Hemingford Grey and Green Knowe

A 'Typical' English Village and an Ancient House with a Literary Connection

Hemingford Grey, So Typical it is Almost Unique

Cambridgeshire

Huntingdonshire

Sunglasses were essential for the two hour drive to Hemingford Grey. The trip had not been planned knowing this would be the warmest day of the year (so far) but we were happy enough that it was. Recent political upheavals suggest England is not at ease with itself, but beneath a smiling sun and a clear blue sky it looked a green and comfortable country.

The M6 and A14 ran freely and we were a couple of miles beyond Huntingdon and almost there before encountering traffic problems. Our planned route (we learned later) would have shown us a straggling village much of it modern and ordinary, but after leaving the A14 a little early we approached via Hemingford Abbot and a couple of wrong turns and fell, as if by magic, into the old village centre. It is one of those places cherished in our national imagination as a 'typical English village', though few of us live in such Gardens of Eden now - or indeed ever did. To paraphrase John Major paraphrasing George Orwell, this is the England of long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer and old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist.

Thatched house, Hemingford Grey

Apart from the thatched houses, large and small, there were renovated workers cottages….

Former workers' cottages, Hemingford Grey

… and houses where roses climbed the wall.

Roses up the wall, Hemingford Grey

Hemingford Grey is in Huntingdonshire, once a county in its own right but now merely a district of Cambridgeshire and the village pub is Cambridgeshire Dining Pub of the Year. Orwell’s ‘warm beer’ notwithstanding I am sure the beer is as well kept as in the Martin's Arms in Colston Bassett, the Nottinghamshire Dining Pub of the year we visited by happy accident last month. We did however, eschew The Cock today and met our daughter Siân at the Hemingford Garden Room, a Community Interest Company café, in the nearby parish rooms where we lunched in the garden beneath the shade of an umbrella.

The Cock, Hemingford Grey

The River Great Ouse and the Church of St James

Well-fed we strolled up the High Street which ends at the River Great Ouse. Across the river is St James’ church where the spire fell down during a hurricane in 1714. Despite the attempt to turn the stump into an architectural feature, it still looks like a stump.

St James', Hemingford Grey

We strolled down the riverside path until we reached a gate in the hedge.

The Manor, Lucy M Boston's Green Knowe

Hemingford Grey is undoubtedly a pretty village, but not so uniquely pretty we would have driven over two hundred miles between us merely to see it; we were actually on a pilgrimage. Siân says she hardly remembers the BBC adaptation of the Children of Green Knowe - four thirty-minute episodes broadcast in 1986 when she was five - but that led to the purchase of the book, and then to the other five in the series, written by Lucy M Boston between 1954 and 1976. They were read and re-read many times in the following years.

The gate in the hedge took us into The Manor, the home of Lucy Boston from 1939 to her death in 1990, and the inspiration for Green Knowe.

Into the gardens, The Manor, Hemingford Grey

The books feature a rather solitary twelve-year-old with the unlikely name of Toseland (actually the name of a village a few miles south of Hemingford Grey). While his parents are in Burma he spends his school holidays at Green Knowe with his wise and kindly great-grandmother Oldknow. During these visits Toseland (Tolly) meets the other children of the family who have inhabited Green Knowe over the centuries. They are, of course, ghosts, but not frightening spooks, merely young human beings displaced in time.

The writing, gently paced and literary, immerses the reader in this fantasy world and is demanding for young readers. After watching a BBC adaption of the first book, Lynne read all the books to Siân and they both came to love the stories.

Siân had recently discovered that the house is open to the public by appointment. When she phoned she was very excited when her call was answered personally by Diana Boston, Lucy Boston's daughter-in-law.

The Garden in Reality and in Green Knowe

The beautifully tended garden also features in the stories. It contains the malevolent Green Noah, actually a decaying felled tree trunk,….

Green Noah, Hemingford Grey Manor

… a stand of bamboo in which a gorilla is found in one story, and a walking St Christopher, though the statue is new, donated after the 2009 filming of From Time to Time an adaptation of The Chimneys of Green Knowe. Despite having Maggie Smith, Hugh Bonneville and Timothy Spall in the cast the film was not a success.

St Christopher, The Manor, Hemingford Grey

We wandered round the garden. Among the highlights were the largest thistle I have ever seen (No, that is a cardoon, Siân corrected me)….

