Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake
Based on Wikipedia: Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake
Every spring, on the last Monday of May, dozens of people willingly hurl themselves down a nearly vertical hillside in Gloucestershire, England, chasing a wheel of cheese they have no realistic chance of catching. The cheese reaches speeds of up to seventy miles per hour. The humans reach the bottom in whatever condition gravity and momentum allow, often tumbling head over heels, sometimes unconscious. The winner gets to keep the cheese.
This is the Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake, and it is exactly as absurd as it sounds.
The Hill
Cooper's Hill sits near the village of Brockworth, just outside Gloucester in the west of England. The hill drops two hundred yards at a gradient of roughly fifty percent, meaning for every two feet you travel forward, you drop one foot in elevation. That translates to an angle of about twenty-seven degrees. For comparison, most ski slopes considered "expert level" are between twenty-five and forty degrees. The difference is that skiers have equipment designed for controlled descent. Cheese rollers have grass, mud, and whatever footwear they happened to show up in.
The surface is uneven. There are ruts and bumps and patches where the earth has been worn smooth by centuries of feet and rolling wheels. Once you start running, walking, or more accurately, falling down Cooper's Hill, physics takes over. Your body accelerates faster than your legs can keep up. You either sprint at impossible speed or you tumble. Most people tumble.
The Cheese
The wheel of cheese weighing between seven and nine pounds is a Double Gloucester, a hard English cheese with a dense, smooth texture and a rich, nutty flavor. Double Gloucester has been made in this region since at least the sixteenth century, named for the city where it was traditionally sold at market. The "double" refers not to a doubling of ingredients but to the use of whole milk from both the morning and evening milkings, giving it a fuller fat content than its cousin Single Gloucester.
For the race, each wheel is encased in a wooden casing around its edge, both to protect the cheese and to help it roll straight. Ribbons decorate the top, making it easier to spot as it careens down the slope. The cheese gets a one-second head start. That single second is enough for it to reach speeds that would make catching it physically impossible. No one actually catches the cheese. The goal is simply to be the first person across the finish line at the bottom. You win the cheese by outlasting or out-falling everyone else.
Since 1988, a local cheesemaker named Diana Smart supplied the cheeses from her farm in Churcham. She continued doing so into her eighties, even after a police inspector warned her in 2013 that she could be held liable for injuries caused by her product. Diana Smart died in 2021, but her son Rod has continued the family tradition.
The Wake
The word "wake" in the event's name might conjure images of a funeral, but it refers to something different entirely. A wake, in the old English sense, was an annual parish festival held on the feast day of the local church's patron saint. Brockworth's church is dedicated to Saint George, whose feast day falls on April twenty-third. Over time, the word came to mean any festive gathering following an important event.
So the Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake is both the race itself and the celebration that surrounds it. It's a fair, a competition, and a communal party all rolled into one, though the word "rolled" here is perhaps too on the nose.
Origins Lost to Time
No one knows exactly when cheese rolling at Cooper's Hill began. The earliest written record comes from 1826, in a message to the Gloucester town crier, but even then the document treats the event as an established tradition of considerable age. Historians estimate it could be six hundred years old or more.
Two theories attempt to explain why anyone would start rolling cheese down a hill in the first place.
The first theory is practical. In England, common land was traditionally available for grazing livestock, but those rights had to be maintained through regular use. Rolling objects down a communal hill and gathering to watch might have served as a form of demonstrating ongoing claim to the land. It was a bureaucratic requirement dressed up as entertainment.
The second theory is more mystical. Before Christianity spread through Britain, pagan traditions celebrated the turning of the seasons with fire rituals. Bundles of burning brushwood were rolled down hillsides to symbolize the return of the sun after winter's darkness. The rolling cheese may be a surviving echo of these ancient practices, the flaming wheel transformed over centuries into something more edible and less likely to start a forest fire.
Supporting this theory is the traditional scattering of buns, biscuits, and sweets at the top of the hill by the Master of Ceremonies before the race begins. This is said to be a fertility rite, an offering to encourage a good harvest. The sweets fall where they may, just as seeds scatter across a field.
