IN ONE FELL swoop
The heart of Lancashire is home to impeccable produce, charming inns and rolling countryside. Michael Raffael finds himself bewitched by
the enchanting Ribble Valley
The River Ribble’s source lies in the Yorkshire Dales. It empties into the Irish Sea near Lytham St Annes on the Lancashire coast. En route, it curls and wriggles its way between bald-pated Pendle Hill and the fells of the Forest of Bowland.
The Ribble Valley belies its name in both time and space. More a rustic pocket of landscapes than a region, it gained its official status as a borough less than 50 years ago. Beyond the narrow band through which the A59 passes, it balloons out, reaching towards crumpled hills, coombs and copses.
Dry stone walls, ancient bridges at right angles to single-track lanes, villages no more than hamlets, tearooms, stately homes doubling as wedding venues, hills filled with hikers, vintage sports cars racing round bends at 25mph and quintessential inns: it encompasses every image of the Arcadian English countryside.
Clitheroe, recently named as one of Britain’s best places to live by The Sunday Times, ices the idyllic cake. A ruined Norman keep sits atop it. The market with neat rows of stalls, a sweet shop with mahogany fittings unchanged in a century, an emporium selling posh furnishings and Cheesie Tchaikovsky cheese shop all shimmer with conservative cool. Sixth-formers from Royal Grammar own the handful of streets in the town centre during their lunch break.
The one-time cotton mill has been given a new lease of life as Bowland Brewery, which claims to have the longest beer hall in the country. Taking over the derelict building in 2014, the owners recycled floorboards and an antiquated sprinkler system to create refectory tables and a U-shaped bar with 42 hand pulls. A 1910 cross-beam engine shines like a science museum exhibit.
Its beers – Buster, Pheasant Plucker and AONB (a nod to the Forest of Bowland, an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty) – have their supporters but Hen Harrier is its flagship. The bird polarises opinion: conservationists strive to protect it (the brewery contributes sales from each pint to the RSPB) while gamekeepers blame its raptor instinct for dwindling red grouse stocks.
Pendle Hill looms above the town. It was the scene of the infamous witch trials of 1612. In The Discoverie of Witchcraft, Reginald Scot described ‘Murther [murder], wicked and divelish [devilish] conspiracies, practised and executed by the most dangerous and malitious [malicious] witch, Elizabeth Southerns, alias Demdike.’ The old crone was lucky enough to die before her trial.
Her rival in sorcery, Anne Chattox, hanged. When questioned about her dealings with demons, she complained that Fancy, her familiar spirit, had served the two of them a banquet of ‘flesh, butter, cheese, bread and drink’, adding as an afterthought that the food had failed to either fill or nourish them.
Back then, Lancashire cheese tasted very different from the cheese we know today. Peasants who owned a cow blended the curds from separate milking sessions until they had enough to form cheeses a few inches thick. The current recipe, which dates back to 1892, turned it into the large cloth-bound barrels.
Graham Kirkham is a fourth-generation