Cardoon, The Manor, Hemingford Grey

… and a fancy frilly red tree/shrub which I was pleased to find she could not identify.

Unidentified tree/shrub, The Manor, Hemingford Grey

We sat on a shaded bench with some of the other visitors. The afternoon temperature exceeded 33° - for American (and Daily Telegraph) readers, that is 92°F - which may not impress the people of Baghdad where a recent heatwave has seen temperatures over 50, but to a resident of north Staffordshire...

Diana Boston came out to say 'hello' but regretted that after recent medical treatment she could not conduct the tour herself. She left us in the capable hands of a friend and neighbour whose name I have shamefully forgotten.

The Manor House

The Manor is a Norman tower house built in the 1130s and one of the oldest continually inhabited houses in England. The extension on the left, described by the guide as a 'Tudor lean-to' softened its character though the Georgian makeover, which involved doubling the size of the frontage and making it rectangular, inserting new windows and changing the facing from stone to brick, was probably a misjudgement. Perhaps fortunately, it soon burned down leaving the sturdy medieval stone building intact. The Manor is now its original shape, plus lean-to, though the Georgian windows and brick facing remain.

Originally the house was moated, the line of the moat can still be seen in the lawn, indeed I was standing in it while taking this picture.

The Manor, Hemingford Grey

The Undercoft and the Hair Picture

Our party of ten filed into the house. One of the books’ medieval characters leaves a window open so birds can fly in and nest on a wooden carving, and there in the narrow lobby, was the very ornament surmounted by a birds nest.

Wooden ornament with birds' nest, The Manor, Hemingford Grey

We sat in the medieval undercroft. The Manor, very much a family rather than a ‘stately’ home, is smaller than we had imagined Green Knowe to be, consisting of an undercroft and overcroft, both divided by Tudor partitions, and an attic above - a house did not need many storeys to be a ' tower' in Norman times.

Lucy Boston bought the house in 1939. She arrived fresh from her continental travels wearing Austrian dirndl and speaking fluent German and was understandably treated with some suspicion. The guide traced her thirty year journey from distrusted newcomer to village treasure; in her later years as she was losing her sight, village girls would stop on their way home from school to thread needles for her patchwork.

In summer the garden occupied her time, in winter she worked on patchwork seated by the fire in the chair Lynne occupies in the picture, or on her writing.

Lynne in Lucy Boston's fireside chair, The Manor, Hemingford Grey

As we had walked through the village Sian had mentioned a 'hair picture'. In one of the books a mystery cannot be solved until a picture is made using hair from all the participants. Hanging above the fireplace is the hair picture that inspired that idea, made by a French prisoner during the Napoleonic wars. In the early nineteenth century prisoners of war had to fund their own repatriation when hostilities ended and selling such crafts was one way of doing it.

The hair picture, The Manor, Hemingford Grey

The Tudor Annexe and Lucy Boston's Patchwork

Upstairs in the Tudor annex we were treated to a display of Lucy Boston's patchwork. Whilst admiring the work, this rather went over my head.

Lucy Boston's patchwork, The Manor, Hemingford Grey

I did, though, admire the Norman window into the main bedroom that would once have been on an external wall.

Norman window between the old house and the Tudor extension.

The Overcroft, Great-Grandma Oldknow's Bedroom

The bedroom in the overcroft was Lucy Boston's bedroom, but more excitingly, it was also recognisably great-grandma Oldknow's. With Georgian windows at one end, Norman windows on either side and a Tudor partition at the end, the room exemplified 500 years of architectural styles.

Norman window, Tudor partition, The Manor, Hemingford Grey

The Overcoft, A Magnificent Phonograph and the Gunning Sisters

During World War Two Lucy Boston invited personnel from the nearby RAF bases to use her house for recreation and, in an age when recorded music was not the commonplace it has become, treated them to gramophone concerts. I am old enough to remember wind-up gramophones, but have never seen one as magnificent as this. It still works and the sound reproduction is surprisingly good. In 2012, while sitting in a garden in the northern highlands of Vietnam, Lynne noted the huge variety of useful things she could see made from bamboo. Now she could add gramophone needles to her list.

