Three generations in the Cotswold cheese cellar

The Cotswold Creamery cellar is reached by a flight of stone stairs cut into the back of a 16th-century barn outside Stow-on-the-Wold. At 5:30 in the morning the stairs are slick with the night’s condensation and Margot Whitfield, 64, takes them two at a time.

"My grandfather started this," she says, unlocking the cellar door. "He came back from the war and didn’t want to do anything except make cheese. There were three other dairies in this valley then. We’re the only one left."

The cellar holds about 800 cheeses at any one time — truckles aged anywhere from six weeks to two years, plus the experimental territorials Margot has been working on for a decade. She turns each one by hand on a rotation that maps to the cheese’s age and the season. In May she turns more often because the milk is creamier; in February less often because the cellar runs cold.

The Creamery’s third generation — Margot’s nephew Tom — joined in 2019 and is gradually taking over the technical side. The handover, Margot says, has been complicated by the fact that nothing in cheesemaking is documented. "He keeps asking me to write things down. I tell him: my grandfather didn’t write anything down. My father didn’t write anything down. I’ll show you."