Fork

Before eating, our small group pedalled along a two-hour route so pastorally pretty it would make Old MacDonald sigh. Skirting purple-hued borage fields, we’ve zipped in and out of woodland, down rows of apple trees and over patches of camomile, and learned how poo from White Heron’s chickens is burnt in biomass boilers to generate heat. “Providing habitats for wildlife is important, but we need to produce food as well,” says our guide Jo Hilditch, who swapped a career in PR for farming when she inherited the family estate 30 years ago.

The tours offer an immersive way of seeing British agriculture in action. Pausing in the estate’s blackcurrant fields, Jo pulls bottles of chilled Ribena from a basket for us to drink (White Heron produces 5% of Ribena’s blackcurrant supply) and encourages us to taste the fruit: fat and sweet, the berries are a whole different entity to the wincingly sharp little beads growing in my own garden.

So lyrical do I wax about the blackcurrants that, after I arrive at my accommodation for the night, the estate’s homely Field Cottage, there’s a knock at the door: the delivery of a punnet to take home. I add it to the cottage’s guest hamper, which is brimming with tangy Worcester Hop cheese, local raspberries, some of the estate’s own apple juice and a miniature of its treacly, sharp-sweet cassis.

I don’t have to worry about working it off. The following day I’m back on the ebike on a new self-guided ride around north Herefordshire. One of a handful of routes the estate has curated around the region’s farm shops, cider-makers, cheese producers and farm-to-fork restaurants, the trails link up some delectable pit stops in different corners of the county, some of which feature on Visit Herefordshire’s new food safaris.

Setting out while the early morning mist is still loitering over the estate’s orchards, I swing over an old grass-covered railway line on to a quiet lane running between fields of hay, then wheel along to pretty Pembridge, with its rows of tipsy-angled black-and-white buildings. As if by arrangement, the bells start ringing from the church’s stand-alone belfry as I pass, giving the impression of a medieval rocket about to launch. I stop in the village stores to pick up a loaf from Peter Cooks Bread and a coffee at Bloom & Grind before pedalling on to Eardisland.

The mist lifts as I arrive, revealing a picturesque swirl of half-timbered buildings, a dainty 17th-century dovecote and an elegant bridge over the River Arrow. There’s no time to dawdle, though. I’m only partway into my 29-mile route and it’s mid-morning already.

I cycle down blissfully empty lanes to Monkland Dairy, set up three decades ago by ex-teacher Kaz Hindle and her husband, Mark. Having “bought a cheese shop because of a drunken dinner”, Kaz tells me the dairy came about when one of the shop’s employees mentioned her grandmother’s 1917 recipe for cheese. The grandmother turned out to be Ellen Yeld, one-time “chief dairy instructress” for Herefordshire, so the recipe was a good one. The Hindles refined it further to produce Little Hereford, a cheddar-like cheese that’s now the dairy’s flagship product.

With Kaz semi-retired, the cheesemaking side of things has been taken over by ex-chef and former customer Dean Storey. Showing me the cheese cave and the dairy’s vintage cast-iron presses, Storey tells that me he makes 30 to 40 Little Herefords a week and up to 300 of the dairy’s deliciously creamy blue monks, plus some “more controversial” cheeses such as ones featuring garlic and chive; “My kids love it in pasta,” he says.

Resisting the urge to order the cafe’s signature ploughman’s, I hop back on my bike. Lunch beckons a few fields further on. The Riverside at Aymestrey is a pretty black-and-white inn beside the River Lugg. The hillside above it operates as a semi-wild kitchen garden. Among a bounty of damsons, cobnuts, jerusalem artichokes, fennel, lovage, kale, gooseberries and apples are pigs and chickens. “The garden started as a lockdown project and now we have 2.5 acres (1 hectare),” says chef-patron Andy Link, as he shows me around. “It means we can work in food metres rather than food miles.”

I’m transported back to the garden when I bite into an appetiser of summer veg croustade – a mouthful of crunchy peas, beans and mint enveloped with crushed seeds. It’s followed by trout cured in gin and lemon verbena, with gooseberries and tendrils of sea purslane, then fall-apart local beef fillet and cheek from a farm 11 miles away. But it’s the dainty, cloud-like savarin I have for dessert that keeps this hyper-Herefordshire meal on my mind as I wobble back on to my bike for the ride back to White Heron; it’s soaked in a delicate syrup flavoured with pine tips.

The following morning, I do some foraging of my own, driving south to Longtown to meet wild food expert Liz Knight, of Forage Fine Foods, on her local patch. As we walk out along an old drovers’ road to the fields past her converted barn, Liz teaches me to look at the landscape not just as a view but as a foodscape. There may be an extraordinary panorama of the Cat’s Back hill across the valley, but we try to keep our eyes down: beneath our feet is pineapple weed, whose fruity flowers can be used to top salads or spice up cordials, broadleaf plantain, which can be fried like kale chips, and docks, whose ground seeds can be baked in bread and crackers.

At one point, we come across an ancient linden tree, whose colossal gnarled trunk makes it a contender for the real-life Magic Faraway Tree, though Liz says that its real sorcery lies in its cucumber-scented flowers; delicious on salads, they are also said to help calm the nervous system. Nearby is a patch of yarrow. A forager’s cure-all, yarrow’s many medicinal properties include calming bites and stings, balancing hormones and soothing sore throats. Picking a few heads, we stroll back to Liz’s kitchen to steep the flowers with honeysuckle in vodka to use as a tincture.

Back home that evening, I make a salad using radishes, runner beans and soft dorstone cheese from the Oakchurch Farm Shop, another pin on Herefordshire’s food safari map. As I slice the veg, I think of everyone I’ve met over the last few days. Seeing such careful tending of food first-hand has left me not just with the lie of the land, I realise, but with the experience of truly savouring it too.

The trip was provided by White Heron; its two- to three-hour ebike farm tour and tasting is £50pp; full-day slow cycle rides £80pp; self-catering accommodation sleeps four, from £509 for three nights. Half-day foraging courses with Liz Knight from £55pp. For more information see visitherefordshire.co.uk