Scottish Cheese: Dunlop, Crowdie and the Modern Revival

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

Barbara Gilmour's role is based on tradition recorded in later parish accounts; she is buried in Dunlop kirkyard, but the details of her story are not contemporary. Claims of caboc's medieval origin are legend.

The folklorist F. Marian McNeill, in The Scots Kitchen (1929; second edition 1963), gathers the older testimony: Meg Dods's 1826 methods for Dunlop and Highland crowdie, the New Statistical Account on Barbara Gilmour, and her own inquiries in Dunlop and Orkney. Her first-hand reports of practice in her time are treated as good evidence; her retelling of the Gilmour story adds romantic detail and is labelled accordingly.

Alan Davidson's The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, ed. Tom Jaine, 2014) adds a later reference view. Its Dunlop entry is signed by Catherine Brown, the leading modern historian of Scottish food, and draws on Patrick Rance's The Great British Cheese Book (1982). Its entries on crowdie, cream cheese and whey supply the rest. Where it differs from McNeill, on Gilmour's family position, on the source of the Dunlop name and on the derivation of "crowdie", both versions are given.

Crowdie and caboc

established Crowdie is a soft, crumbly, slightly sour cheese made by letting milk sour naturally, then gently heating and draining the curds. It was a staple on Highland crofts, eaten with oatcakes. Caboc is a rich cream cheese shaped into a log and rolled in toasted oatmeal. Legend links it to a fifteenth-century MacDonald heiress, but this is not documented; it was revived commercially in the 1960s by Highland Fine Cheeses.

established McNeill explains that the word crowdie had two meanings. In the Lowlands it meant raw oatmeal stirred into water or buttermilk, a breakfast food; in the Highlands it was a soft curd cheese (she gives Gaelic gruth, curd). She prints two methods. The older, from Meg Dods's Annals of the Cleikum Club (1826), is "crowdie or cruddy butter" from Inverness and Ross: two parts fresh sweet-milk curd worked with one part fresh butter, pressed in a bowl and sliced. Packed into narrow wooden cogs, it could be kept for months and became "very high flavoured though mellow"; in the Lowlands, where it was eaten fresh, it was called "a one-day's cheese". The second method heats thick sour milk gently until it curds, drains it for two hours and mixes in a little double cream and salt. She adds that goat-milk crowdie "is excellent".

shared The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) describes crowdie as made from tepid milk set with rennet, drained of whey, then finished with a little salt and sometimes cream. Older home practice, as in McNeill's second method, simply let the milk sour; both routes give a fresh curd. The Companion says much crowdie was made by Highland crofters, that production fell after the Second World War as crofters left the land and few of those remaining kept cows, and that it has risen again since the 1970s. It attributes the Highland butter-and-curd recipe to Sir Walter Scott, as recorded by McNeill, where McNeill's text gives it from Meg Dods's Annals of the Cleikum Club; Dods's book was built around Scott's fictional characters, which may explain the overlap.

shared The two sources also derive the name differently. McNeill gives Gaelic gruth, curd. The Companion derives it from the Lowland Scots "cruds", meaning curds. Both point to the same meaning. The Companion adds a useful social note: in the Highlands, where whey was drunk, a firm curd blended with butter was a way to keep the solids for months, while Lowlanders made only "one day's cheese".

established Hope gives the oatmeal crowdie a longer history. Originally it was sour milk or buttermilk stirred with raw oatmeal to a soft porridge, a summer breakfast in place of brose; later the name passed to an oatmeal soup made with meat or poultry stock, the crowdie of Burns's song "Ance crowdie, twice crowdie, / Three times crowdie in a day". The cheese crowdie went into "tatties and crowdie", a dish for the good milk of summer at the Highland sheilings.

established The oatmeal "crowdie" survived in a sweeter form. The Companion records that for harvest home a festive crowdie was made with cream and sugar, and that this "cream crowdie" is now better known as cranachan.

Caboc

shared The Companion says caboc has been known since the fifteenth century and was Sir Walter Scott's favourite cheese. It became extinct and was revived as a rich cream cheese of double cream, given a crust of toasted pinhead oatmeal and sold in small logs. The fifteenth-century date matches the MacDonald legend but no early document is cited for it, so it is best treated as tradition. In British terms it is a true cream cheese; the Companion notes that UK cream cheese must contain between 45 and 65 per cent fat.

