Twenty-five years ago farmhouse cheesemaking was a lost tradition in Ireland. Medieval monks may have been expert cheesemakers - it is thought they exported their techniques across the Continent - but modern factories were only turning out rubbery cheddar-type cheeses. Despite the lushness of the landscape and the vitality of dairy farming, no one was making high quality, handmade cheeses of the kind you might expect to find anywhere in France.

Then along came Norman and Veronica Steel. Norman is English, but studied at Trinity College, Dublin; he met Veronica when he gave a lecture on Wittgenstein in Cork and 'she was just about the only person in the audience not wearing a nun's habit or a dog collar'. They have been inseparable ever since, living in a ramshackle cottage on the West coast - you have to go outside to get to the sitting room - surrounded by pecking hens. Here, they have raised four children and here, in 1976, they began to make Milleens.

'We like good food,' Norman says, 'and we were always basically self-sufficient. We would kill a duck a week, and Veronica made soufflés in an iron pot in front of the fire. And just as we'd cut turf and salt down fish and pork, making cheese was a way of storing some of the milk for winter.' Veronica was inspired by The Cheeses and Wines of England and France, with notes on Irish whiskey, by John Ehle. 'I worked my way through, and it seemed to be so obvious. We were psyched in some way that only the French could make cheese.'

When they had been producing cheese for themselves for a while, they swapped one for some fresh vegetables. The friend who took it was cooking at a pub in Sneem which happened to be visited on consecutive nights by Declan Ryan, a star chef from Cork, and Myrtle Allen of Ballymaloe House, whose cooking has contributed so much to Ireland's reputation for locally sourced excellence. By the time Norman left Ireland a few months later (for the first time in 15 years), Jane Grigson had written about Milleens in The Observer. And when Norman visited Neal's Yard dairy, bought a book about cheese and mentioned it was going to an Irish cheesemaker, the man behind the counter cried: '"You must be Norman Steel!" And then he took me out the back and there was an Ordnance Survey map, and we were marked on it.'

Initially, Norman says, 'the big distributors came in and said they would take everything we could make. We resisted. We only wanted to sell in small shops and to restaurants where we knew the cheese was appreciated. That meant that it was worth working hard and keeping up standards. We believe that if you produce something absolutely uniform, you can only end up with the lowest common denominator. And we knew we would fight after a while if we didn't respect where we were going.'

To get to the Steels' smallholding, you have to drive through fuchsia-spattered hedgerows, alongside the sea, past the fishing village of Castletownbere. Climbing the rocky outcrops of the Beara peninsula you come upon the red, blue and ochre-painted village of Eyeries.

Landscape and the weather have a lot to do with the nature and flavour of the cheese, which Veronica insists is also affected by her mood. She started out trying to make a hard cheese, but the rind kept going damp and orange, so she tried washed rind instead, where the cheese ripens from the outside, surface bacteria reacting with the paste to release enzymes and give it flavour. The cheese she ended up with has a peachy crust and a paste that varies according to ripeness from semi-firm to creamily oozing.

Veronica walks me round the room where the freshly made cheeses are stored, talking about them as if they were recalcitrant children: 'These were salted yesterday. They get turned a day or two later - it's very arbitrary; it gives them a bit of individuality. And then we wash them - sometimes with brushes and salty water, or we might hose them, punish them, if they're acting up. They have a minimum of three washes: we wait till they're dry, then wash them again.'

She takes me into the cold store. 'These are no good,' she says dismissively, of a tray of big round 3lb cheeses; 'probably overwashed. That one's a bit firm. But look, this one's got a nice give to it.' The finished cheeses taste herby, tangy, creamily spiked; reminiscent of the exposed hills and wild plants of the Beara peninsula and of the engagingly eccentric Steels. 'We're proud of the fact,' Norman says, 'that people know Milleens is made by those two strange people out there in the middle of nowhere.'

Last autumn, Sainsbury's stocked a range of Irish cheeses in 40 of its stores. Graham Cassie, the cheese buyer for Waitrose, which has been selling a number of Irish farmhouse cheeses for the past 18 months, thinks that one explanation for the prevalence of washed-rind cheeses in Ireland might lie in the country's history: 'It could be something to do with the monks. Certainly, in France, monks developed washed-rind cheese for when they were fasting and not eating meat, because it's more savoury and meaty in flavour.'

