Sean and Deirdre Fitzgerald have been making cheese from sheep’s milk for 26 years.

Cratloe Hills cheese is made from milk produced by Friesland and Friesland-Texel cross ewes. They sell it to stall holders in farmers’ markets, such as On the Pig’s Back stall which can be found at the English market in Cork. It can even be found in Dublin Airport.

Their son, Diarmuid, studied at Pallaskenry Agricultural College. After working with the farm relief service and in England for a few years, he came back home to farm full-time last year. Diarmuid looks after the dairy cows, giving Sean more time to focus on producing cheese. He milks 120 ewes in a separate parlour twice a day from March to August/September.

Sean says: “They produce a small volume of extremely valuable milk, but they are hard to control in the parlour. You need a lot of patience because they are greedy animals and need to be milked quickly.”

The milking machine looks the same as those used to milk goats, but the vacuum and pulsation is different. Sean and his wife Deirdre lamb up until the end of March.

The lambs are left with the ewes for around 30 days, during which time they only milk the surplus production. Once the lambs reach 15kg, they are taken off their mothers and sold as stores at 30kg. The ewes are usually milked for four or five years.

In the past week, the Fitzgeralds managed to get their silage in. They were delighted that the weather allowed them to wilt it before picking up this year. There are four milkings to do every day when you include the cows and the ewes. The cheese is made three times a week. They buy sheep’s milk from local farmer Henry Clifton Brown too. Alongside this, Sean feels it is important to do his own cheese promoting and he recently gave talks at McCambridge’s in Galway and O’Connor’s SuperValu in Westport.

Sheep’s milk has 6% protein, 18% total solids and the same amount of fat as cows’ milk.

“This makes an easily digested, highly nutritious cheese,” says Sean, “It contains up to twice the amount of calcium as cheese made from cow’s milk. It is also ideal for those with allergies and is gluten free.”