Whey and "bland"

established Cheesemaking leaves far more whey than cheese. The Companion reckons about 10 kg of milk for 1 kg of cheese, leaving 6 to 9 kg of whey. In most places that is a disposal problem. In the Hebrides it was the everyday drink. The Companion quotes a 1908 description of "bland", a preparation of whey, as the islands' great non-alcoholic drink, available almost anywhere because every home made it. That is the setting for Highland crowdie: milk was turned into curd to keep and whey to drink.

shared The food historian Annette Hope, in A Caledonian Feast (1987), places "blaund" in Shetland rather than the Hebrides: whey strained off buttermilk, thought best when it began to ferment and had a slight fizz, drunk by fishermen at sea and given to consumptives. The word and the drink seem to have belonged to the Northern Isles at least as much as to the west. For the Western Isles she cites Martin Martin's account of oon, milk or whey boiled and frothed up with a whisk, on which islanders lived for months in hard times. In eighteenth-century Edinburgh buttermilk, sold as "soor-dook" at a penny the Scots pint, was so popular that the citizens were reckoned to spend £1,000 a year on it.

Kebbucks and the old dairy

established The general Scots word for a whole cheese was kebbuck (kebboc, cabbock). McNeill traces it to Gaelic càbag, which is also the source of the name caboc. Burns's cotter's wife produces her "weel-hained kebbuck" for a guest, and the old song "The Blythesome Bridal" promises "lapper-milk kebbucks", sour-milk cheeses. Alexander Ross's Fortunate Shepherdess (1768) shows the sheiling dairy with wooden cogs set out for the cream to rise and a hake of drying cheeses hanging from the rafters. Cheeses, like oatcakes, were commonly kept buried in oatmeal in the girnel or meal-chest.

established Hope explains why Scotland's early cheese stayed small. Milk was scarce in winter, cattle were barely kept alive until spring, and cheese could be made in quantity only for a short summer season, much of it at the sheilings. Cheese was a common rent in kind: she notes that "kain", a payment in kind, came in places to mean a fixed weight of cheese. Little reached market. Captain Edward Burt, describing Inverness market in the 1720s, saw Highlanders bring "two or three cheeses, of about three or four Pounds weight a piece" among their few goods. A farming manual of 1665, Skene of Hallyard's Manuscript of Husbandrie, advised that "Kys milk is best for butter, and yows milk best for cheiss", adding "They use in Cunningham to make cheiss of kys milk, but it is not good." Cunninghame, the district that includes Dunlop, was about to change that.

established Ewe-milk cheese was valued but grew rarer as cow-milk cheese undercut it, surviving longest in the Lammermuirs and the Highlands; Scott noted in a footnote to The Heart of Midlothian that the pastures of Buckholm were "famed for producing the best ewe-milk cheese in the South of Scotland". Johnson saw sheep and goats milked in the Highlands in 1773. Hope records that St Kildans made small ewe-milk cheeses cured with the ash of seaweed instead of salt, and that elsewhere oatmeal, mashed potato, caraway or mustard were sometimes worked into the curd. "Kebbock", she adds, was used of any hard cheese, though Scott in Old Mortality glossed it as a cheese of ewe's and cow's milk mixed.

established Cheese also marked life's events. McNeill records the crying kebbuck, a home-made cheese eaten by the women attending a birth, after the newborn's first cry, and the Yule kebbuck, a slice of which was given with oat farls to children guising at Hogmanay. "Cakes and kebbuck" (oatcakes and cheese) appear in her calendar of Hogmanay foods.

Dunlop

traditional According to tradition, Barbara Gilmour, a farmer's wife from Dunlop in Ayrshire, fled to Ireland during the religious troubles of the seventeenth century, learned cheesemaking there, and on her return around 1690 began making cheese from whole, unskimmed milk rather than skimmed milk. Her cheese became famous as Dunlop.

shared The core of the story rests on the New Statistical Account (1840s), quoted by McNeill: cheese in the parish "was made of skimmed milk, till about the end of the seventeenth century, when one Barbara Gilmour introduced the practice of using the whole milk". McNeill, drawing on information from the manse of Dunlop, adds the colour: Gilmour was a young woman who fled to Ireland during the Covenanting persecutions, and she married a local farmer whose surname, "incidentally", was Dunlop. McNeill also insists Dunlop "differs from any known Irish cheese", so the Irish lesson was, at most, the whole-milk method. The flight and the marriage are tradition; the switch from skimmed to whole milk is the documented part.

