Where there's a will, there's a whey "

France may be synonymous with fromage, but the terroir of our green and pleasant land gives rise to all manner of magnificent varieties of our own, declares Tom Parker Bowles, who picks his favourites

- Tom Parker Bowles

MANY'S the long night I've dreamed of cheese—toasted mostly. 'Ben Gunn, Treasure Island's pirate-turned-gamekeeper, had every reason to pine for his platter of molten magic. Being stuck on a desert island for three years will do that to even the most parsimonious of appetites. Yet the allure of Great British cheese is eternal, be you brigand, barrister or barrow boy. It's one of our most ancient foods and most important, too—a method of preserving milk through the bleak winter months. 'Britain has made cheese since as long as there have been humans on this island,' observes Andy Swinscoe, one half of Lancashire's The Courtyard Dairy (www.courtyarddairy.co.uk), 'although it has evolved a lot over the years.' Lush grass, watered by regular rain, and lots of soft, rolling countryside, offer the perfect starting point for all manner of magnificent varieties—Cheddar and Wensleydale, Caerphilly, Stilton and Gloucester. 'As an island, we were known for our Dales cheeses—Wensleydale, Lancashire, Shropshire, Gloucester, Cheddar, Stilton et al. Given our climate and northern hemisphere, we were quite limited... up until now,' notes Patricia Michelson, the owner of La Fromagerie (www.lafromagerie.co.uk) and, alongside the late godfather of British cheese Patrick Rance and Neal's Yard Dairy's Randolph Hodgson, one of the great modern heroes of artisan cheese. 'Climate has changed and pastures, too,' she adds. 'We can now make white bloomy mould soft cheeses in Suffolk, sweet milky goat's cheese in Wales, pungent washed rinds in Gloucestershire and stellar blue cheese in Somerset and Lanarkshire, as well as Nottinghamshire. Every region can make good cheese.'