Listening to Lucy Boston's magnificent gramophone

On the wall was a painting (possibly by Zoffany) of Elizabeth Gunning. Born here in 1733, the second of two sisters born in that year, her father was an impoverished Irish gentleman and her mother a daughter of an Irish aristocrat. The two girls were thrown into London society to make their way without titles or money, relying only on their good looks. At a Valentine’s Day party in 1752 the Duke of Hamilton expressed a desire to marry Elizabeth, then just 18, and the wedding took place that evening. The ensuing scandal provoked a closing of loopholes in the law concerning marriage licences and the calling of banns. The Duke died in 1758, but she became Duchess of Argyll by a second marriage and in 1776 King George III made her a baroness in her own right. My goodness, what a career – though perhaps ‘goodness’, as Mae West observed, had nothing to do with it. Her older sister, Maria, became Duchess of Coventry and a celebrated society hostess. She died of blood poisoning at the age of 27 from the overuse of lead based cosmetics.[update: As Duchess of Coventry Maria Gunning lived in Croome Court in Worcestershire. We visited in 2019 and there is much more about her in that post.]

Miss Gunning, possibly by John Zoffany

Upstairs to Tolly's Domain

Peter Boston, who died 1999, was Lucy’s son and Diana’s husband. He was at university when his mother bought The Manor and an adult when she wrote the books but is nonetheless the inspiration for Tolly. A successful architect, he illustrated all his mother’s books.

We reached ‘Tolly's bedroom’ by a wooden spiral staircase. The toy box, rocking horse and bird cage - all important elements in the stories - looked exactly as they do in the illustrations. This caused great excitement,….

'Tolly's Room' in Green Knowe, The Manor, Hemingford Grey

....but for Siân the ultimate thrill was being able to hold the little carved wooden mouse that is so important to Tolly.

Siân becomes overly excited by a carved mouse, The Manor, Hemingford Grey
....and I did not mean to capture Lynne and myself in the mirror, but as I did...

The guide asked Siân at what age she had come to know the books. 'Six,' she answered with confidence. I was a little surprised, but not as much as the guide. 'They are very demanding books for a six-year-old,' she said.

Descending the stairs we paused while Lynne held our copy of The Children of Green Knowe beside Peter Boston’s original artwork. We had taken the book on our sojourn to Sudan where the desert sun dried out the glue and turned all books into loose-leafed folders. That was in 1987, proving Siân right about enjoying the books as a six-year-old.

Lynne, the Children of Green Knowe and the original cover artwork

We paused in the shop to buy a carved mouse and a DVD of the BBC adaptation.

It can be a mistake to revisit childhood joys, they may not stand up to adult scrutiny, but for Siân (and indeed, Lynne) The Manor was Green Knowe, with all the magic intact. It did not have the same impact for me, the story of a lonely and rather strange twelve-year-old and his great-grandmother held less appeal, but I appreciate the quality of the story telling and slow, gentle way the reader is first beguiled and then sucked inside a unique fantasy world. And The Manor itself? The house is a delight, with or without the Green Knowe connection.

The Somme, One Hundred Years Ago Today

Posted on the 100th Anniversary of the Start of the Battle of the Somme

Almost two years ago, on the centenary of the outbreak of WWI, I posted Ypres, Tyne Cot and the Menin Gate. I always intended to produce another post for today’s centenary of the start of the Battle of the Somme, but I had no idea that I would be writing about the saddest day in British military history a week after the saddest day in British democratic history.

Poppies, near Mametz Wood

The First World War, and indeed the second, were the result of nationalism and divisions in Europe. Dormant since 1945 that nationalism is on the rise again and the European Union is our best hope of containing this poison. Senior Brexit campaigners have said openly that they hope Britain will be the first of several countries to quit the EU leading eventually to the collapse of the whole organisation. Why, I wonder in bewilderment, do they think it a good idea to return to the days of warring tribes? How is it wise to reboot a system that laid waste to our continent twice in the last hundred years?

Etaples Cemetery, a reminder and warning from history.
The small fishing port of Etaples was the embarkation and disembarkation point for British soldiers arriving in or leaving France. Most of those buried here died of their wounds while waiting to be shipped home.

To return to the Somme; the offensive was conceived in a strategy meeting in 1915 as a French attack with British support. After the French became embroiled in the Battle of Verdun, another bloodbath of epic proportions we often overlook in our insularity, the Somme became a British attack with French support.

The barrage started on 25th of June and went on day and night for a week. It was so devastating that the high command believed that few would be left alive in the German trenches and all the British had to do was mop up and take control. This battle plan had been used before and if madness is repeatedly doing the same thing while expecting a different outcome then this was madness.

