The joy of cheese rolling

It’s unnerving being surrounded by a crowd in the woods. You can hear people but only glimpse their limbs or faces through the leaves. It triggers something primordial, similar to the feeling of being watched. Ideally, someone with a big strimmer would have given Cooper’s Hill a good going over before the cheese rolling. But cheese rollers don’t concern themselves with ideals. 

On the last Monday of May, and for reasons lost to time, a wheel of Double Gloucester is thrown down the hill and a group of runners throw themselves after it. The first to reach the bottom gets the cheese. 

All the roads around the hill had been shut by men from the Highways Agency so we strolled merrily down the middle of an A-road for the last few miles. The lanes narrowed and the crowds became tighter. There was a family selling cake and cans of Tango from a trestle table on their cottage driveway. As we reached the hill, we were met with a burst of ‘Johnny B. Goode’ over the tannoy and a good whiff of weed, joining a crowd in which we saw Kaleb from Clarkson’s Farm, a woman shouting into her phone in Mandarin, and a topless techno Viking.

Cooper’s Hill is a few miles outside Gloucester. It’s unnaturally steep, something the photos seem unable to capture. My friends were shocked by the brutal pitch of the hill. Could someone really hurl themselves down that? Yes, and gleefully too. The best technique seemed to be a mix of run and roll, sprinting until your legs can’t keep up and your body gives way to gravity. During the women’s race, a runner managed to knock herself unconscious as she flailed across the finish line. Onlookers gasped. A group of volunteers surrounded her for several minutes. Eventually, she came too, unsteadily raising the smartly ribboned cheese above her head. We all whooped with respect.

The whole event is a hopeless muddle. No one knows quite where to go, there’s a burger van but no portaloos, and the surrounding footpaths become clogged with huddles of people. Gardens are overrun by spectators hoping to find a good vantage point. Above us hovered at least three drones, while the best earthly spot was reserved for cameramen from international outfits like AFP, here to film the mad, peculiar English. 

In the lower fields, you get to see most of the hill but not the finish line, which is obscured by cottages. That was good enough for us; less crowded and we had enough of a view to see most of the injuries. One friend wondered whether there’d have been the same jolly camaraderie at a public hanging.

Every year the powers-that-be attempt to shut the cheese rolling down, once threatening the late Mrs Smart, who used to make the cheese, with criminal sanctions should someone end up injured (her son now runs the family dairy and still donates the cheese). This year, the traditional paramedics were absent, presumably justified by a stretched health service. Stay home, keep your cheese in the fridge, protect the NHS. Not that it mattered; the ambulance still had to come, accompanied by two wailing police cars.

The cheese rolling after-party is held around the back of a Toby Carvery in a glorious, happy field, complete with marquee and a yokel band. We were greeted by a dog sitting on top of a picnic table and one of the winners who kindly let us hold his prize cheese. My Irish companion bumped into a friend of a friend from the other side of the border. He’d thrown himself down the hill, smashing his phone in the process and losing his comrades. ‘Could you message my friend on Instagram,’ he asked, ‘his username is @suckingdiesel?’

We sat in that field chatting for hours. It felt like the whole world was with us; there was an elderly gent in nothing but faded black shorts and Crocs with a dog on a rope, a little girl bobbing along holding buttercups and a bottle of Lucozade Sport, a gang of pretty teenagers rolling joints, and a father with his eight daughters leaning against a transit van. The band played Springsteen and Kenny Rogers and we all sang along.