Isn’t that just the best headline ever? It kills me that this story didn’t include a photo of the actual notebooks!

It is a story that is, literally, as old as the hills, yet its history can be traced in just eight small notebooks.

The accounts ledgers of Victorian bookkeepers in the upper Dales, meticulously written in fountain pen and handed down through the generations, are windows on a lost world of dairy farming… of “blue milk” cheese by the hundredweight and milk by the churn.

They will go on show next week, alongside the recorded memories of retired dairymen and women, in a celebration of the food staples that made Wensleydale famous.

It was a cardboard box that originally contained aniseed balls – 20 a penny, the label said – that had given up the ledgers.

Inside were itemised accounts from 1822 to 1850, with a gap of two years from April 1828. They had been kept by James Willis, who farmed at Yorescott, a house that no longer exists, just to the west of Yorebridge and north of Bainbridge.

Within the pages of copperplate writing were contained the minutiae of everyday life in a Dales dairy.

Read more: Old notebooks that open a window on lost world of Wensleydale cheese