The attack started in the early morning of July 1st. It had been meticulously planned and months of tunnelling had set mines beneath strategic points. One of the biggest, near the small village of La Boiselle, went off at 7.28, two minutes before the scheduled advance. The resulting ‘Lochnagar Crater’ (tunnelling had begun from a trench known as Lochnagar Street) has been preserved. It is a huge hole, and anybody can stop by the roadside walk over and take a look. Today, a service of commemoration will be held here, as it is every year.

The Lochnagar Crater, La Boiselle, Somme

The barrage was supposed to creep forward as the troops advanced. A special operation required the early halting of the barrage over a small part of the front but a failure in communications led to it stopping everywhere at 7.26. Contrary to the plan there were plenty of Germans still alive in their trenches and when the barrage stopped early they had four minutes to emerge from their bunkers and man their machine guns. As the attackers bunched up at the prepared gaps in their own wire they were mown down in their thousands. On the first day of the battle British casualties were almost 60,000 making it by far the worst day in British military history. To their right a smaller French force did not make the same error with the barrage and lost 1,500 men.

On the 7th of July the 38th (Welsh) Division were tasked with taking Mametz Wood. This involved walking down the open hillside past where their memorial now stands and up the hill on the far side. The wood, then more a collection of tree stumps, sheltered a well dug-in enemy with a superb view of the battlefield. Unsurprisingly the attack failed.

Mametz Wood as it is now with the Welsh Division Memorial in the foreground

Field Marshall Douglas Haig blamed the Welsh Division for their ‘lack of push’. There had been some poor leadership, but the main reason for their failure is that too many of the soldiers were just too dead to reach the wood, never mind take it. He sacked the C.O. and passed the division to Major-General Herbert Watts with the instruction to ‘use it as he saw fit.’ He used them to take the wood 'at any cost' which they did between the 10th and 12th of July. Some battalions had 70% casualty rates and the division lost 4,000 men, effectively destroying it.

The Welsh Division Memorial, the Red Dragon tearing at the barbed wire.
The memorial was erected, somewhat belatedly, in 1987 at the request of survivors, who felt they had been shabbily treated,

But it did not stop there. By the time the battle ended in November 1916 the French and British had advanced less than 10km and 1.3 million men (800,000 British*, 250,000 French, 250,000 German) had been killed or injured. Douglas Haig liked to think of himself as the ‘Master of the Field’, others called him the ‘Butcher of the Somme.’

In Somme, Lyn Macdonald’s unflinchingly evocative account of the battle, she writes: 'There was hardly a household in the land, there was no trade, occupation, profession or community, which was not represented in the thousands of innocent enthusiasts who made up the ranks of Kitchener's Army before the Battle of the Somme.'

The battle, indeed the war, was an equal opportunity slaughter. It killed factory workers and farm hands and with the same zeal harvested the sons of the professional classes and elites. Edward Asquith, son of Prime Minister H.H. Asquith, was killed on the Somme in September 1916 while W.N. Hodgson perished in the debacle of the first day. In 1914, Hodgson, an Oxford scholar and the son of a bishop, wrote the jingoistic England to her Children which I quoted in Ypres, Tyne Cot and the Menin Gate. Before Action, written two days before his death at Mametz, suggests he might have become a sadder and a wiser man (if still too much of a traditionalist for my taste) in the intervening two years.

Before Action by WN Hodgson

William Noel Hodgson in 1915
Langfier Studio, borrowed from Wikipedia

By all the glories of the day
And the cool evening's benison
By that last sunset touch that lay
Upon the hills when day was done,
By beauty lavishly outpoured
And blessings carelessly received,
By all the days that I have lived
Make me a soldier, O Lord.

By all of all man's hopes and fears
And all the wonders poets sing,
The laughter of unclouded years,
And every sad and lovely thing;
By the romantic ages stored
With high endeavour that was his,
By all his mad catastrophes
Make me a man, O Lord.

I, that on my familiar hill
Saw with uncomprehending eyes
A hundred of thy sunsets spill
Their fresh and sanguine sacrifice,
Ere the sun swings his noonday sword
Must say good-bye to all of this; –
By all delights that I shall miss,
Help me to die, O Lord.

