In praise of Cheshire, Britain's most misunderstood county

Telegraph

30-03-2025

I'm in cheese heaven. Should I try a chunk of Crabtree, an Alpine-style creation from Larkton Hall Cheese in Malpas, or a taste of ripe Burt's Blue, from Claire Burt near Holmes Chapel? 'Cheese runs through the veins of people in Nantwich,' says farmer's son Nick Birchall of The Cheese Shop in the Cheshire town. 'The Romans produced cheese here in the first century, making Cheshire cheese the oldest in recorded history.'
I've come to Nantwich to stock up for Cheshire Day, celebrated annually on March 30. It's a historical reference to the date the county was given its own Charter of Liberties by King Edward I in 1300 – in effect its own Magna Carta. It's also a somewhat manufactured construct because Cheshire suffers from an identity crisis. Visitors may know Cheshire cheese, or the Cheshire Cat, from the pen of the Rev. Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, born in the Cheshire village of Daresbury in 1832. Most people, however, think of football WAGs and the reality TV series The Real Housewives of Cheshire, which has kept Cheshire's Golden Triangle of Prestbury, Alderley Edge and Wilmslow in fake tan and prosecco for nearly 200 episodes.
'Cheshire is done a disservice by the outside view of the county,' says Joanne Goodwin, Editor of Cheshire Life magazine. 'Beyond the stereotypes, it's an agricultural county by heritage, now a high-tech home for industry and a place with a strong sense of community pride.'
I live in Cheshire and my own experience is a far cry from the bolly and botox of popular perception. For me, it's the ideal weekend-break escape with a swathe of lush, dairy-farming greenery, a host of attractive villages and a pint-sized transport hub at Chester. The city packs 2,000 years of history into its four main streets and has welcomed visitors since the coming of the railways in Victorian times. Indeed, my home city recently topped a poll as the most welcoming city in the UK, according to Booking.com.
The east Cheshire village of Holmes Chapel, meanwhile, was one of the winners at the recent Marketing Cheshire Tourism Awards for Harry's Home Village Tour in the footsteps of the former One Direction singer, Harry Styles. The walking tour finishes at the Twemlow Viaduct, built in 1841 to carry the Manchester-Crewe railway line, where the teenage Harry is said to have stolen his first kiss.
Even the Golden Triangle has moved on since the hedonistic Nineties when the Beckhams arrived, giving rise to the claim that Alderley Edge has higher sales of champagne per head than anywhere else in the UK. The Aston Martin showroom still does a brisk trade but a stroll around Wilmslow reveals a tight-knit community that had prospered from medieval times and boomed as a rural escape for the new-money industrialists of cotton-mill Manchester when the railways arrived.
Cheshire Day celebrations this year are themed around local produce. Heading to the south of the county, I find the market town of Nantwich has a high street of independent culinary favourites, an annual food festival to rival Ludlow and a market hall recently voted amongst the top ten in Britain. It looks like a smaller version of Chester with a jumble of cobbled streets and half-timbered houses. The musket marks on the exterior of St Mary's Church hint at the town's crucial role in the English Civil War.
Father and daughter, Paul and Holly Challinor, are amongst the new generation of local-produce champions with Nantwich Gin developed on the family smallholding after foraging in nearby fields for a bountiful supply of botanicals.
'We gather the rosehip and dry it on the Aga,' smiles Holly. 'The kitchen smells like chocolate the next day.' There are three signature gins, the distinctive labels featuring the town's black-and-white architectural aesthetic. 'The flavours and labels reflect stories local to Nantwich as a rural heartland of old Cheshire,' adds Paul. One story relates to the 16th-century Cheshire herbalist John Gerard, who became the royal botanist to King James I. Gerard's enthusiasm for collecting samples of rosehip and lemon thyme inspired ingredient-blending sessions when the family started its new craft-spirits venture in 2020.
Back at the Cheese Shop, I finally settle for a classic Cheshire, a traditional, cloth-bound cheese from Bourne's Cheshire Cheese of Malpas. It's best enjoyed, advises Nick, with crisp apple slices and a glass of chilled beer. So, forget the bolly and botox, I'll celebrate Cheshire Day this week with a classic taste of real Cheshire. After all, Cheshire Blue was served as the status cheese at Georgian gentlemen's clubs and regular cheese trains used to run to London, laden with Cheshire produce, during Victorian times. As Nick says: 'The story of Cheshire and cheese are inextricably linked.'
How to do it
Stay at Combermere Abbey, with doubles from £210 per night B&B in the North Wing, or £450 for a two-night stay in a two-bedroom cottage. There's no restaurant for dinner but an evening grazing board is available (£45 for two people). Read The Telegraph's full review.