Jeffa Gill favours the simpler explanation that washed-rind cheeses are suited to the damp, warm Gulf Stream climate. She produces Durrus, down the coast from the Steels, on the Sheep's Head peninsula. Jeffa bought a ruined barn with a tin roof here in 1973, and has transformed it into a handsome house and outbuildings.

She started making Durrus in 1979 with milk from her eight cows. Its delicate but full flavour, earthy and herbal, similar to a French or Swiss tommes, is a result of the humid, salty, windy atmosphere of West Cork - 'and that makes a very good rind-washed cheese'. Jeffa is one of a dwindling number of Irish cheesemakers using raw milk (she now takes in milk from a neighbour's farm, whose cows graze on the green slopes over looking Dunmanus Bay). Half of her highly prized cheeses are sold domestically, half go to export. 'Our ambition is not to deal with multinationals, but to have one or two cheeses in every specialist cheese shop in Europe.'

But there are concerns over the future of raw milk cheese in Ireland, where the EU dairy regulations are more stringently interpreted than anywhere else. 'It's hard to find the encouragement to make a really good unpasteurised cheese in Ireland,' says Randolph Hodgson of Neal's Yard dairy, who has done more to promote Irish cheeses abroad than anyone, and was the man behind the counter when Norman Steel came calling. 'There's always pressure to make the cheese more commercial, I think because of the industrial background of those doing the enforcing. There is much less sense of horses for courses than there is in the UK. I'm very worried about the future for Irish cheese. The regulators have to get behind the cheesemakers and understand there's a need for raw milk cheese.'

Mary Burns is one of those who switched over from raw milk cheese to pasteurised. She and her late husband Eugene started making Ardrahan at their eighteenth-century farmhouse in the rolling hills of North Cork in 1983 with milk from their own herd. 'When we started it was very strong - we've modified the flavour since,' Mary says, 'and we couldn't sell it in Ireland. But we realised that tourists were buying it, so Eugene took some to market in France.'

Eugene, who, she says fondly, 'was as big as this room', took his first consignment to Paris in November 1984, speaking no French. After that, he took a tonne every five weeks for the next three-and-a-half years. 'It was the easiest money we ever made.'

But one of their cows contracted TB and they had to shut down production. 'The French couldn't even understand why we'd shut down. It cost us a fortune. Eugene said, if we go back, we're only doing it one way.' So they started pasteurising and, overnight, lost their entire French market.

Fortunately, British consumers also appreciated the tangy, earthy taste of golden-rinded Ardrahan, and Mary still takes 500 gallons of milk a day from her 130 cows and neighbouring herds, and sells 80 per cent of her cheeses in Britain. She also makes a smoked cheese, 'which is for a completely different market'.

Ardrahan can be eaten at five weeks, although it has a richer, more complex flavour at eight, and when Eugene Burns first started taking it to France, it was selling at 14. 'He took some samples to London once and he noticed that people were moving away from him in the Tube. By the time he reached Piccadilly Circus, there wasn't a single other person in the carriage.'

Cheeses age at different rates and must be held at constant temperatures to achieve their optimum flavour. Louis Grubb, who makes Cashel Blue, thinks his cheese is 'not worth tasting until it's six to seven weeks old. In my view the optimum is three to four months. Neal's Yard sell it at eight months. The older it is, the fewer people will eat it, but those who do go into raptures.'

Cooleeney, the white-mould cheese made in the middle of the Tipperary bogs, is best eaten at about nine weeks, when the texture is velvety and the taste oaky and mushroomy. It is extraordinarily difficult to make, in the sense that 'the smallest little thing will upset it', according to cheesemaker Breda Maher. Her brining room is sprayed with penicillin mould; all the rooms through which the cheeses pass must be temperature- and humidity-controlled because white cheeses hate humidity. If you get a foreign body in, a bit of black mould, you lose the whole room. Breda Maher says that 99 per cent of the day is spent cleaning.

Cooleeney is a niche-market cheese, especially when made with raw milk. Carrigaline, by contrast, a semi-hard, waxed cheese made in South Cork, took off immediately in Ireland when Pat and Ann O'Farrell started making it in 1987. The fact that it's waxed means it's not a cheese snob's cheese. 'You look at it and you think, well it looks OK,' says Graham Cassie; 'but for a mild to medium cheese it has great depth of flavour.'

