LIVE24SEVEN // Interviews
Harvest-time in cider country
Intrigued by Herefordshire’s long tradition of cider making, Sharon Chilcott visits cider country to experience the apple harvest...
Apple orchards, a springtime vision of frothy pink blossom, an autumnal delight of intoxicatingly scented ripening cider apples, are one of the glories of Herefordshire’s landscape.
The county has more orchards than any other in the UK, many concentrated in the rural parishes of the Marcle Ridge, where annual celebrations mark both the beauty of blossomtime and the bounty of the harvest.
With its orchards interspersed with a pretty patchwork of woodlands, soft fruit fields, hop yards and grazing pastures, plus a burgeoning number of local craft food and drink producers, this is an area that quickly finds a special place in the hearts of those who discover it.
This year’s 28th harvest-time celebration, over the weekend of October 8 and 9, is the perfect chance to discover a taste for the area! Farms, orchards, cider mills and barns in and around Much Marcle will host small, rural events which all have one
thing in common – apples! Visitors can walk through orchards full of them, feast on them, learn how to identify them, see them pressed, sample ciders and apple juice and buy some to take home. Many of the venues are in walking distance of each other; cycling is also a great way to get about and there’s a tractor and trailer service between six of the locations. At Westons Cider, over the Big Apple weekend, Leominster Morris Men will provide entertainment in addition to the regular daily tours of the mill and cider tastings.
Certain to be a Big Apple highlight is a screening in Much Marcle Memorial Hall on Saturday October 8 at 7pm of some fabulous, nostalgic footage, filmed between the post-war era and the 1970s. This archive material will be shown alongside the glorious film and tour app Golden Fire. Produced by Herefordshire- based Rural Media, this takes its name from Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie: “Never to be forgotten, that first long secret drink of golden fire…”. It charts the story
of the county’s signature drink from 1945, taking in the recent craft cider boom. Set to become a new tourist attraction, Golden Fire encourages visitors and locals to get a taste for cider by visiting some of the 50 or so producers still pressing apples in the traditional way. The smartphone app is filled with films, archive footage, photography, oral histories and tourist information that tells the rich, vivid story of the people, past and present, who make the “golden fire”. Digital arts charity and media production company, Rural Media, believes it’s the first complete audio visual guide to cider making with a smartphone app to illustrate the story and is proud that the project has been nominated in the Best Digital Innovation category for the highly-prized 2016 Royal Television Society Midlands Awards.
Meanwhile, back amongst the orchards, local farmer Nigel Rolinson, who has been involved in cider apple production all his working life, has just started this year’s harvest. The first fruit to be gathered in on
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