IT IS a marketing man’s dream: a family-run business in a pretty hamlet in a stunningly beautiful landscape. In this fantasy world, the factory is a tastefully converted barn where jams and chutneys bubble away on a conventional hob, a dozen preserving pans stirred in turn by a man in a white hat with a wooden spoon.

Strawberries are hulled, jars are filled, labels applied, lovingly and by hand, by loyal, local employees who enjoy their work. We could do it faster and more efficiently, the owner would say, but it wouldn’t be the same. We could rent a unit on a trading estate and do it all on a bigger scale, but we would lose the vital contact with our customers.

Ah, yes – customers. Walkers, mainly, making their way to the tea-and-tasting room, next to the farmhouse adjoining the barn.

They are pleasantly tired from completing one of the walks set out by the owner on the 385-acre farm in which he has invested most of his working life, conserving it for future generations so that, when he retires, he can look back with satisfaction on a job well done and a life fulfilled.

Add the names of some of the 80-plus mouthwatering products, and the fantasy is complete: try blackcurrant and lavender, gooseberry and elderflower, raspberry and pomegranate, strawberry and champagne, for the jams; and for the more masculine chutneys, aubergine and garlic, hell fire plum, spicy red onion, and tomato and chilli. All made by hand from recipes discovered and tweaked, or handed down by mum, or suggested by customers who are encouraged not only to taste but to advise.

It sounds too good to be true, but this is no fantasy.

It’s difficult to find a flaw in the narrative told by Derek Kettlewell of Stalling Busk, wife Lesley and middle son, Andrew – who is indeed a marketing man, with a business degree from Liverpool University – all partners in Raydale Preserves, sitting round the oak table in their comfortable farmhouse kitchen. But like any business, especially one in a comparatively isolated rural area, it hasn’t always been plain sailing.

Derek took over the family farm from his father in the late 1970s but continued to work at the auction mart in Hawes, while someone else managed the farm. In 1991 there came a turning-point: he was offered the manager’s job at the mart.

“I loved the work. I enjoyed figures and book-keeping and clerical work, and I was tempted by the offer. But farming was in my blood going back many generations and I decided to come back to it,” says Derek. “I thought that if I spent 20 or 30 years improving the farm I could look back and see what I had achieved.

Planting trees, rebuilding walls and old sheep folds, establishing walks, doing all the conservation work, is very satisfying.”

Barely four years later the country was hit by the BSE crisis and sales of beef (theirs is a beef and sheep farm) plummeted. That was when they decided to expand the manufacturing of the jams and chutneys.

The business had grown organically over the years, and Lesley always knew they could sell more: at that time their main outlet was Elijah Allen’s the grocery and provisions store in Hawes which was started by Lesley’s great-grandfather and which is still in the family: Lesley works there during the week.

“We added more products and moved premises: from the kitchen to the barn,”

says Derek. They still use the small, domestic jam pans and stir it by hand, not because they can’t afford to expand but because they want to keep it special.

“If you make preserves in a big, commercial vat, the vinegar from the chutneys doesn’t evaporate properly so you have to use thickeners,”

says Lesley: the smaller pans produce a better result.

All the jams are 50:50 fruit to sugar and all the ingredients are sourced locally where possible; no preservatives or other chemicals are added. And it shows.

You’ll never eat a supermarket jam again.