Going against the grain: Meet the British bakeries championing ancient and heritage crops

Ever since the covid-era sourdough boom, good bread has become hot property: according to a dataset from early 2025, there has been a year-on-year increase in sourdough sales of 56% and the UK saw a 237% rise in new bakeries opening between 2019 and 2022. A superlative loaf, however, depends on quality flour — and that requires great grains from which to mill it.

Unfortunately, over the past 70 years, Britain’s flour supply has become uniform and disconnected from the land on which it is grown. Many commodity flours are processed from monocultures developed around the 1960s Green Revolution, when industrial grain production took off with gusto. Although high yield, they tend to be uniformly short in stature and susceptible to climatic changes and diseases, requiring noxious chemicals to flourish. They’re also heavily processed, roller-milled into little more than starch — hence the pappy stodge that passes for much mainstream bread.

Now, a steady revolution has taken hold across Britain. A newer generation of artisans is bucking the system, looking back to our provenance-driven grain histories and embracing small-scale modern varieties in thrall to their forebears. There are a few different kinds. Ancient grains are erstwhile and hardy crops that have existed, unchanged, for sometimes thousands of years: think einkorn, emmer, spelt and khorasan.

Heritage grains, meanwhile, are historic British crops that were naturally cross-pollinated and re-sown over many years, eventually becoming genetically defined varieties, such as Red Lammas, April Bearded and Rouge d’Ecosse. Many were preserved for posterity in seed banks in the 20th century, later salvaged and regrown.

Both are usually tall (to outgrow weeds), resilient to bad weather, pests and diseases and grown without chemicals, often with biodiversity-boosting regenerative principles in mind, such as employing low-or no-tilling planting to preserve soil health and fungal networks or leaving borders around crop fields to encourage wildlife.

Population crops, meanwhile, are a sort of modern version of heritage crops, developed in the late 20th century by places such as Cambridgeshire’s Plant Breeding Institute and Suffolk’s Wakelyns, which aimed to record, preserve and promote our agricultural heritage through native crops and ecologically sympathetic farming. They have cross-bred myriad heritage varieties together to create evolving, diverse styles: Miller’s Choice, Oak Farm, Wakelyns YQ, Maris Wigeon and so on.

In addition to the nutritional and ecological benefits, these grains taste fantastic compared with their dowdy commercial cousins, especially when gently stoneground to retain their precious wholegrains — as these British bakers and millers are well aware.

Barony Mill, Birsay, Orkney

Windswept Orkney has many historic USPs — not least its ancient stone circles and burial chambers — and two more diminutive, but no less significant ones. Enter Barony Mill, the only place on the globe that grinds bere barley, a botanical cousin of wheat. Located on the western mainland, the mill dates back to 1873. It was going to seed (so to speak), but, in the 1990s, the local Birsay Heritage Trust set to its renovation, returning bere-milling to the cultural landscape.

Bere is a long-standing crop in this part of the world. ‘A close relation was found in one of the Neolithic digs,’ explains trust treasurer Tony Morley. It’s also a staple of the Orcadian diet: ‘Beremeal bannocks are something that everybody here knows.’

Bere is a hardy crop and grows quickly. ‘It’s called 90-day barley, because the period from sowing to harvest is three months, from May to August. You have to get it out as early as you can because the weather will take it — or the geese will.’

As well as fine- and medium-grain bere flour, Barony sells whole bere ‘berries’ and the three-storey stone mill operates exactly as it did in the 1800s, powered by the waters of Boardhouse Loch. ‘The water wheel drives everything from the millstones to the hoists, to the sieves to the fanners,’ Morley explains. ‘Even shovelling the grain off the kiln drying floor is done with water power.’ It’s a heritage exemplar for the ages.

Pinch, Kelsale, Suffolk

Just off the north Suffolk coast near Aldeburgh, Pinch is the tiny fiefdom of Alice Norman, a Ballymaloe-trained chef long in thrall to sensitively sourced ingredients. During the pandemic, she returned to her native Suffolk and started a meal-kit enterprise, setting up in a former jam room at Maple Farm. Here, piqued by the farm’s wooden Austrian mill, used to grind various specialist grains, she began ‘feeling more passionate about flour and where it comes from’.

