Fellside Cottage Farm sits at 1,400 feet on the southern lip of upper Teesdale. The fields are technically grazings but biologically they are wildflower meadows, a fragment of the great Pennine hay meadow system that once stretched from the Yorkshire Dales to the Cheviots.
Joshua keeps a small fold of 24 Highland cattle as conservation grazers. The cattle eat the rougher grasses and bracken that would otherwise choke out the wildflowers, and in doing so finish themselves on one of the most botanically diverse diets available to any beef animal in Britain.
Highlands are slow (Joshua's are finished at 40 to 44 months), but the result is a beef of remarkable depth: dark, marbled, with a faintly aromatic finish that the cook will recognise as something quite different from a supermarket steak.
“A Highland will eat what no other beast will, and turn it into the best beef you have tasted.”