From Chaucer to Cheesemaker From Head of English to award-winning cheesemaker: Rachel Yarrow, Norton & Yarrow artisan cheesemaker achel Yarrow joined the staff at Abingdon School as Second in Department for English in 2010, moving to become Head of English for three years from 2012. Rachel says of her time at Abingdon, “I had a lot of fun there; the staff and the pupils were great people to be around. We were expected to work hard, but it was genuinely enjoyable and I’m still in touch with lots of people from that time.” As well as teaching English, Rachel was responsible for running the debating club and establishing the Model United Nations society following a number of requests from pupils. In particular she remembers Toby Marlow (2013) dressing up as various senior members of staff for balloon debates… It was after attending a middle management course sponsored by the School, intended as a springboard for a move to a school leadership position, that Rachel realised that the career path wasn’t for her. A chance reading of an article soon after about goats and cheese making in a copy of Woman and Home, left in a holiday villa in Sicily, planted a seed which led her to make a significant life change. Rachel and her partner (now husband), Fraser, spent a year exploring the idea of setting up a cheese making business, and she continued teaching Sixth Form lessons part-time for a while after the business actually started. She recalls arriving at School straight from the farm, changing out of her wellies in the car park and brushing straw out of her hair, to go and teach Milton to the pupils. “It was particularly ironic at that time to be teaching the themes of pastoral literature, often about how those who go after the dream of a simple, rural idyll are following a myth!” With no family background in farming, it was difficult to know where to begin, but conversations with friends and support from the environmental charity Earth Trust helped get her started. Initially she says she simply googled how to make cheese, bought some milk and experimented at home. “The first batch was horrible,” she reports, but trial and error as well as some courses at The School of Artisan Food in Worksop led to greater success. She started acquiring goats – just two to begin with, which gradually grew to the 170 they have now. As the herd expanded and her cheesemaking improved, Rachel started selling her cheese at local farmers’ markets, but was soon winning awards and getting onto some of the country’s best cheese counters. She now sells to Neal’s Yard Dairy, Paxton & Whitfield, La Fromagerie and the Courtyard Dairy to name a few. She has also been successful in winning a number of awards, most recently ‘Best Goats’ Cheese’ at the British Artisan Cheese awards in May 2022, and Best Artisan Cheese in the World Cheese Awards in November 2022, selected from over 4400 entries. “It has been seven years of ups and downs, especially recently with Covid, the cost of living crisis and all the usual stresses and strains of running a small business. We now have a team of ten invaluable staff – we learnt the hard way that you can’t do it all yourselves!” However one of her favourite aspects of her new career is the opportunity to listen to hours of audiobooks when wrapping cheese or milking – so she works her way through tomes of classic literature that she never had time for when she was actually teaching English. n R G R I F F E N 2 0 2 3 | 1 8
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