Swaledale

A trip to Swaledale Foods, our meat supplier, takes you to the eponymous dale in the northernmost and most rugged part of the Yorkshire Dales. The name itself, spoken back at you in a broad Yorkshire brogue, combined with the scenery, seems almost perfectly bucolic; when you arrive you half expect to meet some wild Heathcliff-like figure, apron sodden with blood, cattle marauding around a crumbling farmhouse. So it’s a little disappointing, if fundamentally reassuring, when you of course arrive at their office in an industrial park just off the Dales, kitted out with all the layers of security you would expect from a modern and forward-thinking abattoir.