The story of Wensleydale cheese, one of Britain’s finest ‘territorials’ is an historic rollercoaster ride of growth from murky origins to near death experience to a welcome resurgence. Today, this moist, crumbly cow’s milk cheese, with undertones of honey and lemon, not only survives but thrives.

Wensleydale Creamery at Hawes, the largest producer of Wensleydale in Yorkshire, is so proud of their cheese that they are currently applying to the EU for Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) status. PDO is awarded to foods produced in a designated geographical area by time-honoured means. If granted, it would prevent other manufacturers outside the Dales calling their cheese Wensleydale.

PDO would be just reward in view of Wensleydale’s often turbulent history and would finally secure the rightful place of Wensleydale cheese at the heart of artisan cheese making in the beautiful Yorkshire Dales.

The story of Wensleydale goes back to a curd strainer unearthed at the Roman fort at Bainbridge in Upper Wensleydale, the earliest evidence of cheese making in Yorkshire although it gives scant clue as to the sort of cheese the Romans enjoyed there.

The next chapter belongs to French Cistercian monks who came over in the wake of the Norman Conquests and settled first at Fors Abbey in Upper Wensleydale and later at the more comfortable Jerveaux. They brought with them a recipe for a blue ewe’s milk cheese from Roquefort. Using milk from the lush limestone pastures and maturing them in the dark damp cellars of the monastic granges where the natural mould in the stone created blue veins, it sounds like a superb cheese.

But this blue veined ewe’s milk cheese is not the Wensleydale we know today. Down the years cow’s milk replaced ewe’s milk and the taste for blue declined. Nevertheless, cheese making remained a practical way of preserving milk and by the 19th century some 1,000 cheeses were reported on sale at North Yorkshire’s Yarm Fair.

Farmhouse cheese making flourished right up until the start of the second World war with some 433 farms making cheese in the Dales and yet within
20 years they were gone.

The Milk Marketing Board took the blame. Created in 1933 to provide a national scheme for the collection and distribution of milk, they provided a reliable income for farmers during the depression but the effect was to decimate farmhouse cheese making. A guaranteed market for milk negated the need for cheese making until only the Wensleydale Creamery at Hawes survived, largely through the inspiration of Kit Calvert, a local Dales cheese maker who fought to maintain cheese making in Wensleydale.

But by the 1990s Dairy Crest was running the Hawes creamery. Wensleydale cheese had lost much of its character and local distinctiveness. Real farmhouse cheese production had gone ‘underground’ produced on a handful of small farms and marketed quietly, even secretly, through word of mouth.

But when Dairy Crest announced their intention to relocate Wensleydale production to Lancashire it caused an uproar and led eventually to a management buy-out. The Wensleydale Creamery was saved and traditional cheese making in Wensleydale began to revive.

The real renaissance though, has come from the return of farmhouse cheese making. Forced back into cheese through farm diversification, small scale dairies are once again producing superb quality cheeses: Suzanne Stirke’s lovely moist Richard lll Wensleydale, David and Mandy Reeds’ reborn Swaledale, Joan Cross’s Cotherstone; Iain and Christine Hill’s Ribblesdale and Lowna Dairy’s range of fresh young goats’ cheeses.

In particular, at the Shepherd’s Purse dairy near Thirsk, Judy Bell has pioneered a range of blue ewe’s milk cheeses bringing the story almost full circle, back to the creation a thousand years ago, of those creamy, blue veined cheeses, maturing in the cool dark cellars of Jerveaux Abbey in the heart of Wensleydale. It is the taste of tradition and territory and, above all, absolutely delicious.

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