shared Catherine Brown's entry in The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) tells the story with different details. It calls Gilmour an Ayrshire farmer's daughter, not a wife, who had been living in Ulster in exile from religious persecution and returned in or just after 1690 with the new method. Daughter and later wife are not incompatible, but the sources differ on her position at the time. Annette Hope, in A Caledonian Feast (1987), gives 1688 as the year Gilmour and her husband settled on a farm near Dunlop, with the first Dunlop cheeses following shortly after, and doubts the Irish lesson altogether, since Ireland then had no reputation for cheesemaking. Brown explains why the method mattered. Using full-cream milk and pressing the curd hard gave a cheese with better keeping quality and flavour. The old cheese was called "common cheese"; the new one "sweet-milk cheese" or "new milk cheese". By the 1790s, when the parish accounts were written, it was established as "Dunlop cheese", made in five parishes of Ayrshire and two of Lanarkshire.

shared The source of the name is also told two ways. The article's main account, following the parish, says the cheese is named after Dunlop parish. Brown's entry says it took its name from the native dairy cattle of Ayrshire, the Dunlop breed, later known as the Ayrshire. McNeill also connects the cheese with that breed. The breed itself was named from the district, so both explanations lead back to the same place.

established Dunlop cheese, a mild, moist hard cheese, was widely made in Ayrshire and south-west Scotland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the twentieth century it was largely replaced by cheddar made in creameries. Small producers have since revived it.

established McNeill links Dunlop's rise to the local "Dunlop" breed of cow, later famous as the Ayrshire, and describes the cheese merchants who carted it to Glasgow until the railway made it more profitable to send fresh milk. Meg Dods's method (1826) has the milk renneted while still warm, the curd cut with a broad knife or "three-toed instrument", salted, pressed and repressed in the "chessel", then turned and rubbed to prevent "fire-fanging". Dunlop's moistness, McNeill says, made it popular with Lanarkshire miners and Clydeside workers as "an excellent sandwich"; by 1963 it was being made firmer and drier on cheddar lines so that it kept in merchants' stores. In 1855 the Ayrshire Agricultural Association had brought in a Somerset couple to teach the cheddar method, after which, she reports, Ayrshire's average quality rose. She records that the Dunlop creamery closed in 1932 and that the cheese was no longer made in its native parish.

established Hope adds steps in Dunlop's spread and decline. Scott has Jeanie Deans, in The Heart of Midlothian (1818, set in 1737), boast to the Duke of Argyll that some folk thought her cheese "as gude as the real Dunlop", which at least shows the name was proverbial by Scott's day. By the 1790s Ayrshire cheese sold readily everywhere, and in 1812 Ayrshire women were making cheese from Ayrshire cows' milk in Caithness, though not for sale south; Moray and Nairn still bought Cheshire and Gloucester from England. Ayrshire farmers tried other cheeses in the early nineteenth century: Stilton failed, but Cheshire was taken up after a Cheshire family settled in the county and taught the method. When Dunlop's quality slipped under mass production, the Ayrshire Agricultural Association invited the Somerset cheesemaker Joseph Harding and his wife to teach cheddar making; Scottish cheddar followed, and a permanent Dairy School opened at Kilmarnock in 1889 to train farmers' wives and daughters. All farm cheesemaking stopped during the Second World War. Writing in 1987, Hope reported that the last farmhouse Dunlop had been made in the 1970s, before the revival described below.

established Brown's entry fills in the wider picture. The growing city markets of Glasgow and Paisley encouraged production in the later nineteenth century, and as late as 1930 at least 300 farms were making Dunlop. Patrick Rance, quoted in the Companion, recorded farm households keeping one mature Dunlop open for cooking and a softer one for eating, with porridge at breakfast followed on alternate days by bacon and eggs or toasted cheese on a scone. The real threat came in and after the Second World War. Brown writes that the Milk Marketing Board, worried that customers would associate Dunlop with rubber tyres and think the cheese rubbery, tried to replace the name with the vaguer "Cheddar". Some makers, especially on the Isle of Arran, kept the name and the tradition going. Compared with Scottish cheddar, she describes Dunlop as mellower and nuttier, softer and creamier.