Commonwealth War Graves lie thick on the ground from the Belgian coast to beyond the Somme battlefields. Stump Road is one of the smaller cemeteries and not the easiest to find. From the little D151 south towards Thiepval, about 1km beyond the village of Grandcourt, a single track sunken road heads left up the hillside. Some 500m along this, shortly before it peters out in a field, is the last resting place of 263 soldiers, 24 of them Canadian, the rest British. It is a peaceful place, at least it is now, though it was less so in 1916. Beyond the cemetery fields of wheat and brassicas cover the low, rolling hills and the summer air is filled with birdsong.

Stump Road Cemetery, near Grandcourt, Somme

Among the graves is that of Private WE (Will) Collard of the South Lancashire Regiment. A twenty-year- old Cardiff bus conductor, he had joined the Welsh Regiment in March 1916 and only arrived in France in July. He was wounded almost immediately but recovered and returned to the front in September, though now in the the South Lancashires; perhaps he had been in the Welsh Division, all but destroyed at Mametz Wood. On the 21st of October, in a trench near Stump Road, an exploding shell removed his head, an event witnessed by his brother-in-law, Sidney Leader. Sid and Annie Leader (Wills’s sister) were Lynne's great grandparents.

Lynne by the grave of her great-great-uncle, Stump Road, Grandcourt

Thiepval ridge to the south of Stump Road was a major feature of the battle, but looking at it in peaceful times it hardly stands out enough to be thought of as a ridge.

Thiepval Ridge from the tank memorial at Pozières
The Somme was the first battle in which tanks were used. They struggled on the muddy, shell cratered ground and were not the game changers that had been hoped.

Thiepval was chosen as the site of the Anglo-French memorial to the fallen. Designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens (also responsible for the Cenotaph and New Delhi) it was unveiled in 1932. Around it cluster the graves of men who are, in the British phrase 'soldiers of the Great War, known unto God' or in the more uncompromising (and, perhaps, honest) French phrase 'Inconnu'.

French graves marked 'Inconnu', Thiepval Memorial

On the walls are the names of the 72,000 men who make up the Inconnus. My family was lucky in WWI. My maternal grandfather was a miner in the Rhondda, and coal was so important to the war effort he was not called up. It was one of the few times in history when coal mining has been the safer option. He did eventually put on khaki and although it is unclear if he arrived in France before the shooting stopped he was certainly in Germany in the army of occupation in 1919. My paternal grandfather joined up earlier, but as far as I have been able to ascertain he was never sent anywhere more dangerous than Shrewsbury. Somewhere on the right hand side of the monument, almost, but not quite too high to read from the ground is the name of Private Edgar Morgan King, a cousin of my paternal grandmother.

Lynne at the Thiepval Memorial, Somme

The first day of the Battle, 100 years ago today, was an unmitigated disaster. After that it improved to merely awful. The performance of the British army in WWI had often been described as that of lions led by donkeys (an observation first made during the Crimean War). As Siegfried Sassoon, who served so valiantly in a war that so disillusioned him, put it

'Good morning; good morning!' the general said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead,
And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
'He's a cheery old card,' grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
~
But he did for them both with his plan of attack

One century ago they were lions led by donkeys. One week ago half of my compatriots chose to be donkeys led by liars.

* 'British' in this context refers to the 'British Empire and Dominions'. The casualty list included Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, Newfoundlanders (Newfoundland had not then joined Canada), Bermudans, Indians, South Africans and Rhodesians. (and Wikipedia's list may not be exhaustive).

WW1 Centenary Posts

Ypres, Tyne Cot and the Menin Gate (1914/2014)
The Somme, One Hundred Years Ago Today (1916/2016)
The Eleventh hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month (1918/2018)

Melton Mowbray and the Vale of Belvoir, Stilton Cheese and Pork Pies: The Tasting

A Melton Mowbray Pork Pie and a Comparative Tasting of Four Blue Stiltons

If you have read the previous post, you will know we returned from Melton Mowbray and the Vale of Belvoir with a pork pie and slabs of cheese from four of the five local creameries - four of the six current Blue Stilton producers.

So we had to eat them.

23-Jun-2016

Dickinson & Morris Melton Mowbray Pork Pie

The pork pie provided lunch on Thursday and Friday (it was a big pie).

Dickinson & Morris Melton Mowbray Pork Pie

The Melton Mowbray Pork Pie Association gained Protected Geographical Indication status from the EU [Feb 2021: The post Brexit situation is currently unclear] The association has ten members and we have one pie, so this was not a comparative tasting.

