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CHEESE ROLLING
EXCERPT FROM TRUE BRITS ©JR DAESCHNER

For sheer lunacy and danger, few events can rival cheese rolling.

If you've never seen it, the ancient Gloucestershire tradition doesn't sound that daunting: a cheese is flung down a hill, and dozens of men chase it.

Initially, I envisaged a wheel of cheese trundling down a long, grassy slope at a leisurely pace. Of course, some runners might take a tumble-that would explain the dozens of injuries every year-but they were probably reckless or just plain clumsy. In my naïveté, I even imagined that I might join in the fun.

But then I saw Cooper's Hill.
From the bottom, the racecourse doesn't seem that dangerous; from the top, it looks suicidal. Rather than a gradual incline, the hill drops away at a near 70-degree angle, then quickly shifts to 50 degrees, then plunges again, then levels out, then falls one last time before abruptly flattening out-leaving runners only a few yards to stop before crashing into a cottage fence at the bottom.

The 250-yard racecourse is a short, sharp drop full of dips, bulges, and any number of perils, seen or unseen: long, ankle-twisting grass; patches of slick, decomposing leaves; gravel outcrops lurking under the turf; tufted islands jutting up unexpectedly; eroded foot-traps masked by grass; not to mention big, fat Roman snails and the odd duck's nest. In short, the hill is a natural obstacle course containing just about every impediment Mother Nature could come up with, making it difficult to walk down, let alone run down.
In fact, the runners don't dare start the race standing; instead, they sit at the starting line before flinging themselves off the ledge.

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