On the Spring Bank Holiday every May, several hundred people gather at the top of Cooper’s Hill near Brockworth in Gloucestershire, a wheel of cheese is released down the slope, and a group of competitors throw themselves after it.
The hill
This is the part that photographs never quite capture. Cooper’s Hill is not a gentle slope — it reaches a gradient of around 1 in 2 in places, and it is uneven, tussocked and frequently wet. It is steep enough that nobody actually runs down it. Competitors take a few strides, lose their footing, and complete the descent as a tumbling fall.
The cheese
A Double Gloucester of about 3 to 4kg, bound in a wooden casing. It is given a one-second head start and then reaches speeds of up to 70mph, which makes it entirely uncatchable — nobody has ever caught it in the air.
So the race is not really about the cheese at all. The winner is the first person to the bottom, and they get the cheese as their prize.
The injuries
Substantial and routine. Broken ankles, wrists, dislocated shoulders and concussion are normal, and an ambulance and mountain rescue team are traditionally in attendance at the bottom. In some years spectators have been injured too, when a runaway cheese has gone into the crowd.
The official event was cancelled in 2010 on safety grounds after crowd numbers became unmanageable, and there have been no official organisers since. It has continued regardless, entirely unofficially, every year — the local community simply turns up and does it, and the authorities have arrived at a wary accommodation.
How old is it
Genuinely unclear. Records go back to the early 1800s and it is certainly older, with the usual theories about pagan fertility rites or the assertion of grazing rights on the common. The honest answer is that nobody knows why anybody started doing this.
The winners
It has become an international event. Competitors travel from Australia, the United States, Japan and across Europe, and the winners are frequently not local. Chris Anderson, a local man and former soldier, holds the record with more than twenty wins.
In 2023, 19-year-old Delaney Irving from Canada won the women’s race and was unconscious when she crossed the line, waking up in the medical tent to be told she had won — an outcome that captures the event precisely.
Watching it
Free, unticketed and extremely crowded. There is no parking to speak of, the hill is a serious walk from anywhere, and standing on the slope itself is genuinely hazardous. The sensible position is at the bottom, well off to the side, where you get the arrivals and the ambulances.
It is one of a family of British customs — see also well dressing, swan upping and the various Shrovetide football games — that are unexplained, unpaid, uninsured and quite unstoppable.