It was my friend's day off, and we'd decided to spend the day at Healey's Cornish Cyder Farm, a small family-run cider producer near Truro. If you've had or heard of Rattler cider (I hadn't), it's made there. They have guided tours, cider tastings, tractor rides of the orchards, apple-pressing to make juice, a restaurant and a tea room, of course a shop, and as it was half-term week they also had a pumpkin patch. There can't be many more quintessentially autumnal things than going somewhere like that.
The visitor centre smelled of apples, and had stacks of multi-packed ciders and juices along the sides for sale. We were disappointed to be told that the pumpkin patch wasn't their own, the pumpkins had been brought in from elsewhere, and that it was really aimed at little kids, but it's good they were honest with us instead of letting us spend money on that particular tour which wouldn't have been worth it. Still, we booked ourselves onto the regular full guided tour, which was £20 for just under two hours, and lingered for 15 minutes in a little seating area, reading the boards about the farm's history, before the tour started at 12.
First stop was the Press House, one of the old buildings in the cobbled courtyard, to see the apple press, a fairly modern machine small and compact enough that you can stand at the finishing end and see whole apples going in at the start only a few metres away. The apples are rinsed as they're fed into it, then shredded, crushed and pulped to extract all the juice, which is then taken off via pipes to one of the numerous large silos outside. What remains, the dry apple pulp, is used for animal feed and farm fertiliser, so nothing is wasted. Here's a short video they made a few years ago showing the process, if you're interested: https://youtu.be/IUH1NELFalY. During harvest season, the press runs for up to 16 hours each day, and it takes around two days to fill one of the 50,000-litre silos, in which the juice is fermented.
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| The apple press |
Next was the Jam Kitchen, where just a couple of people at a time make all of Healey's preserves by hand, getting around 80 jars from a single batch. They had a jar of every item in the range on the counter in front of the kitchen, for sampling, but we didn't get to sample them at that point as there were too many people in the group and it would have taken ages, so the tour guide suggested we come back later if we wanted to try any.
The museum, in the old barn, was interesting, with a number of big old traditional presses dating from the 15th to the 19th centuries, and the tour guide explaining the history and progression of cider-making. Some of it has you grimacing at the, well, grimness. With donkey-drawn presses, the apple pulp that was pushed out of the bowl by the moving wheel had to be scooped up off the ground and put back in - meaning all sorts of nasties were also put into the tray and mixed in with the pulp. In the mid-17th century, many makers started using lead, either as a sweetener in the finished cider, or to line the juice-collecting trays with lead so that the juice wouldn't soak into the wood; around the same time, a mysterious "colic" became very widespread, and it was over a hundred years before someone figured out that it was lead poisoning. But in general, alcoholic beverages were safer to drink than water, simply because the water used to make them had been boiled and so the germs killed. Many farmers used to pay their seasonal labourers at least partly with cider, and the best cider-makers got the best workers. The museum also had a little corner made up to be like a cooper's workshop, the craft of the cooper - the barrel-maker - being one of many traditional skills that are fading.
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| Old apple presses in the museum |
After the museum was the distillery, where they make a small range of spirits. I can't remember any info about that, but it was interesting. Next was down into the chilly, dimly-lit, barrel-stacked cellar, where they had a little bar set up and gave each of us a really cute little mini glass tankard only about 5cm tall with a smiley face embossed on the bottom. All of the several samples were nice - ranging from a few types of modern cider, to brandy, to elderflower wine, to a new limited-edition pineapple cider - but I preferred the traditional scrumpy. I was sad that only the children were offered samples of the apple (and apple-and-rhubarb) juice, but I wasn't brave enough to ask for some. The guide pointed out some little black spots on some of the wooden beams and explained that it was caused by the evaporating fumes from the barrels, and eventually the beams would all be covered, would all be black.
