Cheese cheese cheese. Here’s another mission for the trip- find the perfect cheese board. Ah what a terrible task. Best someone gets it sorted though or we’d all be stuck. Andy and I have really put ourselves out for this one and are sampling cheese boards in various pubs and restaurants around the country. As yet there is no marking criteria, maybe we need to sample more cheese so we can perfect this first or it would not be fair. We’ve been to a couple of places so far, here are two of the best, will keep you updated with more hot spots for cheese around the UK. Hurrah! I mean poor me.

The Gurnards Head Near Zennor, St Ives

Erm you can’t really see the cheese on here, I was distracted by the amazing elderflower pudding with gooseberrys that I accidently ordered when we got the cheese. Some how we also accidently ordered main meals aswell. I would recommend doing the same. While the choice for veggies wasn’t huge what there was was lovely, and if you’re not veggie the meals looked amazing. I’m pretty sure they will have sourced a lot of it locally too as there are a lot of great organic farms around here and the owner seemed well involved with the local community. We went on a wild food walk starting from here the day before and the lady who ran it supplied the pub with various wild food she’d foraged that day for their menu including rock and marsh sampire, wood sorrel, seaweed and mallow flowers. Going off on a tangent a bit her walk was great, if you’re ever in the area I would recommend going on one and also she does weekends which look fantastic where you go foraging then cook various wild food dishes. Here’s her  Fat Hen website. Oh the cheese yeah, one blue, one brie, one cheddar, we’ve found it to be the standard arrangement. Should start asking what they all were and taking notes as that’s about all I can remember. Oops. We’ll have to go back. Damn. Anyway I can safely give them about 8 out of ten. More biscuits might have been better, but then I’d always say that.

The Bird in Hand Hayle, Cornwall

I liked this one, lovely sunny day, bench outside, good generous chunks of cheese, bit of fruit. I’d normally go for crackers rather than bread but I guess this was a plougmans, which comes with bread not cheese erm… and the bread was very nice, so it was all ok.  Good pint of lovely 7% farmhouse cider to wash it down with and I left the pub with a sunny cidery smile on my face. 8.5 out of 10.