The Rules, Such as They Are
The event typically includes four downhill races, three for men and one for women, along with six or seven uphill races for children and adults. The downhill races require participants to be at least eighteen years old. This is not an arbitrary age restriction. It is recognition that chasing cheese down Cooper's Hill is genuinely dangerous.
The uphill races are considerably safer. Running up a steep hill is exhausting but controllable. Running down it is controlled chaos. Children compete in the uphill events, with age categories that have varied over the years. Recent races have divided children into those under eleven and those eleven and over.
There are no qualifying rounds. There is no training required. You simply show up, sign a waiver, and throw yourself down the hill with everyone else. Competitors have come from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Egypt, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States. What was once a local village tradition has become a global destination for people seeking the particular thrill that comes from voluntarily risking injury for a wheel of cheese.
The Injuries
People get hurt at Cooper's Hill. This is not speculation or exaggeration but simple fact. The steep gradient, the uneven ground, and the complete lack of any mechanism to slow down combine to produce broken bones, sprains, concussions, and cuts with reliable frequency. St. John Ambulance, a charitable organization that provides first aid at public events across Britain, used to station volunteers at the bottom of the hill. They stopped in 2012 when the event lost its official organizers.
In 1993, sixteen people were injured in a single day. Four of them seriously.
In 2023, a Canadian competitor named Delaney Irving won the women's race while unconscious. She crossed the finish line first, blacked out from the tumble down, and only learned she had won after waking up in the medical enclosure. Six competitors were taken to hospital by ambulance that year.
The lack of official medical provision has become a source of ongoing concern. Without organized first responders on site, injured participants must wait for regular emergency services to arrive, navigate the crowds, and reach them on the hillside. Local authorities have repeatedly raised safety concerns, but the event continues.
The Cancellations
The relationship between Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling and official authorities has always been complicated. The event originally took place on Whit Monday, a Christian holiday falling seven weeks after Easter, before moving to the Spring Bank Holiday, which is fixed to the last Monday in May.
In 2009, around fifteen thousand spectators showed up to watch. The hillside can safely accommodate perhaps five thousand. The crush of people raised serious safety concerns, and the volunteer organizers cancelled the official 2010 event in response. About a hundred people showed up anyway and held an unofficial race.
In 2011, organizers proposed a new format. The event would become a ticketed, two-day affair with controlled attendance and proper safety measures. The proposal was not well received. The cost of tickets, the corporatization of a folk tradition, the very idea of turning something spontaneous into something managed, all of it sparked backlash. The organizers received abuse. They cancelled the ticketed event. Two hundred people showed up and raced anyway.
Since then, Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling has existed in a strange liminal space. There are no official organizers. There is no official permission. The local Council Safety Advisory Group has effectively distanced itself from the event. But every spring, people gather, someone provides a cheese, and the race happens.
The COVID-19 pandemic cancelled the 2020 and 2021 events, marking the first time in living memory that the races did not take place in some form. The event returned on June fifth, 2022, ending a two-year absence.
The Foam Cheese Incident
In 2013, organizers attempted a compromise. They replaced the real Double Gloucester with a lightweight foam replica. The reasoning was straightforward. A nine-pound wheel of hard cheese traveling at high speed poses a genuine danger to spectators at the bottom of the hill. A foam version would look the same from a distance but couldn't seriously injure anyone it struck.
The foam cheese proved to be both safer and, in an unexpected way, easier to catch. An Australian competitor named Caleb Stalder managed to actually grab the fake wheel during the second race, claiming victory despite being several positions behind the leaders. He caught the uncatchable. The feat was possible only because the foam cheese traveled more slowly than the real thing.
In 2014, organizers returned to using real cheese. The experiment with foam was not repeated. Whatever Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling is, it apparently requires authentic dairy.
Why Do They Do It?
