MATT CLARK spends the day with North Yorkshire’s newest swineherd at Carlton Towers – and reports on a venture to produce the finest pork for its cookery school.

AT Blandings Castle, Lord Emsworth may have pampered his beloved Empress, but at Carlton Towers Lord Gerald Fitzalan Howard doesn’t indulge in Clarence’s anthropomorphism, nor do his pigs have names.

These Oxford Sandy and Blacks are strictly here to work. Eventually they will become prime cuts of pork for Cooks, Carlton’s cookery school, but for now they are busy getting the unused walled garden ready for growing again.

“We want to start producing our own produce and pigs were the obvious start because they are currently rootling and fertilising the land,” says Lord Gerald. “By spring we will be able to plant vegetables and put them in the woods. They will be the happiest pigs in the world.”

They don’t know how happy. His lordship’s Christmas present from daughter Flossy was a truffle infused oak tree and there are plans afoot for an entire plantation.

For now, though, Lord Gerald says he’s looking forward to the day he can put one of his pigs on a lead and take it for a woodland snuffle.

“We’re getting to know one another, at the moment. I feed them twice a day on pig nuts, then they get little treats. I’ve discovered they love apples and pears, celery is a no- no and they don’t like courgettes or aubergine, but then who does?”

All these treats are unsaleable vegetables which Lord Gerald collects weekly in his pick-up truck from English Village Salads, just down the road. Until, that is, Carlton becomes self sufficient.

The plan is to use the pork, ham and bacon for Cooks and sell the rest via Carlton’s upcoming This Little Piggy Went To Market website and a stall in London. There will also be a Park to Plate arrangement with Ilkley master butcher David Lishman, who says the meat will be excellent for traditional curing at his butchery classes.

Later, Lord Gerald intends to breed from his pigs, then raise rare breed cows, sheep and chickens to make Cooks an academy of food in which to learn how it is produced, grown, reared and slaughtered.

Cooks was launched last May and uses all the old downstairs rooms for their original purposes.

“This house was built to impress and the large rooms were never used. But without knowing it my great-great-uncle made a perfect venue for weddings, so Carlton is finally being used for what it was designed for 100 years later and now we have the kitchen going again and are about to use the walled garden once more”

There probably weren’t any pigs roaming the grounds back in 1842, but Lord Gerald believes his ancestors would definitely approve of his new idea.

“Everyone loves a pig. I think God, on Wednesday, after a very good lunch, invented pigs and puppies. Monday it was aardvarks and giraffes and he got a bit wrong. We were probably Friday afternoon and he got it completely wrong, but Wednesday is when he got his design pinnacle.”

Indeed so. Wasn’t it Churchill who said a cat looks down at you, a dog looks up at you, while a pig looks you straight in the eye?