How to make an Apple Day

4th October 2025

Harvest is the most important event in an agricultural area with all a year’s effort focused on gathering a crop. The festival of Apple Day in Rivers Heritage Orchard enables centuries of local cultivation to continue to exist in this abruptly changed landscape. The joy of this gathering of families to pick abundant fruit this year resulted in heaps of multicoloured apples. It was a good harvest and a great day!

Clearing the ground

A couple of weeks before Apple Day Sawbridgeworth Town Council sent a team to mow and clear the long straggly foot-catching summer undergrowth from the Orchard aisles. At the final maintenance day before the event, Adrienne Richardson, who has directed the maintenance throughout the year, distributed rakes to move the windfalls out of the paths to heaps at the foot of the trees. Vistas appeared and the fallen fruit lay ready to attract pie makers and wild creatures.

Setting the scene: hustle and bustle

Early on, cars on the verge of the Hospital roundabout opposite the Orchard appeared. As usual in the long lane leading from hospital entrance to the Brook End field entrance a line of stalls appeared. From the cars supplies were brought over the road. First, the blue cloth was laid where the fruit would be collected and then hauled over to the van to be taken for pressing.

Picking begins

Young and older, long handled pickers and reaching up, the fruit is collected down. What a harvest! Despite or perhaps because of the dry summer, the trees were loaded with fruit. All were laid in crates kept for this moment, now filled to the brims, ready to be pressed into juice.

What is pressing?

Rob Richardson set up a hand pressing station to demonstrate. Beside a table bearing a number of piles of apple - ready for single variety juicing - he holds an apple ready to be first crushed in the scatter to the left, then pressed in the spindle press. The juice will flow sweet and transparent into jugs. On a much larger scale Cam Valley Orchards in South Cambridgeshire will produce 1000 bottles of Rivers organic juice. Selling this home grown nectar will keep the Orchard going for another year. Who wants to crank the handle?

Sustenance for pickers and all

Juice, coffee, apple juice, apple cake and all is offered at the refreshment area.

Hear all about 300 years of History

To the snapping sound of wind-tossed signs overhead, Elizabeth Waugh, Rivers archivist, pulls her cap low to tell the story of the Conference pear brought into being on this Orchard site. It was named by Thomas Francis Rivers for the National Fruit Conference of 1885, at which the Rivers pear won first prize. This pear cultivar - with examples growing close to the History table - is now Britain’s favourite pear. Buy the Rivers book!

The Fruit Identification Table

Eugene Keddy prepared an extensive labelled display of the multitude of heritage apples grown in the Orchard. Among them are cultivars raised by the Rivers Nursery. Eugene joined Peter Laws in a discussion which centred around exciting news concerning an excellent Rivers cultivar, Early Rivers, thought to have been a lost variety as it was last mentioned about 50 years ago. Now discovered as a veteran tree in Redwick, Newport, Wales, it is found to match an accession listed as Early Rivers at the University of Copenhagen!