The Story of Wensleydale by Jill Turton
A curd strainer dug up at the Roman fort above Bainbridge in the Yorkshire Dales is the earliest evidence of cheese making in Wensleydale and by extension the starting point of all Yorkshire cheese. Jill Turton digs further.
Trust then, the French to invent it. The Benedictine and Cistercian monks, sent over in the wake of the Norman Conquest, apparently couldn’t stand the local food and sent for cheese recipes from Burgundy and Roquefort. The monks set up at the long lost Fors Abbey, near Bainbridge, but lasted there just 15 years before they saw sense and rebuilt downstream at the more comfortable setting of Jervaulx. But monastic records of 1150 establish ewe’s milk cheese at Fors so it is the true birthplace of blue Wensleydale. The limestone pastures of the monastic granges delivered superb milk; dank cellars and storage vaults coupled with natural moulds that flourished in the stone created the blue veins and hard selling kept the monks in the abbeys to which they were becoming accustomed.
‘We stand in reverence and awe as we gaze at the ruins of Fountains or Jervaulx, but the true and lasting memorial is not in the stately ruins but in the miles and miles of limestone walls and that peacetime delicacy, a ripe blue-veined Wensleydale cheese’
Kit Calvert ‘Wensleydale Cheese’ published 1946.
 Tastes change and so does the definition of a true Wensleydale. The milk of shorthorn cows gradually replaced ewe’s milk through the Middle Ages to the 17th century. The basic Wensleydale techniques spread to Coverdale, Swaledale and Cotherstone. Cheese fairs sprang up across North Yorkshire in the 19th century; Yarm Fair lasted three days with up to 1,000 cheeses on sale. Substantial dairies were built at Hawes, Coverham, Askrigg, Leyburn and Dent.
 At the outbreak of the second World War there were still 433 Dales farmhouses making cheese but within 20 years there was none: the creation of the Milk Marketing Board in 1933 was the salvation of dairy farmers in the Depression but their dependable market for milk eroded the necessity for cheese making. The Dales dairies and cheese factories first merged then closed until only the Wensleydale Creamery at Hawes survived through the inspiration of Kit Calvert, quintessential Dalesman and guardian of the Wensleydale legacy.
 Nationalism, pasteurisation and milk mixed from different herds conspired to bequeath a bland white Wensleydale that was hardly worth saving on its own account when Dairy Crest announced in 1992 that is was closing down the Wensleydale Creamery, despite its profitability, and coolly relocating to Lancashire. In the ensuing furore a management buy-out saved Hawes and it now flourishes with better made and marketed cheeses than Dairy Crest could manage. But the real renaissance has come from the independent sector: David and Mandy Reeds’s reborn Swaledale: Joan Cross’s Cotherstone; Suzanne Stirke’s Richard III Wensleydale and Shepherd’s Purse ewe’s milk Yorkshire Blue are cheeses which have gone almost full circle back to the creation of the monks of the Abbot of Savigny and their forlorn dairy.
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