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.
My friends were shocked by the brutal pitch of the hill. Could someone really hurl themselves down that?
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.
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