Glossary · Culture
The three counties
Definition
Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire taken together — the heartland of English perry and a principal centre of cider, with a shared orchard tradition and cultivar stock.
- Subject
- Culture
Where this is covered properly
The glossary defines; these pages explain. Each is described in its own words.
Style
Three Counties cider
The shared cider and perry tradition of Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, defined by a common fruit inventory and by the perry pear orchards that survive nowhere else in comparable numbers.
Region
Herefordshire
The English county where cider was first treated as a subject for study rather than a farm by-product, and which now supplies more cider fruit than anywhere else in the United Kingdom.
Related terms
Terms that belong to the same part of the subject, or that this one is routinely confused with.
Perry
Perry pear
A pear cultivar grown for fermentation rather than for eating, characterised by high tannin, high acid or both, small size, and flesh too hard and astringent for the table.
Perry
Perry
A fermented alcoholic drink made from the juice of pears, and specifically from perry pears rather than dessert pears. It is not cider made with pears added: it is a separate drink with its own fruit, chemistry and problems.
Orchard
Traditional orchard
An orchard of widely spaced standard or half-standard trees on vigorous rootstocks, with a permanent grassland floor that is grazed or mown. In the United Kingdom it is a recognised priority habitat.
History
Herefordshire Pomona
The illustrated survey of apples and pears produced by the Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club in the late nineteenth century, and the most substantial visual record of English cider fruit of its period.
Where to go next
- Cider glossary — The whole vocabulary, by subject and A–Z.
- Comparisons — Terms that are only really clear when set against the thing they are not.
- Search — Finds terms by their aliases and by their spellings in other languages.
Sources
What this page rests on. Where a source is marked as registered rather than read, CiderHQ is recording that the body is authoritative on the subject without claiming to have worked through the document itself. See our evidence policy for what each state means.
Three Counties Cider and Perry Association
TCCPA · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
National Perry Pear Centre, Hartpury · specialist organisation · passage verified 2026-08-24
Read on 2026-08-24 — and the address CiderHQ had registered, perrypears.co.uk, is no longer the Centre at all. It fails the TLS handshake over https, and over plain http it resolves to a Sedo domain-parking page: an earlier pass in this sprint recorded it as retrieved on the strength of an HTTP 200, which was wrong, and the correction is the point. The Centre publishes at nationalperrypearcentre.org.uk. It is the closest thing British perry has to an identity authority: it holds at least two examples of most known varieties, states that the DNA of most of them has been determined and is used as an aid to identification, and publishes a variety register with synonym lists. Its 121-variety register is transcribed into the perry pear records, including the nineteen names it shows being claimed by more than one variety.
Gloucestershire Orchard Trust · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24