Orkney and other lost cheeses

established McNeill was frank that Scotland "sadly lacked the inventiveness" of English and Continental cheesemakers, with only one national cheese. She names others that were never marketed beyond their districts: the Island of Coll cheese, by then "disappeared from ken"; the cheeses of Liberton near Edinburgh; the ewe-milk cheese of Buckholmside near Galashiels, which Meg Dods thought "an admirable substitute for Gruyère"; and a "Blue Highland cheese, finer than Stilton" mentioned by Norman Macleod.

established Orkney cheese, she wrote, was "a traditional product which has only recently emerged from obscurity". Her recipe, from Miss Jessie Tait of Holm, renneted whole milk at 85°F, pressed the curd in a cheese cog or "chessit" under a seven-pound weight, turned it daily for eight days and dried it at a window. She notes that on smaller crofts it was usually made with skim milk, that it was kept buried in oatmeal, and that fresh curd fried in butter was a farmhouse treat. Orkney cheese is still made, and modern Orkney Scottish Island Cheddar holds protected status. The Oxford Companion to Food notes that Orkney is famed for its sour-milk products and cheeses, a dairy tradition helped by farms that are, on Catherine Brown's figures, about four times the size of Shetland's.

Revival

established From the 1970s onward, Scottish farmhouse cheesemaking revived, with cheeses such as Isle of Mull cheddar, Bishop Kennedy, Caboc, Lanark Blue and Dunsyre Blue.

established Hope's survey of 1987 catches the revival early. She names Bonchester, a soft cheese made in the Borders from unpasteurised Jersey milk; Caboc and traditional crowdie made by old methods on a Ross-shire farm and sold across the country; Barac, a hard ewe-milk cheese from Dumfriesshire; and a revived kebbock of mixed milks sold in specialist shops.

Lanark Blue

established Humphrey Errington created Lanark Blue, a blue cheese made from unpasteurised ewe's milk, in the 1980s. In 1995 Clydesdale District Council ordered batches destroyed, claiming listeria contamination. Errington fought the case through the courts, and a sheriff ultimately ruled in his favour. The case became a landmark for artisan cheesemakers.

• Crowdie is a soft fresh cheese from the Highlands.
• Caboc is rolled in toasted oatmeal.
• Dunlop cheese is named after an Ayrshire parish.
• Barbara Gilmour is buried in Dunlop kirkyard.
• Lanark Blue survived a famous legal battle.
• A "crying kebbuck" was eaten after a newborn's first cry.
• Dunlop's moistness made it a favourite sandwich cheese for Lanarkshire miners.
• Orkney cheese was stored buried in oatmeal.
• The Milk Marketing Board once tried to rename Dunlop "Cheddar" because of the tyre company.
• In the Hebrides the everyday drink was whey, called "bland".
• Cranachan began as "cream crowdie", a harvest-home treat.

• Disputed: Barbara Gilmour introduced Dunlop cheese around 1690. The New Statistical Account records that cheese in the parish was made of skimmed milk "till about the end of the seventeenth century, when one Barbara Gilmour introduced the practice of using the whole milk". The details come from later parish accounts and tradition, not contemporary records.
• Disputed: Gilmour fled to Ireland and married a man named Dunlop. McNeill gives both, but they are tradition. Only the switch from skimmed to whole milk is the documented part. Hope doubts the Irish lesson altogether, since Ireland then had no reputation for cheesemaking.
• Disputed: whether Gilmour was a farmer's wife or a farmer's daughter. McNeill and tradition say wife. The Oxford Companion to Food calls her a farmer's daughter who returned from exile in Ulster in or just after 1690. The two are not incompatible, but the sources differ on her position at the time.
• Disputed: caboc dates from the fifteenth century. Legend links it to a MacDonald heiress, and the Companion says it has been known since the fifteenth century. No early document is cited, so it is best treated as tradition.
• Disputed: where "crowdie" comes from. McNeill derives it from Gaelic gruth, curd. The Companion derives it from Lowland Scots "cruds". Both point to the same meaning.
• Disputed: where Dunlop gets its name. One account names the parish. The Oxford Companion to Food says it took the name from the native Dunlop breed of cattle, later known as the Ayrshire. The breed was itself named from the district, so both lead back to the same place.
• Myth: Dunlop cheese has died out. Hope reported in 1987 that the last farmhouse Dunlop had been made in the 1970s, and the Milk Marketing Board once tried to drop the name for "Cheddar". Makers on Arran kept it going, and small producers have since revived it.