OUR LITTLE CORNER OF THE WORLD

When our grandmother Ivy created her recipe for vintage Cheddar a century ago, she was perfecting a family tradition that came from the unique area where she and all her children and grandchildren have grown up. We’re grateful to have had the great fortune to have grown up in Somerset, and particularly in the beautiful village of Wyke Champflower.

Wyke Champflower is one of many small villages in Somerset, surrounded by fields and sitting between the hills of the Mendips and Quantocks. Wyke is an old English word for a village involved in dairy farming, while Champflower comes from the Norman French for “field of flowers”, so it’s clear that the area’s suitability for farming was already established in the Middle Ages.

The warm weather provided by the Gulf Stream, along with the rains that come in from the West, mean that this is a particularly fertile area, providing plenty of lush grass that’s perfect for raising cows. Another clue that this was a particularly wet part of the world comes in the name of the river that runs through our farm, the Brue. It’s an Old English word for “vigour”, and documents tell us that the waterway was often so fast and full that it the area was well-known for flooding.

Cheese has been made in the area at least since the 12^th Century, when a reference to King Henry II buying an amount of Cheddar for his court was recorded. We know that our grandmother Ivy’s family, the Thornes, were descended from generations of farmers, whose fields stretched to an impressive 300 acres. In 1927, when she married Tom Clothier, from another long-standing dairy family, and moved to Wyke Champflower, their first farm was a fifth of the size, with just 10 cows.

That herd, and the dairy that came with it, grew a lot in their lifetime and since, but they were always careful to look after the countryside and to give back to nature more than they took. Following their example, we’ve become pioneers in producing green energy, and we do all we can to preserve the landscape that we’ve been lucky enough to inherit.

While the land has been worked for all that time, Wyke Champflower is still an unspoiled stretch of countryside, and a popular spot for walkers and hikers. We think the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, who lived nearby and wrote poems about the natural beauty of the landscape, would still recognise it now. We intend to do all we can to help keep it that way.