Cookies are small data files sent by a website’s server to a web browser, processor memory or hard drive and stored there. They can be used for a range of different purposes, such as customising a website for a particular user, helping a user navigate a website, improving that user’s website experience, and storing that user’s preferences and login information.

Cookies can be classified as either ‘essential’ or ‘non-essential’.

‍Essential cookies: these are cookies that are either:

used solely to carry out or facilitate the transmission of communications over a network; or
strictly necessary to provide an online service (e.g. our website or a service on our website) which you have requested.

‍Non-essential cookies: these are any cookies that do not fall within the definition of essential cookies, such as cookies used to analyse your behaviour on a website (‘analytical’ cookies) or cookies used to display advertisements to you (‘advertising’ cookies).

Cookies can be classified as either ‘session’ or ‘persistent’, depending on how long they last after they are placed on your browser.

‍Session cookies: session cookies last for as long as you keep your browser open. They expire when you close your browser.

‍Persistent cookies: persistent cookies expire at a fixed point in time or if you manually delete them from your browser, whichever occurs first.

Cookies can be classified as ‘first party’ or ‘third party’.

‍First party cookies: these are cookies placed on your device by our website domain.

‍Third party cookies: these are cookies placed on your device by third party website domains.

These are cookies which are strictly necessary for our website to be able to operate or to provide you with a service on our website which you have requested. We use the following essential cookies on our website:

first party session cookies to remember the items you have placed or removed from your shopping cart for the purposes of allowing you to checkout on our website. These cookies are: wc_fragments_# and /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php-wc_cart_hash

We use the following types of non-essential cookies on our website:

‍Functional cookies
Analytical cookies

Functional cookies

‍These are cookies that are designed for purposes such as enhancing a website’s functionality. These are either not strictly essential for the website or functionality which you have requested to work, or are cookies which serve non-essential purposes in addition to their essential purpose. We use the following functional cookies on our website:

a third party persistent cookie used to gauge your bandwidth in order to optimise the display of YouTube videos on our website. This cookie is called VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE and expires after 8 months.

a first party session cookie used to help Google Analytics manage the number of users on our website. This cookie is called _gat

Analytical cookies

‍Analytical (or performance) cookies track and gather data about what a user does on a website. These cookies are not essential for our website or its functionality to work. We use the following analytical cookies on our website:

first party Google Analytics cookies to us understand how you engage and interact with our website, including how you came to our website, which pages you visited, for how long and what you clicked on and your location (based on your IP address).  The Google Analytics cookies used on our website are the _ga cookie which is a persistent cookie and lasts for 2 years and _gid cookie which is a session cookie. As described in more detail in the ‘functional cookies’ section above, we also use the _gat cookie to assist with the performance of Google Analytics on our site. Information collected by Google Analytics cookies is aggregated and anonymised.

third party YouTube (owned by Google) cookies which collect information about the videos you watch on our website, including what you watch and where you view them (e.g. on our homepage). These cookies are called YSC and PREF. They are persistent cookies and expire after 8 months.

‍More information

‍Google Analytics cookies are classified as first party cookies as they are set by our website domain, although Google collects and processes information from our use of Google Analytics. To find out more about how Google handles information collected from Google Analytics, see Google Analytics’ privacy policy, which is available here.

‍For information on how Google uses data from cookies it uses, click here

‍For Google’s general privacy policy (including, in relation to YouTube), click here

You can accept or reject some or all cookies (for example, blocking all third party cookies) by adjusting your browser settings. If you do not know how to do this, the links below set out information about how to change your browser settings for some of the most commonly used web browsers:

‍Google Chrome
‍ Mozilla Firefox
‍ Microsoft Internet Explorer
‍ Apple Safari
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‍Some browsers, such as Chrome and Firefox, allow you to change your settings to browse in ‘incognito’ mode, limiting the amount of data placed on your machine and automatically deleting any persistent cookies placed on your device when you finish your browsing session. There are also many third party applications which you can add to your browser to block or manage cookies.

You can opt out of Google Analytics tracking by installing the browser add-on which is available here

To clear cookies that have previously been placed on your browser, you should select the option to clear your browsing history and ensure that the option to delete or clear cookies is included when you do so.