Biggar Blue

In the early 1980s Humphrey Errington took on a small holding just south of Biggar, close to Edinburgh, Scotland.  Wanting to recreate a cheese traditional to the area, he discovered that sheep were more common than cattle on this rugged landscape, so decided to use sheep‘s milk to make cheese following a recipe written in the 1820s by Sir Walter Scott.  Travelling to France he imported the finest dairy sheep to be found, the Lacaune breed (the same used to produce Roquefort), and set about creating a unpressed blue cheese similar to those made throughout the North of England in the middle ages.

The cheese, Lanark Blue, was soon established, and it quickly became a well-known classic throughout Scotland.  Based loosely on a Roquefort recipe, it has a powerful flavour that comes from the richness of the milk from the sheep milk feeding on the unforgiving mountainside.  Humphrey soon became known as pioneer in the revival of the Scottish cheese industry and helped unpasteurised cheese to continue to be made in Scotland, though not without a few legal battles (in which he almost lost his farm – read more on that here).

But milking sheep has its disadvantages, especially as they ‘dry off’ throughout the winter (ready for the spring lambing), which meant that during the long winter months the Erringtons had no work for their staff, and no income stream. So in August 2019 Selina and Andrew bought 100 dairy goats from a high-welfare farm in Yorkshire (a hotchpotch selection of breeds – Sannen, Toggenburg and Alpine), and set about developing a range of goats’ cheeses they could make in the winter (goats can be milked all year round); Biggar Blue is one of these.  An exact copy of Lanark Blue but made with goats milk instead of sheep.

This product will have two weeks shelf life from the date of delivery.  Conveniently, at checkout you can choose a delivery date even well in the future if you would like your cheese delivering for a specific event.