A day in the life of a Countryside Alliance Awards Champion

Rachel Evans, Director of Countryside Alliance Wales, visits Izzy’s Butchers in Wales to find out more about the winner of our 2024 Clarissa Dickson Wright award.

It is 5.15am in the beautiful, peaceful Llanrhayder-ym-Mochnant on a nippy Tuesday autumn morning. Despite the alarm going off Izzy Hosking is already awake. A swift cup of tea and out the door she goes with a few enthusiastic gundogs and the terrier for their morning run. “They love a good blast in the morning,” Izzy tells me. “And it’s a great start to the day for me.”

By 6am Izzy is in her shop and the first fridge and freezer temperature checks are done. Then it’s on to prepping for the initial shop counter build for her busy butcher’s shop, slicing bacon, preparing traditional meats alongside chicken Kiev, plum pork and so many other combinations of meat and flavours that light up the counter before daylight gets the chance to break through the shop window. Mark Evans is in by 7.30am and cracks on with the sausage making to start, alongside Julia Letham. Today’s offerings are traditional pork alongside venison and the ever-popular Moroccan pheasant (they are incredibly good if you like something a little bit on the spicy side).

Then there’s the baking to get underway with another huge variety of cooked foods, perfect for picnic lunches; traditional pork pies, quiche, Welsh faggots, game pies including venison with black pudding and peppercorn sauce. The recent addition to the counter comes from a newly appointed in-house chef, Ian Fuller, adding partridge terrine, game liver pate, and celeriac and parsley soup – all ideal for shoot days.

Locally sourced

The shop opens at 8am with the first customer usually at the counter within 10 minutes. From then on, the morning whirls by in a flurry of chatter and sales and before Izzy knows it the counter needs topping up again. There is of course time for the staff’s breakfast and as the season has begun, a pheasant bacon roll is washed down with a warm cuppa.

A whole local carcass of beef gets delivered on a Tuesday and Mark begins to break it down, handing the beef over to Izzy to joint, steak and dice. This carcass is, as always, locally reared with this fine Highland grass-fed beast coming from the Davies’s in the Tanat Valley.

There’s also a deer carcass hanging in the game larder: Izzy had popped up to the north coast of Wales on Monday afternoon to an estate where she supports their deer management control programme, bringing one home for the shop. Izzy and her apprentice Emily begin to skin out and break down the carcass ready for the butcher’s block. The next job is to prep the pheasants Izzy plucked on Sunday. Game isn’t hung like it used to be and these birds have been quickly delivered from field to fridge counter and are soon back out of the door in various forms in the bags of Izzy’s loyal customers, or into the back room for internet orders.

It’s then time to check the mail order enquiries and get those packed up and away. The mail order side of the business gets incredibly busy when the pheasant shooting season starts and seems to be growing year on year.

I finally get the chance to have one of those “warm cuppas” with Izzy and ask her how it feels to have won not only the best butcher in Wales award but the Clarissa Dickson Wright Award, the first time that it has been brought back to Wales.

“It was such an amazing experience to attend the finals in the House of Lords,” explains Izzy. “I got the chance to speak with other butchery winners and pick up some nice ideas and advice from them. When they were announcing the winners of the butcher’s category and I realised it wasn’t me, I thought ‘oh well, fair enough’; these are tremendous businesses, and they deserve it. I was of course gutted but I was humbled to be among them.

“They left the Clarissa Award until the end,” continues Izzy. “I had actually said to my mum, Christine, on the way in, ‘Look at the Clarissa Award, that’s the one you’d want, isn’t it?!’

“I honestly did not think I was in the running at all and they started talking about the winner and that they had started in such and such year and I thought ‘oh, I started then too’. Then as they went on people started looking at me and I could feel myself burning up. I looked at my mum stood next to me and she was welling up and she said to me ‘that’s you…’ I just could not believe it; I was just blown away.

“I have been a huge fan of Clarissa’s, and I absolutely loved her series with Johnny Scott, Clarissa and the Countryman, it was a huge influence for me. I remember them going wildfowling in one series and I thought, ‘yeah, I’d love to do that’. My grandfather bought me their books. It’s an honour to win this, and the customers are really proud of it too. It’s placed outside the shop on the wall as you come in – I do polish it quite a bit,” she says, laughing.

As the day winds down the shop is thoroughly cleaned and finally at 5pm the lights go off. Izzy quickly runs back to grab a couple of venison casseroles for her and her husband Danny’s supper. “Best get back and see how his day’s been at our shoot,” Izzy exclaims.

And just like that, she’s off again. As we say down our way, she’s one hell of a girl!