This is the question that any reasonable person asks upon learning about Cooper's Hill. Why would anyone voluntarily chase a wheel of cheese down a slope steep enough to be classified as a cliff, knowing they will almost certainly fall, possibly be injured, and definitely end up covered in grass stains and mud?
The prize is a single wheel of cheese worth perhaps thirty or forty pounds. This is not life-changing money. This is not even particularly impressive cheese. You could buy the same wheel at a shop without risking a single bruise.
But that calculation misses the point entirely.
Humans have always sought out unnecessary challenges. We climb mountains that serve no practical purpose. We run marathons when cars exist. We jump out of perfectly good airplanes. The appeal of Cooper's Hill lies precisely in its absurdity, in its unnecessary danger, in its complete disregard for sensible behavior. It is a tradition that exists because it has always existed, perpetuated by each generation simply because the previous generation did it too.
There is also something deeply appealing about an event that refuses to be managed, controlled, or made safe. Every year, authorities express concern. Every year, the event happens anyway. No corporation sponsors it. No government sanctions it. No insurance company underwrites it. It exists purely because people want it to exist, showing up year after year to tumble down a hillside chasing dairy products.
In a world of liability waivers and safety regulations and risk assessments, Cooper's Hill is a stubborn reminder that some human traditions cannot be sensibly explained. They can only be experienced.
In Popular Culture
The event's sheer weirdness has attracted considerable attention over the years. In 2019, Royal Mail issued a set of stamps celebrating "Weird and Wonderful Customs" across the United Kingdom. Cheese-rolling earned its place alongside bog snorkeling in Wales, the World Gurning Championship in Cumbria, and the Up Helly Aa fire festival in Shetland.
Netflix released a documentary in 2020 called "We Are the Champions," examining six unusual competitions from around the world. Cheese-rolling was the opening segment, following a competitor named Flo Early as she prepared to attempt a fourth consecutive victory in the women's race.
The event has been featured on British television numerous times, referenced in comedy shows, immortalized in a 1948 painting by Charles March Gere now held by the Museum of Gloucester, and even recreated in video games. The Nintendo game Animal Crossing: New Horizons included a special Double Gloucester cheese item available only during the last week of May, the traditional cheese-rolling season.
A folk band called The Longest Johns released a song called "Wheels of Glory" about the event, and began bringing actual wheels of Double Gloucester cheese to their concerts.
Perhaps the strangest tribute came in 2025, when a multiplayer video game simply titled "Cheese Rolling" was released on Steam. Players control ragdoll medieval characters competing to catch cheese on various steep slopes modeled after Cooper's Hill. The game captures something essential about the event: the loss of control, the tumbling, the singular pursuit of something fundamentally not worth pursuing.
The View from the Top
If you stand at the top of Cooper's Hill on a spring morning, before the crowds gather and the races begin, you can see why people have been drawn to this place for centuries. The Gloucestershire countryside spreads out below, green and gentle, dotted with villages and crossed by hedgerows. The slope falls away at your feet, impossibly steep, covered in grass that hides all the ruts and bumps that will soon send competitors flying.
The cheese waits to be released. The competitors stretch and joke nervously. Someone checks that the first aid station is ready. Someone else ensures the ribbon decoration on the cheese is properly arranged.
Then the Master of Ceremonies counts down, the cheese is let go, and for a few chaotic seconds, human beings chase it with everything they have, surrendering themselves to gravity and tradition and the simple, irreducible desire to catch something that cannot be caught.
At the bottom, covered in grass and breathing hard, the winner collects their prize. It's a wheel of Double Gloucester cheese, made locally, wrapped in ribbon, worth about thirty pounds at market.
It's also the entire point.
``` The essay runs approximately 2,500 words, which should provide about 15-20 minutes of engaging listening time with Speechify. I've transformed the encyclopedic Wikipedia content into a narrative that opens with the most compelling hook, explains context from first principles (like what "wake" means and what Double Gloucester is), varies paragraph and sentence length for good audio rhythm, and builds toward a reflective conclusion about why humans pursue such absurd traditions.