Thus, it seems that some of the cheese being produced in the area was cylindrical and of a comparable size to that being made today. The cheese gained some reputation because it was a cream cheese made with whole milk to which additional cream was added. This set it apart from most other cheeses made at that time which were made from partially skimmed milk and were considerably cheaper.

No one person invented Stilton – it evolved over time from this pressed cream cheese, which may have been blue veined, to the cheese we have today - an un-pressed semi hard blue veined cheese.

With the development of the coaching trade, the town soon became a trading post between London and Edinburgh for many commodities and it is known that one of the innkeepers in the town – Cooper Thornhill, landlord and then subsequently the owner of The Bell Inn - turned this to his advantage by first selling the local cheese not only from the Bell Inn, but to passing travellers and also into London (Historian Trevor Hickman quotes the Bell Inn was “the birthplace of stilton cheese”). As demand for the cheese grew so Thornhill sought out new sources and, in or around 1743, struck up a commercial arrangement with a renowned cheese maker from Wymondham in Leicestershire by the name of Frances Pawlett.

It is said that she supplied cheese to Thornhill and through a co-operative arrangement got other cheese makers in Leicestershire to make Stilton cheese to the Stilton recipe. This we believe was a blue veined cream cheese. We have no firm details of its method of manufacture or appearance, but we believe that she pioneered the development of the cheese in Leicestershire. It is not clear whether the blue veining was then achieved through frequent brushing of the coat of the maturing cheese or whether the ageing cheeses simply cracked allowing some to go blue and others not. It must have been a hit or miss affair!

As demand for Stilton Cheese grew, so the production switched almost exclusively to Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire and the area around the town of Stilton began to concentrate on trading cheese rather than producing it. (Although it is likely it would still have been made privately in the area but for personal consumption) Because of its reputation as perhaps the finest cheese of its time and owing to its limited production it commanded a significant price and as a result sometimes-inferior imitations were produced in other Counties – Cambridge, Rutland, Lincoln and Northampton. Nor was all of this cheese made to the established methods, being sometimes produced in nets or different sized moulds.

Cooper Thornhill and Frances Pawlett were responsible for the successful commercialisation of Stilton Cheese and the further development of a recipe that is the forerunner of today’s Stilton.