HERO CHEESE Bell End Blue
Bell End Blue Cheese
A Glorious Waste of Time
Suzie, Jonty and their goats and the story of Abbey Farm Cottage.
At the foot of Chimney Bank, one of England’s steepest hills, sits Abbey Farm Cottage: a ten-acre farm on the edge of Rosedale Abbey in the North York Moors. Suzie and Jonty have built an extraordinary small-scale cheesemaking business around a herd of 150 goats.
Suzie currently milks around thirty goats each morning. The farm operates a kid-at-foot system, meaning the young goats remain with their mothers. They sleep separately overnight, allowing Suzie to milk in the morning, before the goats return to what she describes as their most important job: being mums.
Suzie’s journey into cheesemaking began almost accidentally. Having previously worked in property in the City, Suzie’s farming life started with a bottle-fed meat goat that she could not bear to send away. One goat became two, then three, and before long she was milking Golden Guernseys, Saanens and Toggenbergs.
“I knew we had milk,” she explains. “Then it became a question of what we were going to do with it.”
The answer was cheese.
Every goat has a name, and many answer when called. Nutmeg, a hand-reared Golden Guernsey cross, remains a particular favourite, although Dibble and Bonnet are the farm’s determined escape artists.
The farm’s best-known cheese is Bell End Blue, named after a local Rosedale landmark. Bell End was supposedly the final place in the valley from which the church bells could once be heard, literally where the bells ended.
Made from raw goat’s milk, the cheese begins creamy and gentle before developing a distinctive, peppery blue finish. The milk travels no more than eleven metres from goat to cheesemaking room, and production remains intensely hands-on.
There are no vast stainless-steel vats here. The cheese is made in a tiny four-square-metre room using a fifty-litre insulated vessel and a pan. The curd is lactic-set, left overnight and individually ladled by hand. Up to 200 cheeses can be made each week, with the finished cheeses matured in adapted wine fridges.
Suzie is rightly proud of how far the business has come since she and her husband bought the farm in 2019. Abbey Farm Cottage has since achieved full approval for raw-milk production and collected gold awards at several major cheese competitions.
Away from the cheese room, the farm also hosts goat yoga. Initially nervous visitors invariably end up sitting on the floor, cuddling the animals. For Suzie, the greatest pleasure is simply watching the young goats leap and play before the barn settles for the evening.
“They are a glorious waste of time,” she says. “You can just stand there listening to them munching their hay.”
And sometimes, that may be time very well spent.