The Gloucester Cheese Rolling: a handful of links

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Here in Britain, we’re recovering from the bank holiday (which is a strange phrase meaning a long weekend) by soaking in a bit of rain and looking back to one of the more bizarre events in a country full of bizarre events, the Gloucester Cheese Rolling, which took place over the holiday. The link you just skidded past will take you to an earlier post about it. Briefly, it’s a race in which contestants chase a cheese down a very steep hill.

I mention this because Ubi Dubium was kind enough to send me a link to an article about this year’s cheese race. Follow it and you’ll find lots photos of people who’ve fallen over and are rolling downhill, as well as a description of the race as “twenty young men chasing a cheese off a cliff and tumbling 200 yards to the bottom, where they are scraped up by paramedics and packed off to hospital.” Except that when I was there it involved a lot more than twenty and they weren’t all men. Other than that, I won’t quibble.

Okay, they weren’t paramedics. The local rugby team was at the bottom of the hill. Still, it does give you the flavor of the thing.

As long as we’re at it, here’s another article on the race, about a runner who’s won his twenty-first gloucester cheese, setting an all-time record. Among other things, it tells you that he doesn’t like gloucester cheese. He eats cheddar. The trick to winning, he says, is to stay on your feet. Which is like saying the that the trick to winning a marathon is to be faster than everybody else.

And since we’re talking about cheese, you can also read about the much tamer Stilton Cheese Rolling Championship by following this link or you can go vegan and read about the World Pea Shooting Championship here.

After all that, will anyone dare say that reading Notes isn’t educational? Or that Britain isn’t a very strange country?

24 thoughts on “The Gloucester Cheese Rolling: a handful of links”

  7. I suppose I could think of worse things, like the bull running mentioned previously. Folks certainly don’t lack imagination to come up with extremely weird things to do in their spare time.

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    • I don’t know about an entire holiday. The gloucester race is so steep that it’s over in no time. I’m not sure about the other one–that may take longer. There’s also a flaming tar barrel festival and I can’t help wanting to combine them so we end up with a grilled cheese sandwich festival. Or maybe a fondue festival.

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  9. Now this is really funny. I think the rugby team at the bottom of the hill definitely depicts the ‘flavor’ of the event. Well said! You wear the British humor well, Ellen, in words.

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