Cheese Rolling at Cooper's Hill: Chasing a Wheel Down a Cliff

Mon, 29 May 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Once a year on a hillside in Gloucestershire, a man rolls a wheel of cheese off the top of a near-vertical slope, and a crowd of people throw themselves down after it. The cheese wins. It almost always wins. The cheese rolling at Cooper’s Hill is the most reckless folk event in Britain, and I say that with enormous affection.

Cooper’s Hill sits near the village of Brockworth, outside Gloucester. It is a grassy slope of roughly 26 degrees at the shallow end and something close to a 1-in-2 gradient at the worst of it — steep enough that from the bottom, looking up, the runners at the top appear to be standing on a wall. Every Spring Bank Holiday, at the tail end of May, people gather here to chase a 7-to-9-pound wheel of Double Gloucester down that wall, and the winner keeps the cheese.

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Cheese Rolling at Cooper's Hill: Chasing a Wheel Down a Cliff