From antiquity up until the present day, there is a difference in the use of dairy products between the north and the south of Europe. Both regions produce and eat cheese, but the production and eating of butter and drinking of milk is more common in northern Europe. Pliny the Elder claimed that while the northern barbarians enjoyed cream and even buttermilk, they had never figured out how to produce cheese, or else had no interest in it.
Evidence of this early dairy production survives in Ireland and Scotland in the form of ‘bog