After crafting cones from spelt (for the ice creams she’d sell her kit customers), she began baking crullers — a fried doughnut — and then the crisp-bottomed Roman-style pizza for which Pinch is famed. Maris Wigeon is a farm staple and well suited to pizza dough, but Norman will use whatever’s thriving, all milled into semolina, a wheatgerm-flecked plain flour and bran, ‘which goes into the chicken food’.

Next in the running is a coarser, ‘proper’ wholemeal. The flavour, Norman explains, is slightly nutty, ‘like the smell of a health-food shop. We tried it in our pizza; it was actually a bit too much flavour. We need to introduce it gradually, so people’s palates can get used to it’.

Soon, she hopes to have a single wheat variety aligned to each product she’s crafting. ‘It sounds cheesy, but it’s bringing people back to the roots of where an ingredient comes from and the idea that this year’s bag of flour will be different to the next,’ she says. ‘It’s a reminder to be mindful about what this ingredient is.’

Shipton Mill, Long Newnton, Gloucestershire

Back in the early 1980s, John Lister and some friends were ambling in the Cotswold wilds when he came across a ruined, Domesday-era watermill. Inspired by the principles of William Morris and the Arts-and-Crafts Movement — which sought to reinstate craft skills in the face of rank mechanisation — they set about returning the site to glory. ‘It was an amazing opportunity to get stuck into the making of something wholesome,’ he recalls.

Shipton, which has been granted a Royal Warrant by The King, is now one of the country’s preeminent mills. At first, it ground plenty of Maris Wigeon (and still does; the 100% Maris flour ‘suits our organic production methods, as well as offering opportunities for thatching straw’).

Soon, it was experimenting with emmer, einkorn and spelt; even working with Italian mountain farmers on saragolla, propagated in the country’s south for centuries. Lister is also fascinated by teff, an East African grain familiar to Ethiopian and Somalian communities, but something of a curiosity to Western bakers.

Given Shipton’s size, it’s inevitable the mill has segued into some more refined flours, but the founding principles remain (not least in the heritage flour supplied to bakery behemoth Gail’s). The ecological appeal of specialist wheats over commodities is simple, Lister says. ‘These softer wheats have bigger root systems and they harvest more nutrients. You get resilience because you’re not planting a single variety in a field that has to be sprayed to keep all the weeds off, so the biodiversity is greater. It’s a completely different approach to producing grain.’

Landrace, Bath, Somerset

It was when working at Neal’s Yard Dairy that Andrew Lowkes developed the foodie ethos that would shape Landrace, the Bath bakery and restaurant he founded in 2019: ‘The better the farming, the greater potential to make something delicious at the other end.’ Back then, he’d been spending time with various growers and millers involved in the UK Grain Lab — a decentralised body championing interesting wheats. The quickfire nature of wheat cultivation and breadmaking appealed to his ‘impatient’ personality, he laughs. When the Bath site came up, he took the plunge.

At first, Lowkes was more concerned with locating stoneground flours than esoteric strains, but a burgeoning relationship with Ceredigion’s 16th-century Felin Ganol watermill inspired him to start grinding his own. After sourcing some fresh stones from a company in deepest Vermont, USA, and installing them at Somerset’s Westcombe Dairy, Landrace began milling: at first, self-grown wheats — Red Lammas and Orange Devon Blue Rough Chaff among them — before the bakery’s ascent necessitated purchasing grain again.

This year, the mill has been processing wheat from various growers, but Corston Fields Farm near Bath (for a red spring wheat called Mariagertoba) and Somerset’s agroecological don Fred Price (for rye and other heritage varieties) are go-tos. Despite being combined in the bakery’s mixing bowls, they’re milled and bagged as single varieties.

‘Our motto,’ he says, ‘is “Identity preserves stone milling”.’ As well as cornetti — an Italian-style croissant that ‘gives us hell! It’s really hard to make laminated croissants with British stoneground wheat’ — Landrace’s country sourdough remains a signature. It’s all in the retained wheatgerm, Lowkes notes. ‘It’s the grain’s little passport — it declares to your gut that it’s worth digesting.’

This feature originally appeared in the September 23, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.