AND now for the scrummy bit. Food glorious food.
You couldn’t avoid the stuff.
Ludlow was like a big open air pantry last weekend. When friends said that Ludlow Food Festival was one of the country’s biggest food fairs, if not THE biggest, I took it all with a pinch of salt.
But I have to say, if you followed your nose in this beautiful Shropshire town, you couldn’t avoid the traces of ginger, garlic and a smokiness in the air.
There were queues for venison, for the bread and sausage trails and lots of earnest looking people wearing glass tankards round their necks on yellow ribbons in pursuit of their next pint of real ale.
I sat in a deckchair in the grounds of the medieval walls of Ludlow Castle taking leisurely afternoon tea over the newspapers. Sunday’s provisions were stored carefully in a bag at my side.
I had found Shropshire blue cheese, wonderful pork and leek sausages from a farm high in the Marches, damsons, punnets of strawberries and raspberries that turned out to be the most flavour packed I’ve had in years.
There was also a blackcurrant sage in full glowing flower and a monarda that the woman who raised it assured me would be bursting with buds by next summer.
I’d lingered over some Gloucester old spot pork and the smoke house products that used everything from English oak, walnut and juniper berries, sweet chestnut and hazel wood to apple and damson to create the most magical of aromas.
Here was English produce at its finest, at its freshest and on a glorious late summer day it was hard to think of anywhere better to be. Just a pity that the railways didn’t have the ability to transport me quite as well as Ludlow did!