Pat O'Farrell thinks the depth of taste is due to where they are: 'Milk off limestone land has a special flavour of its own.' Carrigaline is a cheese that anyone can eat - children, people who don't like cheese that much - creamy, with a grassy back taste.

Most of the cheesemakers I spoke to seemed to have produced their cheeses almost by accident. They started off with recipes and ideas about the kind of cheese they wanted to make, but what they ended up with was conditioned as much by the quality of the pastures around them, what size they cut the curd and the weather.

'We started out making hard cheeses - Cheshire and Caerphilly-types,' says Louis Grubb of Cashel Blue, 'but we had a dilemma: everyone likes hard cheese but there are a lot of them about. So should we make something that no one else was making, but there was only a small demand for?' Deciding to go for a niche market and make a blue cheese, they tried to replicate the sort of cheeses that were then being imported into Ireland, such as Stilton or Danish blue. In fact, they ended up with a softer, creamier cheese. The combination of Cashel's double-cream softness and the tanginess of the blue mould may have been accidental, but it is world-class.

Many Irish farmhouse cheeses, born out of economic necessity, have become serious businesses (Neal's Yard has for some years exported Ardrahan, Cashel Blue, Coolea, Durrus, and Gubbeen to America). They have done this while remaining essentially local and domestic, with the best producers treating their cheeses as organic, always capable of development.

All over Ireland there are farmhouses where, if you arrive at the right time, usually just before lunch, you can see whey being sloshed onto tables and curds pressed into moulds. Following the cheese through its plunge into a brine bath and to the cold store, you see an almost an alchemical process - what someone once called 'milk's leap into immortality'.

The bacteria colonise rinds and seep into the paste to produce cheeses that are tangy or spiky, creamy or grassy. What makes the difference is not just the quality of the milk, nor the business of siphoning, cutting, pressing, salting, washing and brushing, but the personalities involved. 'When you visit the Irish cheesemakers,' Graham Cassie says, 'you often find not only wonderful pastures, but highly creative characters. The whole family may be involved. And passion. You can't make a great cheese without passion.'

Paxton & Whitfield Montgomery Cheddar, £15.96/kg, tel: 020 7930 0259
A treat of a cheese. It has oomph and a dense, solid texture which crumbles on the tongue.
*****

Neal's Yard Montgomery Cheddar, £10.25/kg (under 5kg), £9.20/kg (over 5kg), mail order: 020 7645 3555
Exactly the same product as sold by P&W, yet it's crumblier and saltier. Still superb.
*****

Sainsbury's Taste the Difference Keen's Cheddar, 170g £11.55/kg Vac-packed with so much attitude that this great cheddar has lost some of its character on the journey to the shelf. Needs time to breathe.
****

Asda Extra Special Mull of Kintyre Mature Cheddar, 250g, £1.59, stockists: 0500 100 055
Lacks the structure of the big beasts.
**

Lye Cross Farm Organic Farmhouse Cheddar, approx. £6.69/kg, available at Sainsbury's
There's a certain astringency which isn't pleasant. As Fergus said: 'This lacks cheesy glamour.'
*

Neal's Yard Colston Bassett Stilton , £9.05/kg (under 3.5kg), £7.55/kg (over), tel: 020 7645 3555
The supermodel of the Stilton world, against which all others must fight. Creamy but salty. Delivers what Fergus calls a full-on 'cheese moment'.
*****

Tesco Finest Mature Stilton Wedge Medium, £7.50/kg Really not bad at all: creamy and mellow. A pleasant bit of Stilton.
****

Sainsbury's Taste the Difference Vintage Blue Stilton, £8.89/kg
Also creamy, solid and pleasant. Its greatest fault is that it has been chopped up and vac-packed for supermarket sale.
****

Duchy Original Stilton, from Fortnum & Mason, 10.49/kg
Has a good taste but there's an odd graininess from the frenetic bluing in this cheese.
**

Marks & Spencer Organic Stilton, £11.15/kg, stockists: 020 7268 1234
This has a very peculiar and, frankly very nasty bitter taste to it. Horrible.
no stars