Secrets Beneath the Soil of Somerset

Typically, I write about cheese, not about dirt, but here we are in the muddy depths. This was written on January 31st, as a submission to Le Concours Mondial du Meilleur Fromager, AKA "The International Best Cheesemonger Competition," where I will be representing the United Kingdom on the 2nd of June, 2019. The panel of judges asked for an "argument for the soil," and immediately I thought of the beautiful scenery that surrounds my daily life. My little Bristol flat is atop a crest overlooking part of the Mendip Hills, my work in Bath provides a commute along canals and steeply rolling pastures, and any trip to local cheesemakers will yield breathtaking views of beautiful valleys carved by the currents of ancient seas. Luckily, I paid attention during the geology class I took as a course requirement at the University of Utah fourteen years ago, so despite my BFA in being a starving artist I understand the context of a piece of rock or two.

The soil of Somerset holds eons of history beneath its picturesque surface. To the untrained eye, what can be seen are rolling, steep hills, lush with greenery, dotted with cows, sheep, and a host of gamebirds. But beneath these beautiful scenes lie ancient layers of earth, based with a foundation of Silurian rock and Carboniferous Limestone full of fossils from millions of years of sea life and pockmarked by deep cave systems. Well above this is the Lower Oolite series -- rich clays and limestone that support the clays and chalks above; honey-colored Bath Stone is seen in the buildings of the area, and the permeable Oxford Clay forms a water-rich base. The landscape is striped by rivers which carry the minerals from these hills -- calcium, sodium sulfate, lime, the last remaining legacy of hundreds of millions of years of shells and bone -- into the verdant pastures of the area, home to some of the last calcicolous grasslands in the United Kingdom. It is upon these rich pastures that the cattle who bear the milk to make Somerset Artisanal Cheddar feed, and always have. It is the air and the springs here that keep cellars and cheese caves damp, and fuel the local moulds that smell of wet grass and Somerset clay, for which clothbound Cheddar and Caerphilly have become known worldwide. Without this ancient soil, the flagship cheese of the United Kingdom would be nonexistent.

Mist rises from the pastures as I cycle between South Gloucestershire and Somerset.