Ribblesdale Cheese

If you love cheese as much as we do and fancy a fun family day out, we have just the thing to make your mouth water!
Just up the road in the small market town of Hawes, lies a family run artisan cheese makers...

We are a small, artisan cheese makers, specialising in goats cheese.  We are tucked away at the bottom end of Hawes, North Yorkshire, on a small industrial estate: Upper Wensleydale Business park, next door to the Goodlife and adjacent to the new GTEC building.  It amuses me no end when people ask me: do you make cheese on your farm?  And do you have your own animals?  I am utterly honest and say not any more to both, which is true – my uncle started the business at his farmhouse, now where I live, but telling people that we make cheese on an industrial estate doesn't quite have the same cachet.

In these days of environmental health regulations, this is the best place for us where we can make cheese in the right space, with the right equipment and services, safely and hygienically even if the location is not too photogenic.  My uncle used to have a small herd of goats, but these days, we buy in the region of 180,000 litres of goat milk a year, so we would need over 1,000 goats to satisfy those requirements.  It is a shame that we find ourselves in Wensleydale as opposed to Ribblesdale, where we started, but realistically, there isn't any commercial space big enough for us in Horton in Ribblesdale – and we have already outgrown our space in Hawes and we only have about 2,200 sq. ft!

Ribblesdale Cheese was formed in 1978 by my uncle, Iain Hill, a tall, charismatic Yorkshire man through and through, who moved up to the Yorkshire Dales after engineering a redundancy payment from Lewis’ where he was a store manager.  His initial idea, after buying a dilapidated farm house was to start an outdoor centre for inner city children.  This did not work out.  He tried a few other ideas with little success until his mother, my grandmother who was by then living with my uncle and his children, gave him some money with strict       instructions to ‘do something useful’ with it.                                                      

So, (much to Grandma Hill’s dismay) he bought a pair of goats and named them Victoria and Maude after his mother.  He did not realise that they were in goat as they shortly afterwards produced two fine offspring and milk.  His drinking buddy, the local vet suggested that he make cheese and that is how we started.  Iain built up the herd to around 50 -100 that lived in a barn opposite the farm house, though they were very naughty and kept escaping, causing much chaos and  mayhem around the surrounding fields and annoyance to neighbouring farmers.

Iain perfected his cheese and built a local following which included selling frozen goat milk to Andrew’s girlfriend’s father for his orphan lambs and progressed to local and then national wholesale outlets.  Goat cheese was a relatively new and different phenomenon in the 1980s where cow’s cheese was the norm and many people – and still to this day – won’t eat goat cheese as they are reminded of the sometimes smelly rustic style goat cheese available at French markets; fortunately, public taste is changing and many  now appreciate the health benefits associated with goat cheese.

Eventually, due to arthritis, Iain sold the goats and bought in the goat milk and started to make it at other cheese maker’s premises as his initial home dairy became too small until eventually he contracted out the cheese making process.  Sadly, Iain died in 2006 and was succeeded by his niece, Iona, (that’s me!) who knew absolutely nothing about cheese or cheese making.  It was a steep learning curve!

In 2014, we are a very different business but without losing sight of our  humble and very authentic beginnings.  In 2008, we became cheese makers once more and moved from Horton in Ribblesdale (hence Ribblesdale!) to Hawes to larger premises to create a new dairy and now make hard goat, cow and sheep cheese.  In 2013 we made our first soft goat cheese.

Everything we make is by hand: the milk is stirred by hand, the curd is hand cut, hand shovelled.  Yes, you get big muscles!  A vat takes as long as it takes, there are no set times or schedules.  All of our cheese is made in a long, slow and traditional way to recipes that I have developed.  Many people do not appreciate the time and physical effort involved in cheese making – we can be in at 7am, setting the pasteuriser off and finish washing down at about 4.30pm and if we are making 2,000 litres, we make just 100 cheeses at a time.

Our average make is 1,900 litres of goat milk twice a week throughout the year.  We are busier from January to March when we also make sheep’s cheese and we make like crazy in September and October for Christmas sales.  We make cow’s cheese between once and twice a month and we run cheese making classes which have become very popular and have a waiting list.

We specialise in goat cheese: about 90% of our sales are goat cheese, but we also make award winning sheep cheese, the odd bit of Wensleydale cow’s cheese and, in 2013, we made our first sortie into soft goat cheese making and won a Gold at Nantwich 2013 for our new Goat Curd.  We make about 23 tonnes of cheese a year, not a huge amount, but enough to satisfy our customers.

Our goat’s milk comes from a single herd that are located about an hour and a half away from us, in Lancashire as there are no milking goats available to us in N Yorkshire.  It is single source and excellent quality.  Our ewe’s milk comes from Simon Stott at Laund Farm, Chipping, just over the border in Lancashire who has 400 Friesland sheep and again, this is single source.

Our cow’s milk is from a single pedigree herd of Friesian, Ayrshire and Shorthorn cows just 16 miles away from us.

The cheese we make ourselves includes: Superior Goat, Smoked Superior Goat, Original Goat, (Booths take this cheese), Smoked original Goat, occasionally an unpasteurised goat cheese, a traditional bandaged natural rinded goat cheese, Wensleydale cow cheese, a traditional bandaged Wensleydale, an unpasteurised Wensleydale, our own sheep’s cheese and a soft goat curd.

Other than Booths, we do not sell to supermarkets, only to fine food, deli's and farm shops via our loyal network of wholesale customers.  Good times!

Ribblesdale now do 'one-day' cheese making courses! For more information please go to their website at www.ribblesdalecheese.wordpress.com/the-little-cheese-shop

With thanks to Iona from Ribblesdale Cheese for kindly supplying this content.