pay her respects and said she missed him deeply.
The episode brought the couple back to screens just as viewers were catching up with Reuben, Jess, friends Sonny and Capper, and his brothers Sid and Miles. It was not a polished family montage. The team were clearing trees that had fallen on a church graveyard, and the day’s work kept the series rooted in the practical, physical world that made the family name familiar in the first place.
For Jess, though, the story was about memory more than machinery. She said her grandfather was a character and that things had not felt the same since he died. George died in 2018 at the age of 70, and Jess described a life shaped by family work, saying her grandmother had always been there helping out and that she and her grandfather had spent years doing jobs together. She said he involved her in what he was doing, taught her everything and was proud when she got things done.
One exchange gave the tribute its edge. Reuben told Jess that he never met her grandfather, even as the episode centered on the legacy George left behind. That distance mattered, because the tribute was not only about grief but about inheriting a story that Reuben came to later, through Jess and through the farm itself. Jess said she thought George would be happy to see where things were now, because the work had carried on.
The background only sharpened that point. Reuben found his own television audience on Our Yorkshire Farm with his parents, Clive and Amanda Owen, before getting his own series. Jess also works as a farmer on her parents’ Brough Castle Farm, the place George inherited when he was 18 and spent his life running and improving for the family’s future. In that sense, the tribute did what good family television rarely does by accident: it showed how a farm can outlast one generation and still keep the people who follow tied to the one before. Reuben and Jessica got together in October 2024, after meeting at a young farmers’ convention and, as she put it, just clicking because they both came from farming backgrounds. For now, the unanswered question is how George’s legacy continues to shape the farm day to day, beyond the affection seen on screen.
