Cheese rolling on Cooper's Hill, Gloucestershire

Here's another recipe:

You start with an extremely steep hill.
Then you take a 8lb round of Double Gloucester cheese...
On a count of three, an official rolls it down the steep hill...
And when the count reaches four, a set of racers run down the hill chasing the cheese!
The first to reach the cheese or the bottom of the hill first wins the race and the cheese.

After a lovely, peaceful, serene time in Breacon we headed in Gloucester on the way home to join the crowds for the day watching the traditional cheese roll. No one is to sure what the tradition is all about, but they have been doing it so long now they feel no need to stop.

There was a lot more people there than we thought there would be, and John and I figured out that we were not going to be able to race (only 15 people per race and they were well down the queue), the challenge was to find a spot to watch the festivities unfold.

The day was a bit of a laugh, with people dressed in all sorts of get-ups, mankinis, Spiderman, roller derby, you name it. They would have a race which would take about 2 minutes, then spend 30 minutes clearing off all the hurt and injured people so they could start another race. Of course the crowd would get bored so people would just run down the down in the mean time, giving the huge crowd a bit more of a laugh.

See if you can spot the cheese in this video:


Just to break it up a bit, they do a couple of uphill races, which was almost as funny, as people would start off at an almighty pace only to be huffing and puffing and sliding back down by about a 1/4 of the way up.



At the end of the day they had some unoffical races (read no cheese). I managed to get into one of these (even if it was by jumping the fence), and and even better managed to come out relativly unscathed with just a bunch of scratches and grazes up the legs and arms.

This video shows a different perspective on the hill - you can definitely see how steep it is from this angle.


Check out the rest of the photos here.

Nearly there...

I know posting has been a bit light as of late, but it's very nearly the end of my dissertation and I'm trying with all my might not to get too distracted and keep a semblance of concentration through to the bitter end! Adrian's being hounded to write a post about cheese roll so hopefully that appears at some point too ;)

The dissertation's due on the 1st of September, so only three weeks to go. Wish me luck!