Traditionally pork pies were agricultural workers’ lunch. They could be taken to the fields and the meat stayed safe and clean inside its pastry shell which was (until the 18th century) discarded not eaten.

Dickinson & Morris Melton Mowbray Pork Pie

From the late 17th century Melton Mowbray was the centre of three major fox hunts, the Quorn, the Cottesmore and the Belvoir*, each hunting several times a week throughout the autumn and winter fuelled by industrial quantities of Pork Pies. The season coincided with the annual pig slaughter, so fresh pork was used. The meat in Melton Mowbray pies is thus grey, the colour of roast pork, not the pink of processed pork used in other pies. The other two distinguishing features of Melton Mowbray pies is that the meat is chopped not minced and the pies are baked free standing so have a slightly bowed appearance.

Dickinson & Morris Melton Mowbray Pork Pie

I have always liked a pork pie, it makes a fine lunch with salad and home-made chutney. I enjoyed the Dickinson & Morris pie and have eaten many before – they are widely available. It was good, but would I drive all the way to Melton Mowbray if it was the only place to buy it? Probably not. Would I pick one up in my local supermarket as I passed? Yes, I would.

25-Jun-2016

The Stiltons

The Pork Pie, whether Melton Mowbray or not, is a peculiarly British delicacy. Fine cheeses, however, can be found all over Europe and beyond, and Stilton is up there with the finest.

Colston Bassett Blue Stilton

Stilton received its EU Protected Designation of Origin status in 1996[ Feb 2021: Again, the post Brexit situation is currently unclear] , and all Blue Stiltons (about a million cheeses a year) are made the same way.

Clawson Blue Stilton

How Stilton is Made

(The following is a précis of the description on the Stilton Cheesemakers Association website). Rennet and penicillium roqueforti (blue mould spores) are added to pasteurised cow’s milk. Once the curds have formed, they are allowed to drain overnight. The following morning, the curd is cut into blocks to allow further drainage before being milled and salted. It is placed in cylindrical moulds which are turned daily to allow natural drainage and ensure an even distribution of moisture. The cheese is not pressed so it develops a flaky open texture.

Cropwell Bishop Blue Stilton

After 5 or 6 days, the cylinders are removed and the cheese is transferred to a temperature and humidity controlled store where it is turned regularly. At 5 weeks when the cheese is forming the traditional Stilton crust it is pierced with stainless steel needles allowing air to enter the body of the cheese, activate the penicillium roqueforti and create the blue veins.

Tuxford and Tebbutt Blue stilton

Tasting the Stiltons

Saturday lunch was a Stilton tasting, but of course you cannot eat Stilton all on its on, you also need crackers, bread, butter and, of course, a glass (preferably two) of Tawny Port.

Saturday lunchtime Stilton tasting

Remembering that the opinions are personal and apply only to our randomly bought samples, we thought the general standard was high and there was not much between them. We disagreed about two of the cheeses but overall achieved a measure of consensus.

We both liked Colston Bassett the best. It looked the picture of a piece of Stilton and was creamy, smooth and utterly delicious. Perhaps a little stronger than the others, it had a marked and pleasing 'blue' flavour.

Colston Bassett Blue Stilton

Second we placed the Clawson. It did not look as good, the blue being so smeared in the cutting (was it cut with a knife rather than a wire?) that the photograph looks out of focus, though it is not. Cutting inside it looked fine and the texture was gloriously creamy, the flavour mild with a flick of 'blueness' at the finish.

Clawson Blue Stilton

We disagreed over the last two. I thought the Tuxford and Tebbutt had a sheen like a factory produced cheese. I did not like the pasty texture, could detect no flavour of blue and rated it the weakest.

Tuxford and Tebbutt Blue Stilton

Lynne, on the other hand, found a flavour in the Cropwell Bishop that she did not like. I thought the blue was over-concentrated when it should be veined through the cheese but I liked its slight crumbliness and extra sharpness.

Cropwell Bishop Blue Stilton

Overall we were surprised how mild they were. I am sure Stilton used to be a strong cheese, but this may be the effect of age on our palates - or maybe we have become habituated to fiery curries on our Asian travels.

* Despite the 2004 hunting ban, all three hunts still operate and claim they do so within the law. Quite how they do that is a mystery to me.