IF BRITISH Food Fortnight wasn’t enough reason to celebrate our rich food heritage, then the bounty of food festivals and themed food weeks on the horizon should have you champing at your culinary bit.

It’s the Taste Cumbria festival in Cockermouth this weekend, and the Kendal Festival of Food throughout October, a month which also includes National Chocolate Week and the start of British Sausage Week, running into November.

Closer to home, and the new Cumbrian Artisan local food website is now open for business, with among others, Holker Estate on the menu – and you can’t get more British than that!

The estate has a long tradition of farming through the craftsmanship of tenant farmers who produce cheese, seasonal honey, shorthorn beef, seasonal venison, game and salt marsh lamb.

The lamb is produced on marshes around the Cartmel peninsula, where lambs are free to roam over the land but are kept under the watchful eye of skilled farmers who protect them from incoming tides.

Holker Estate also raises shorthorn beef - dark, rich and full flavoured with natural marbling for excellent cooking.

Estate venison is also available seasonally from the herd of menil fallow deer which has been at Holker Hall for about 300 years, grazing on about 90 hectares of parkland.

Checkout diced Holker venison at £7.75 for 480g on Cumbrian Artisan (www.cumbrianartisan.co.uk).

Also celebrating British Food Fortnight this week is Greenlands Farm Village at Tewitfield which is offering 20 per cent off Cumberland sausages made with own-reared pork; and the same discount off lamb burgers and beef topside roasting joints.

Meanwhile, you can buy Mark Duckworth’s amazing oregano and lavender lamb sausages from his Dales Traditional Butchers shop in Kirkby Lonsdale (£6.98 per kilo). But the lucky folks who shop with Mark at his stall on Blackburn market not only bag themselves a feast, but also help their favourite charity with their purchase.

”We ask customers to suggest a sausage flavour and, if theirs is the suggestion pulled out of the hat, then we not only make it our featured sausage of the month, but we also donate 50p per kilo to the winning person’s nominated charity,” explained Mark, who used lavender salt to create his latest sausage.

To Ayside, just off the A590, and rare breed Saddleback pork loin chops were the recommendation from Aireys butchers, who have got the chops on special offer at £6.99 per kilo.

I reckon they would be lovely drizzled with a little Little Doone Sweet balsamic dressing from The Honeypot at Hawkshead (£4.25/250mls), a Great Taste award product which comes in three flavours – garlic, chilli, and original.

Finally this week, Burton in Lonsdale village stores has absolutely triumphed for British Food Fortnight with a veritable feast of local goodies – my thanks to shop manager Gail for suggesting preserving sugar for all the wonderful chutneys you might want to make with the autumn harvest bounty; Diggles pies from Lancaster to keep you going through your labours; a Bowland Outdoor Reared ‘beef olive’ for a special dinner; or a David Knipe chicken breast filled with Procters cheese and wrapped in Bowland Outdoor Reared natural oak smoked dry-cured back bacon.

And to finish off, Burton stores shop assistant Marie Sharrock makes the most amazing sherry trifles – only £2 a trifle, which serves two.

And if that doesn’t make you proud to be British...