For fifteen years, Iwan Pritchard wrote code. He worked for a fintech company in Bristol, lived in a flat with a Nespresso machine, and spent his weekends doing very little. Then in the spring of 2019, on a wet Tuesday afternoon in March, he stood in a field outside Crymych and watched a Friesian cow being milked by hand. Something — and he still cannot quite explain what — shifted.
"I went home that night," he tells me, "and I started reading about cheese. Just reading. Books, blogs, anything. By the end of the week I'd booked a course in Somerset. A year later I'd quit my job."
We are sitting in the small whitewashed dairy he now runs with his wife, Catrin, in the foothills of the Preseli mountains. It is mid-morning and the air smells faintly of warm milk and rennet. Outside, a pair of red kites circle slowly above the byre.
"I thought I was running away from a career. What I was actually doing was running towards something I didn't yet have a word for."
Starting from nothing
The Pritchards bought the smallholding — twenty-two acres and a half-collapsed barn — in 2020. They moved in with two suitcases, a dog called Mostyn, and what Iwan describes as "an embarrassingly small amount of money." Catrin, who had trained as a vet, took a job at the local practice three days a week. Iwan started milking.
The first cheese they made was inedible. The second was worse. By the eighth attempt — a soft, ash-rolled goat's milk round they would later name Carreg — they had something they were proud of. A delicatessen in Cardigan bought four wheels. The Pritchards spent the money on a better thermometer.
Five years on, the dairy produces nine cheeses. Their hard alpine-style, Y Berwyn, was named best new British cheese at the World Cheese Awards last autumn. They have a waiting list of forty restaurants. And Iwan, when pressed, will admit he has never been happier.
The shape of a different life
What I notice, watching him work, is how unhurried he is. He talks to the cows by name. He stops, mid-sentence, to listen to a curlew. When he turns a wheel of cheese on its rack, he does it with the kind of attention you might give to a sleeping child.
"In tech, everything was always optimisation," he says. "Faster, more, scale. Here, you can't optimise. The milk takes its time. The mould takes its time. You can't ship a half-finished cheese."
He pauses, smiles. "It turns out that's exactly what I needed."