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| The barrel cellar |
We were taken back to the visitor centre, where the tour guide opened up the door in the big barrel-vat installation which makes up part of the front of the building. Inside was a staircase winding upwards around an actual modern vat, and at the top of that was a walkway, from which you can look down at the goings-on in the storage and distribution warehouse and then the production plant, where all the drinks are bottled and packaged. It was cool. There were information boards around, explaining the whole production process from orchard to bottle, and some other things as well which I can't remember. I should have taken pictures of more than just the first one, it would have been interesting to remember and write about. The tour guide let us wander round for a while, watching the happenings below and reading the boards, then called us back to a little counter in one of the corners, where she had set up two sets of those tiny little plastic sampling cups full of apple juice, from two different varieties of apples. She explained that juices often need to be mixed together so that the end product has a nice balanced taste, instead of being a tad too sour or dry or sweet. When we had tasted half of each cup of juice, she told us to pour the juice from one cup into the other so they were mixed together, and try that. While the individual juices on their own had been fine, the mixed one was definitely nicer, you could tell the difference.
The tour finished with a tractor-trailer ride through the orchards, which was nice. There was interesting commentary, but I can't remember any of it and there isn't much information on their website I can use to tell you about the orchards.
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| Fallen apples in one of the orchards |
By this point it was nearly 2:30pm, and high time for lunch. We went to The Old Bottlery restaurant, a really nice, bright, dog-friendly space with a huge old barrel-vat for a bar and a wood-burning stove in the centre. The table next to the fire was of course already occupied so we sat at a table near the counter, away from the door. The place was maybe half-full, not quiet but not busy either, happily. My friend opted for a cream tea, which included two enormous homemade scones, while I found exactly the sort of thing I was hoping for in a cyder-roasted ham and homemade-appleslaw sandwich, the filling almost overflowing from between slices of proper thick-cut locally-made wholegrain bread. Plus, as part of the tour, we'd been given a voucher for a free drink in the restaurant and I used mine to get a bottle of their apple juice. All was yum! :) It'd be a great place to go for a Sunday roast, too.
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| Ham and appleslaw sandwich |
Next and final stop was the shop. While the scrumpy had been nice, and they sold small flagons of it and the cute mini tankards, and they also sold nice fruit wines like strawberry, I knew I wouldn't drink all of anything I bought. So I headed instead for the preserves section, and immediately wished I'd gone back to the jam kitchen to sample some things before coming to the shop. They have a range of 25 different preserves and, although I was definitely going to buy some marmalade, there were several others which sounded good and I knew they'd all be great quality. In the end I went for plum jam, as I'll always remember how delicious the plum jam I helped make on the farm in Canada was. I was a bit disappointed the next day, when spooning some of the jam out onto some toast, to find that the plums were whole (minus stones) so actually it wouldn't spread very much or last very long, and it wasn't as delicious and flavoursome as my Canadian one. Oh well. The marmalade is perfect :)
Leaving Healey's, we headed towards Truro, Cornwall's county town, administrative and retail centre, and only city. The drive through the winding country lanes was an autumn extravaganza. There were trees everywhere, mostly beeches, and the colours were stunning. The earlier rain meant that everything was now glinting and glimmering in the liquid gold of the setting sun, beautifully contrasted against the darkened tarmac and tree trunks and richly-coloured leaves and the lingering slate-grey clouds :)
It started raining again when we got there. I hadn't been there before and knew nothing about it; it seems like a nice place and I'd like to visit it properly one day. I liked the old buildings, wishing (as I always do) that I could see them as they were in their original time, without the concrete and roads and cars and modern stuff. We happened across the cathedral - didn't even know the place had one - and ducked inside out of the rain, and wandered around for a while. I love places like that, peaceful and quiet and architecturally beautiful. There was a little exhibition on there, too, about climate change and eco-responsible lifestyles and what local groups are doing, which I liked.
Once my friend had bought what she needed to, it was late afternoon and the shops were starting to close, and it was still raining, so we couldn't stay and explore. Will have to go back another time!
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| Inside Truro Cathedral |
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