When you buy the honey from Dunkertons’ Cheltenham or Pembridge shops it is Herefordshire beekeeper Richard Fleming who cares for the bee hives that produced it and when you buy our award winning cider you are supporting the Soil Association in their campaigning to save our bees. 

Ivor and Susie became friends of Richard not long after they moved to Herefordshire. He made cider in a small north Herefordshire village from the early 1970s until the early 1980s.

When Susie and Ivor were thinking of making cider at Hays Head Richard was very helpful recommending which varieties of apples had the most flavour, which to avoid, that they should look out for perry pears (perry is a great favourite of Richard’s) and much general information on cider making.

When the Dunkertons bought an old, half-timbered barn to be their cider shop at Hays Head it was Richard who dismantled it and reconstructed it.

Over the forty years I have known Richard he has been an eel fisherman (working from a coracle he made), a charcoal producer, a teacher and, of course, a bee keeper. Oh, and in the early 1980s he built the pair of pigsties at Hays Head.

When I was at teacher training college at Hereford in the mid-1970s I would cycle, with friends, to his farm in Wellington and taste and buy his cider and perry. He is a characterful part of Herefordshire life.

- Written by Robert West