SEASONAL FARE

AUTUMN FOOD AND DRINK FESTIVALS

Great British Food Festival

Arley Hall, Northwich, Cheshire Sept 24-25 A chance to buy produce from 80 top local producers; plus cooking demonstrations by local and celebrity chefs, popup real ale and wine bars.

greatbritishfoodfestival.com/ arley-hall.asp

Stone Food and Drink Festival

Stone, Staffordshire Sept 30-Oct 2 Offers a tapas trail through the Georgian town centre, a festival farmers’ market, cookery classes for adults and children, and a gourmet food marquee in Westbridge Park.

stonefooddrink.org.uk

Polesden Lacey Food Festival

Great Bookham, Surrey Oct 1-2 Artisan bakers, microbreweries and local food producers will be displaying the fruits of their labours in the grounds of this National Trust property.

fantasticbritish foodfestivals.com/polesdenlacey-food-festival.html

Monmouthshire Food Festival

Caldicot Castle, near Chepstow Oct 8-9 Chefs (including Shaun Hill) will cook in the demonstration theatre; plus foodie activities in the children’s quarter and a great producers’ market.

investing great Italian dishes with first-class Lancashire produce. It’s an unlikely treat on the LancashireYorkshire border.

Over the next couple of days, I slept, walked, drank and dropped in on Bowland food producers. Emma Robinson’s family had farmed Gazegill, down a long rough lane at Rimington, for 500 years. Farming methods hadn’t much changed. Emma and partner Ian O’Riley were wildly organic, keen on wildflower hay meadows, shorthorn cows, and Oxford sandy and black pigs. Anyone can show up at their farm shop, and tour the farm, any time. And they smiled a lot, something that I urge on other eco-minded folk.

Certainly, Chris Kitching at Leagram Dairy, back near Chipping, knows how. She and her team create not just mega-desirable Lancashire cheeses (including with mustard or Marmite) but also Red Leicesters, Double Gloucesters, sheep’s milk monmouthshire foodfestival.co.uk

New Forest Food & Drink Festival

Various venues, Oct 31-Nov 6 A new event in this foodie hotspot; taste local produce, sign up for celebrity chef evenings, tea parties or children’s activities.

thenewforest. co.uk/newforestfoodfest

cheese and a two-year-old Bob’s Knob organic item that needs careful tasting. Were you to visit Chipping and not call in on Mrs Kitching, you would have missed the point.

Then – as you must – I went to Northcote. It’s at Langho, near Blackburn, a manor house hotel-restaurant that enfolds you in thick-seamed luxury. I knew chef Nigel Haworth and manager Craig Bancroft as lads. They have outstripped me by miles, refining local produce into Michelin-starred cuisine, and creating bedrooms in line with noble traditions. (The Queen, the Duke of Lancaster and the Duke of Westminster own significant slices of Bowland.)

I had a ball. This land knows how to do high class. But it is class rooted in the fields, the moors and the fells of Bowland. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Lancashire. You really are very lucky.

Gourmets young and old gather at Polesden Lacey Food