There are more than 700 varieties of British cheese. That means you could eat a different one for lunch every day for nearly two whole years.

Or you could just come to the Sturminster Newton Cheese Festival this weekend and tuck into the varieties that will be exhibited at the fourteenth festival to take place in the town.

Visitors can take their pick from Bath Soft Cheese, to Curworthy, Exmoor Blue, Lyburn Farmhouse and Norsworthy goats cheese.

And, says spokeswoman Helen Lacey, there will be plenty of cider, artisan bread and yummy cake and chocolates to help wash it all down.

“I love cheese,” she enthuses.

“I love eating it and I love what it does for this town.”

Her father was a dairy farmer and she helps with the festival for the sheer love of it.

Cheese and Sturminster Newton, she explains, go back a long way, to the days of The Creamery which was set up to serve what Thomas Hardy, no less, described as ‘the vale of little dairies’.

The development of rail transport in the 1800s, specifically the Somerset and Dorset Railway that ran through the town, created a fast route to the growing market for milk in London and by 1913 local farmers took the plunge and set up The Creamery which was to produce Double Gloucester, Caerphilly and Cheddar.

That closed in 2000 but by then the Cheese Festival, says Helen, had been going two years.

“You can’t have enough of cheese and we’re very lucky because of the number of producers we have at the festival,” she says.

“People are more aware of artisan foods and there are more events like ours where you can see producers coming out and selling their wares.”

She won’t name her favourite cheese – “What a thought!” – but is partial to the odd slice of Dorset Blue Vinny: “It’s quite sharp and has a certain tang to it which I like,” and also to Exmoor Blue because of its creaminess.

Mind you, she also likes a good, strong cheddar, and Old Winchester, and she loves the sight of cheese itself: “There’s something about seeing a pile of truckles of cheese,” she says.

And if cheese is not your thing?

“We’ll have specialty teas for people to try and fabulous chocolate from Kernow Confectionery, and there’ll be plenty of crafts for people to buy.”

Her greatest hope is that by coming to the cheese festival, visitors will find a new cheese to fall in love with.

“Come along and try a cheese you haven’t tried before,” she says.

“Talk to the people who made it and ask them some questions about the process because that can help make a difference.

“Maybe you’ll find a whole new cheese or understand a bit more about this wonderful food.”

  • cheesefestival.co.uk