The Padfield family have been happily milking a herd of cows at Park Farm for four generations. Edward Ernest Padfield took on the 240 acres of Park Farm in August 1914. Cheddar cheese was made by his wife in the building that adjoined the farmhouse and the cows were milked by hand in the building across the yard. They had a small herd of Shorthorn cows.

In 1990, when Graham Padfield decided to start making cheese again, he was able to do so in the very same buildings in which his grandmother had made her Cheddar nearly 80 years before. Times change and in 2015, production moved into a new cheese dairy adjacent to the cattle dairy and milking parlour. Graham’s award-winning cheeses are now made closer than ever to where the cows are milked – less than 50 yards away!

The local Bath Cheese was well known in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was even recommended to Admiral Lord Nelson in a letter from his father, written shortly after Nelson’s victory at the Battle of Copenhagen.

Graham Padfield tracked down the recipe for Bath Cheese in an old grocer’s recipe book. It stipulates that the cheese must be made with full cream milk, that salt be sprinkled on the young cheeses with the aid of a feather, and that the cheese was soft and covered with white mould.

In 2000, Graham invented the Wyfe of Bath cheese, a nutty and sweet semi-hard cheese named after the character in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales while in 2010, he started making Bath Blue. All the cheeses have been well-received and have won many awards. Bath Blue came first at the World Cheese Awards 2014-15, seeing off competition from 2,700 other cheeses from around the globe.

All of our cheeses are made using old-fashioned manual methods, which gives the cheeses more flavour.