Jeffa Gill

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Many years ago we made a television programme about some West Cork food people, which featured Jeffa Gill, the creator and curator of Durrus Cheese. The director ended the sequence with a long, slow shot, which started with a close-up of the farm, near the top of Coomkeen hill where Jeffa works and makes her cheese.

Slowly, slowly, slowly the camera drew back from the farm, until eventually it sat in the far distance, surrounded by hills and fields, a quiet little place miles up a hill in West Cork. The director – Mickey O'Neill – wanted to make a simple, but telling, point: this famous, prize-winning cheese, which you will find in Harrod's and Dean & DeLuca, which travels all over the world to the best shops and delis, is made by this woman in this lonely place up this hill, at the edge of the country, at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.

Durrus Cheese: A Product Apart. But the ultimate effect, of course, was ironic: the more the home of Durrus receeded, the bigger the impact of the cheese became. The voice was small, artisanal: the echo was massive.

The interesting thing about Ms Gill is that she is a woman who has spent almost 35 years as the creator of one of the best-known cheeses in Ireland, working to make the cheese as fine as it can be. In the process, she has made Durrus cheese world-famous. And yet she is, personally, self-effacing. Her cheese is foreground, but Ms Gill is background. The reality is that her personality is sublimated into her cheese: it speaks for her, it tells the story of her work, it delineates her character, it can alter as her moods might alter. One day, it's strawberries and green fruits. A few months later, it's mushrooms and damp woodland and umami steak. Durrus cheese is a dance of flavours, and Ms Gill is the dancer: when she moves, the dance begins, the art is fashioned, but the dance and the movement are one.

Besides this extraordinary interweaving of life and art, the often-repeated history of Durrus cheese can seem almost superfluous: Ms Gill arrived in Dublin in 1965, to study fashion. She bought the farmhouse in Coomkeen in 1974, and started making cheese with the milk of a few Fresian cows she had, and Durrus cheese first appeared in 1979.

Today, the milk for the cheese comes from Cornelius Buckley, who farms near to Colomane, and in the intervening years, every major cheesemaking award has been won by this most singular, raw-milk cheese. Most recently, the team have begun to produce Durrus Og, a smaller version of Durrus, and Dunmanus, an aged cheese which is matured for at least 3 months.

That's the story. But it's not the real story. The real story of Durrus cheese – the artistic story – is the story of the small voice, and the mighty echo.

Durrus Farmhouse Cheese, Coomkeen, Durrus, West Cork