Perry pear
Arlingham Squash
A soft-fleshed perry pear from the Severn parish of Arlingham, sharing its second name with Taynton Squash without being related to it.
Also written Arlingham Squash Pear.
- Classification
- Sweet — Perry pear classification
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Sugar and body, Bulk juice
- Origin
- Arlingham, Gloucestershire
- Species
- Pyrus communis
- Flowering
- Late flowering band
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
How it is classified
Perry pear classification
Sweet
Low acid, low tannin. Mild perry pears giving soft, light perry.
Low acid, low tannin. Squash pears are soft-fleshed and generally mild, and this one is described accordingly.
Every classification on CiderHQ names its system. Why there is more than one.
What it contributes to a blend
A direction, not a measurement. These bands are the level of resolution the evidence supports, and they say which way adding this fruit pushes a blend rather than what the finished cider will be.
| Axis | Typical | Range |
|---|---|---|
| Acid | Low | |
| Tannin | Light | |
| Sugar | High | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | Slight | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
Descriptive collection material on a soft, low-acid pear.
Soft flesh giving a mild, low-acid juice with a sweet finish and no grip.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Arlingham Squash, and for a great deal of cider fruit that is a finding rather than a gap. Bittersweet apples in particular contribute tannin, sugar and body while being close to aromatically mute, and most of what a cider made from them smells of was produced by the fermentation rather than carried in by the fruit. CiderHQ publishes the absence rather than filling the space with descriptors nothing supports.
Measured analysis
CiderHQ holds no sourced juice analysis for Arlingham Squash. Figures for this cultivar circulate, but they reach the present through compilation rather than through the original tables, and publishing a number we cannot attribute would give it an authority it has not earned. What is known about how the fruit behaves is described above and below.
In the orchard
- Harvest window
- Mid
- Flowering
- Late flowering band
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
Late September into October. Soft-fleshed fruit that must reach the mill without delay. The National Perry Pear Collection records it ripening in the first half of October at Hartpury, which agrees with the window recorded here.
Very short. Squash is a description of texture and a warning about handling.
Mid-season. Self-incompatible. The National Perry Pear Collection places it in the late flowering band, from flowering records kept over many seasons.
Pears are not self-fertile. A variety needs another in blossom at the same time to set fruit, which is why the flowering band matters more in a perry orchard than the harvest window does.
Ripening moves with the site and the season. Where the National Perry Pear Collection’s observation at Hartpury falls in a different band from the window recorded here, both are kept rather than one overwriting the other.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Pear scab | moderate | — |
| Rapid post-harvest breakdown | high | — |
How it is used
- A parish perry pear in the Severn vale, pressed with the rest of the local crop.
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
No established tradition of separate use, and few enough trees that one is unlikely to develop.
About Arlingham Squash
Arlingham Squash comes from a parish inside a loop of the Severn, in country where perry orchards were part of the agricultural landscape for centuries before anyone catalogued them. Its name pairs the parish with a description of the flesh: squash pears are soft, and the word is both a description and a warning, since soft flesh means the fruit is unusable almost immediately after it falls.
It shares the Squash element with Taynton Squash, which is a different pear from a different parish with a different reputation. The two are not related, and the shared name is simply two communities reaching for the same descriptive word. That kind of coincidence is a recurring source of confusion in perry pear records, alongside the more familiar problem of one tree carrying several names.
The juice is mild — low in acid, low in tannin, sweet-finishing — and makes a light perry without structure. It survives in small numbers in its own district, and this record is short because the documentation is.
Names, origin and identity
Cultivar naming is the hardest problem in cider fruit data. The same tree carries different names across ten miles, and two different trees have shared a name for two centuries.
Origin · traditional account
Parish tradition. Arlingham sits inside a loop of the Severn, and its orchards are among the oldest documented perry ground in Gloucestershire.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Old Squash | Regional name | Recorded as a synonym of Arlingham Squash by the National Perry Pear Collection. |
| Old Taynton Squash | Regional name | Recorded as a synonym of Arlingham Squash by the National Perry Pear Collection. |
| Squash Pear | Disputed identity | The short form is used for any soft-fleshed perry pear and does not identify this cultivar. |
The National Perry Pear Collection’s identifications are supported by DNA analysis of the trees it holds, which is why they are treated here as the stronger account where they conflict with a documentary one. Where the collection records a name for two varieties it holds as distinct, the name identifies a group of trees rather than one variety, and fruit offered under it needs checking against something other than its label.
Why it matters
- Named for a Severn vale parish with a long perry history, and surviving in small numbers within it.
Related cultivars
Recorded relationships, including the ones this fruit is routinely confused with.
Fruit that plays a similar part
Cultivars sharing a classification under the same system and a comparable role in a blend. Not a similarity score — a stated relationship.
Green Longdon
The senior member of the Longdon group, widely grown in north-west Gloucestershire and carrying six synonyms, three of which other Longdons also claim.
Barnet
A very late-flowering Three Counties perry pear of mild juice, carrying six recorded synonyms and one that collides with a cider apple.
Bartestree Squash
A late-ripening Herefordshire squash pear of notably low acid, and one of the mildest juices in the modern Three Counties survey.
De Cloche
A bell-shaped Domfrontais poiré pear, planted alongside Plant de Blanc and giving a mild, sweet juice.
Green Roller
An early-flowering Three Counties perry pear with the highest assimilable nitrogen recorded in the modern survey.
Potato Pear
A heavily russeted Monmouthshire perry pear whose name describes a fruit that looks like a potato, giving a mild, sweet juice.
Where it grows
What people ask next
Questions readers ask about the things this page mentions. Each one goes to the section that answers it rather than to a page written to receive the question.
- What is perry — Perry is an alcoholic drink made by fermenting the juice of pears, traditionally of specific perry pear cultivars rather than eating pears. It is to pears what cider is to apples, and has its own history in the three counties of England and in Normandy.
- How are apples milled for cider
- When are cider apples harvested — In the northern hemisphere the cider harvest runs from about September to November, with late bittersweets such as Dabinett and Vilberie coming in last. Cider fruit is generally picked riper than dessert fruit, and often gathered from the ground.
- How are perry pears classified — Perry pears are conventionally divided by acid and tannin into sweet, medium sharp, bittersharp and bittersweet, following the scheme used in the English perry literature. Sorbitol content matters too, and it does not appear in the classes.
- Where are perry pears grown
- What is taynton squash
Where to go next
- How cider apples are classified — Why there are four schemes and none of them is universal.
- The blend explorer — See which way changing the proportions moves a blend.
- Blending — What a cider maker is actually deciding when they build a blend.
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.
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
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.