Mrs Kirkham'sLancashire Cheese

The last family making raw-milk Lancashire cheese at any scale does it at Beesley Farm, Goosnargh, from the milk of their own hundred cows: Mrs Kirkham — Ruth — began in 1978, her son Graham leads the make now as the third generation of cheesemakers on the farm, and his sons work alongside, which puts three generations in the dairy at once. The method is the old two-day curd, clothbound and buttered up, aged three to six months into the crumbly-then-creamy thing Lancashire is supposed to be. December 2023 brought the hardest chapter — a precautionary E. coli recall over Christmas — and the cheese returned to sale once batch tracing cleared it; by November 2024 the farm was hosting the trade's own events again. The farm shop sells the truth of it six days a week.