Decades of mismanagement and poor policy has left our rare and precious chalkstream environments in a perilous state

Two rare environments are close to my heart – Heather Moorland and Chalkstreams. Both are almost unique on a global scale and thus massively important.

You might think these are two very different environments; well, yes, they are – but there are many similarities. They are also supremely delicate; lack of management or the wrong sort can lead to damage taking a decade or more to repair.

I’ve been involved with grouse moors all my life – and have managed a famous stretch of the Middle Test for more than 40 years; this makes me a very old fart who’s experienced perhaps the most fundamental decades for both.

It’s hard to believe but during the Second World War it was only legal to make one type of regulation Cheddar in Britain – making any other sort of cheese was banned. Sixty years on, however, the British cheese industry is flying. There are over 750 different types, some of them ancient and others very new, and prizes for cheesemaking are hotly contested.

Patrick sets off for Norfolk to visit Mrs Temple, an environmentally-conscious dairy farmer and renowned cheesemaker. She shows him around the dairy and then takes him to see her Brown Swiss cattle that graze in the water meadow on their farm.

Amazingly, the Temples use waste whey from the cheesemaking process to fuel their biodigestor, which provides power for four hundred houses.

After visiting Mrs Temple, Patrick pops by the Walsingham Farm Shop to pick up some of Mrs Temple’s famous Binham Blue, which their best selling cheese by some way. Then he drives back to London and rings up Angus Birditt, the author of A Portrait of British Cheese: A celebration of artistry, regionality, and recipes. Angus has travelled the country talking to cheesemakers and he believes that to understand cheese is to understand rural Britain.

You can order Angus’ book here: https://www.londoncheesemongers.co.uk/products/a-portrait-of-british-cheese

You can buy Mrs Temple’s cheese here: https://walsingham.co/products/mrs-temples-binham-blue-cheese

What would be your choice for Desert Island Discs? I pondered on this while the Sealyhams worked a brash pile for a rat. Plastic Bertrand’s Ca Plane Pour Moi definitely, along with Noel Coward’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen if the BBC allowed it (unlikely). Then the sound of curlew in winter. And next, the scream of my old Sharpe's of Aberdeen trout reel.

The old girl was built almost 30 years ago and she was giving her banshee wail yesterday as the line ripped out attached to a very cross rainbow fooled by a home-tied Shuttlecock Emerger. In he came, the priest delivered the last rites and it was time for a cuppa, at which point one of my fellow Rods noticed the engraving on the reel’s side: Macnab Challenge 1998.

“So, what did you start with?”, he asked. “The salmon, the stag or the grouse?”

“Actually, it was none of those,” I replied. “It was a goose.”