Cornwall revived a 400 year old cheese – here’s how

I still remember the first time I tasted Cornish Yarg. A pale cheese wrapped in nettle leaves, not
only does Yarg have an unusual – yet rather delightful – taste, but I was instantly taken by its
curious backstory.

Given Yarg’s almost archaic look (wheel’s of this cow’s milk cheese are hand-wrapped in
bundles of foraged nettles and left to mature), I’d assumed it likely had a history stretching back
to Cornwall’s medieval dairies.

I was partly right, but equally quite wrong, given Cornish Yarg was revived by a Cornish farmer
named Alan Gray sometime in the 1980s.

Fascinated by its unlikely origins, I decided to dig a little deeper into its story, to discover how
Cornwall revived a 400-year-old cheese for modern tastes.

The ‘rediscovery’ of Cornish Yarg

These days, Cornish Yarg is a cheese you’ll find in gourmet farm shops and served on artisan
cheeseboards across the South West. For many centuries, however, its recipe was lost.
Abandoned, in fact, in dusty attics and hidden away on forgotten bookshelves.

As the now semi-legendary story goes, in the 1980s a dairy farmer named Alan Gray dusted off
an old copy of The English Huswife – a 17th-century household manual attributed to Gervase
Markham – and flicked through its aging pages. Amongst tips for preparing veal sauce and
recipes for puff pastry, Gray was taken by a brief description of an age-old cheese making
technique involving nettles.

The ‘recipe’ gave only a brief, casual description, assuming the reader already knew how to
make the cheese, and was familiar with the nettle wrapping process. The practice itself was far
from unique in pre-industrial Britain, although hardly known to Mr Gray, and likely carried out for
centuries.

Wrapping cheese in leaves – nettles, wild garlic or even herbs – has long been a preservation
technique, slowing moisture loss and imparting subtle flavours as the cheese matured. Nettle-
wrapping also had a practical benefit: when dried or blanched, the serrated leaves acted like
natural armour against pests. By the 20th century, however, this sort of small-scale, leaf-
wrapped cheese had almost entirely disappeared from British markets, replaced by factory-
made blocks and wax-coated rounds.

Gray saw an opportunity. Not only to revive a local cheese, but to create something distinctly
Cornish. He set about experimenting in his kitchen, using milk from his own herd. In a moment
of light-hearted branding, he decided to name the new cheese ‘Yarg’, his own surname simply
spelt backwards.

From a curiosity to commercial success

Reviving an archaic recipe was one thing; selling it to the public was another. By the early
1980s, food safety regulations were tightening, and small farmhouse dairies were under
pressure to pasteurise milk and comply with hygiene rules that assumed an industrial scale of
production. Gray’s early batches were met with enthusiasm from friends and family, but scaling
up was a different challenge.

In 1984, recognising that his equipment and facilities were too limited for expansion and
wouldn’t meet strict hygiene standards, Gray sold the recipe he’d now perfected to Michael and
Margaret Horrell, fellow Cornish dairy farmers.

The Horrells had the space, the pasteurisation facilities, and the patience to develop a consistent product. They also brought in Catherine Mead, whose skill and attention to quality would eventually transform Cornish Yarg into an internationally recognised cheese.

Over the next decade, the Horrells refined the process, striking a balance between the artisanal
quirks of a farmhouse cheese and the consistency required for commercial sales. In 1995,
production expanded to a second site. When the Horrells retired in 2006, Mead took the reins,
consolidating production at Lynher Dairies near Stithians, where Cornish Yarg is still made
today.

How to make Cornish Yarg

Cornish Yarg begins with pasteurised cow’s milk from local herds. The curds are formed, cut,
and pressed, then soaked in brine to season the cheese and influence its microbial balance.
This is where Yarg departs from most modern British cheeses. Instead of being waxed or left
with a bare rind, each wheel is wrapped, by hand, in locally foraged nettle leaves, which are
often collected from Cornish hedgerows near the dairy in Stithians. .

As the cheese matures, typically for four to six weeks, the nettles allow a fine bloom of white
mould to develop across the surface. This mould plays an important role, moderating the acidity
and contributing to the texture gradient that is Yarg’s hallmark: creamy and yielding near the
rind, but crumbly and fresh at the core.

Yarg is often compared to Caerphilly for its bright tang, but take a bite and you’ll soon realise it
offers far more layers of complexity. The nettles impart subtle herbal and woodland notes, while
the natural mould development brings an almost mushroom-like aroma.

I find fresh Yarg pairs well with a light ale or cider, but it’s often left to mature for longer,
developing deeper, almost savoury tones that goes well with a glass of wine. Of course, the

cheesemakers continue to experiment, and my favourite variation on Alan Gray’s revived recipe
is the Wild Garlic Yarg (wrapped in wild garlic leaves, rather than nettles) which is matured for at
least 5 weeks.

Britain’s cheesemaking renaissance

The revival of Cornish Yarg in the 1980s coincided with a broader shift in British food culture.
For much of the 20th century, the country’s cheesemaking heritage was stilted by wartime
rationing and industrial agriculture. During the Second World War, the government mandated
that all milk be sent to central processing plants to make a single, standardised ‘Government
Cheddar’. By the war’s end, many regional cheeses had been lost.

The 1970s and 80s saw the beginnings of a pushback against that homogenisation. Small
farmers, food writers, and adventurous chefs began looking to pre-industrial recipes, regional
cow breeds, and traditional maturation techniques. Yarg fitted perfectly into this new ethos: it
was both a revival of a historical idea and a contemporary product that (eventually) met modern
food safety standards.

In the South West, the success of Yarg also inspired other producers to explore the county’s
dairy potential. Today, the region is home to an array of award-winning cheese, including the
blue-veined Cornish Blue and the goat’s-milk Ticklemore (made in Devon).

Despite being a 400-year-old cheese, Cornish Yarg’s popularity only continues to strengthen.
It’s now sold across the UK and exported to specialist shops abroad, and regularly wins prizes
at the British Cheese Awards and the World Cheese Awards.

Production, though, remains low-key, using local ingredients and hand-wrapped nettles, just as cheesemakers have done for centuries.