Herefordshire

How apples came

Orchards for cider appeared in the Herefordshire lowlands in the fourteenth century⁴. By 1657, when John Beale described its farming to Samuel Hartlib, the county was “reputed the Orchard of England”: every dwelling, “from the greatest persons to the poorest cottager”, stood among orchards, most hedges carried rows of fruit trees, and a married servant’s cottage orchard was often “all the wealth they have”. Beale judged the county better suited to apples, and Worcestershire to pears and cherries¹.

The county’s first famous cider apple was the Redstreak. Thomas Andrew Knight called it the first fine cider apple grown in Herefordshire, “or probably in England”, and wrote that the credit for raising it early in the seventeenth century had generally gone to Lord Scudamore, after whom it was first called “Scudamore’s Crab”³. In 1664 John Evelyn wrote that, by the example of “my Lord Scudamor” and other gentlemen, “all Hereford-shire is become, in a manner, but one intire Orchard”². By 1811 the Redstreak was spent, and its trees could no longer be propagated³.

Knight, who had found the orchards neglected in the 1790s, published his Pomona Herefordiensis in 1811 for the Herefordshire Agricultural Society, and in 1876 the pomologist Robert Hogg proposed the Herefordshire Pomona to the Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club⁵. The club found that the county’s nearly twenty “Norman” cider apples matched none of 85 varieties sent from Normandy in 1883, renamed most of them “Hereford” as local seedlings, and in 1884 chose eight true Norman apples to bring home, Michelin and Médaille d’Or among them⁷. Between 1870 and 1900 twelve cider factories opened around Hereford and smaller firms multiplied, Henry Weston’s at Much Marcle among them⁵; Percy Bulmer started his business at Credenhill in 1887⁶. In 1903 Herefordshire helped to set up the National Fruit and Cider Institute, outside Bristol at Long Ashton⁵.

How they’re grown

Much of the Herefordshire lowlands lies on Old Red Sandstone with fertile soils, in high-rainfall country drained by the Wye, the Lugg and the Frome⁴. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries cattle and pigs often grazed among the cider trees. Traditional orchards, once widespread, now survive mainly around hamlets and farmsteads, while “bush” orchards supply the drinks industry⁴; Bulmer’s was among the first firms to plant intensive bush orchards, in the early 1970s⁵. Even so, in 2011 Herefordshire still had 3,360 traditional orchards covering 2,481.5 ha, more than any other English county and about a seventh of England’s total¹⁴.

The cider apple is a crop of its own. The specification for Herefordshire Cider describes traditional varieties grown widely across the three counties, and on a handful of farms in Shropshire, Gwent and Powys, and used for nothing but cider; their high tannins give a bitterness and astringency that cider made from culinary apples lacks⁹. In 2018 Heineken, owner of Bulmers since 2008, used roughly a third of the United Kingdom’s cider apples, bought from about 180 orchard owners, most of them in Herefordshire, and a glut of bittersweet fruit led it to end some growers’ contracts¹⁵. Westons, at Much Marcle, says it needs more than 40,000 tonnes of fruit each autumn, all grown within about 80 km of its mill¹⁶.

What’s picked

Only Kent has more orchard. In June 2025 Herefordshire’s commercial holdings had 3,922 ha of orchard fruit (the survey’s “top fruit”), about 23% of England’s 17,217 ha but down from 5,302 ha in 2016; Worcestershire had 851 ha and Gloucestershire 454 ha¹¹. In Defra’s last survey of varieties, in 2012, cider apples covered 5,100 of the West Midlands’ 6,211 ha of orchard, about 71% of all the cider apples in England and Wales¹². England’s cider apple and perry pear orchards covered 5,800 ha in 2025, down from 7,320 ha in 2018, and yielded about 150,800 tonnes¹³. In the returns of 1877 to 1883 the county had more orchard than any other, about 10,960 ha by 1883⁷.

Westons takes in fruit from September to December¹⁶; Herefordshire Through Time says the earliest cider varieties are ripe by late August and the last by the end of December, and that fruit was traditionally left to fall and the trees then shaken⁵. Beale’s favourite, the Gennet-moyle, was left to ripen on the tree and then “hoorded in heapes” for two or three weeks before grinding¹.

The specification names Dabinett, Yarlington Mill, Kingston Black, Michelin, Brown Snout, Chisel Jersey, Bulmer’s Norman, Ellis Bitter, Redstreak, Reine des Pommes and Vilberey among the recognised varieties, and more than 99% of the fruit pressed for Herefordshire Cider comes from growers in the county⁹. A contract orchard at Kimbolton, seventy years old in 2018, held seven traditional bittersweets, among them Brown’s, Vilberie and Dabinett¹⁵.

On the table

Most of the crop is drunk. Cider and perry from Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire were registered as protected geographical indications in 1996¹⁰. Herefordshire Cider is made from local cider apples, with up to a quarter perry pear juice allowed, and has “rich appley flavours” with marked astringency⁹. In Beale’s day perry was mostly “a weak drink fit for our hindes”, though Bosbury’s Bareland pear made a strong one, and the Gennet-moyle was “much commended” for tarts and pies¹.

Cider was also a wage: labourers took weak “small cider” as part of their pay, “up to six pints a day” and more at harvest, carrying it into the fields in small wooden casks⁵, which an 1839 glossary of Herefordshire words calls costrels¹⁸.

The winter customs were about the corn as much as the apples. On Twelfth Night eve in 1879, at Focle Farm, Upton Bishop, the farmer and his labourers lit twelve fires and a thirteenth on a straw-wrapped pole in a cornfield while “Cider circulated freely”, and on New Year’s Eve men lit a fire in each cornfield and singed a hawthorn bush in it, chanting “Old Cider”. The wassailing of apple trees, the Herefordshire Pomona recorded, had by then “entirely passed away in Herefordshire”⁸.

Bertram Bulmer and Norman Weston, both from cider-making families, set up the Hereford Cider Museum Trust in 1973; its Museum of Cider opened in 1981 in Bulmer’s old works, and in 1984 Bertram Bulmer won a licence to distil cider brandy there¹⁷.

Notes

• In Herefordshire speech a “hit of apples” was a plentiful crop, and must was ground apples, pressed or not¹⁸.
• At Rouen in 1884 Herefordshire’s table fruit won a gold medal and its ciders silver-gilt and silver medals⁷.
• Knight measured the specific gravity of fresh Redstreak juice at 1079³.
• In 2011 a plant on the old jam factory site at Ledbury processed 117,000 tonnes of apples for the drinks industry⁴.

Where the sources disagree

• Who raised the Redstreak. Knight gives Scudamore the credit only as it was “generally given”, and thought he may have found the tree on his estate rather than raised it³; Evelyn praises his example, not his breeding².
• How much orchard. The returns of 1877 to 1883 counted all land under fruit trees⁷, the June survey orchard fruit on commercial holdings, Natural England traditional orchards¹⁴: the figures do not compare directly, and the 1883 area is converted from imperial units. “Only Kent has more” adds up Defra’s four Kent areas, 6,769 ha in June 2025¹¹.
• Cider apples by county. No county figure was found: Defra’s 2012 survey gives regions¹², its later statistics England as a whole¹³.
• Harvest months. September to December is one mill’s season¹⁶; Herefordshire Through Time gives the end of August to the end of December⁵.
• Variety names. The specification writes Vilberey⁹, the Guardian Vilberie¹⁵; no source ranks the varieties by area, so the list at the top is alphabetical.
• Wassailing. The Pomona’s report that it had died out dates from the 1880s⁸; later revivals were not researched.