Cheese Rolling

Information about Cheese Rolling

A race on 29th May 2006.

The Master of Ceremonies.

The Cooper's Hill Cheese Rolling and Wake is an annual event held in May at Cooper's Hill, SO892146, near Cheltenham and Gloucester in the Cotswolds region of England. It is traditionally by and for the people of Brockworth - the local village, but now people from over the world take part. The event takes its name from the hill it occurs on. From the top of the hill a round of Double Gloucester cheese is rolled, and competitors race down the hill after it. The first person over the finish line at the bottom of the hill wins the cheese. In theory, competitors are aiming to catch the cheese, but since it has a one second head start and can reach speeds up to 70 mph (enough to knock over and injure a spectator as it did in 1997), this rarely occurs.

Accurate information is hard to come by, but the tradition is at least 200 years old. Suggestions have been made that the event may either date back to Roman times or have been a pagan healing ritual, but there is no evidence for this.

"The Cheese Rollers" is also the name of the nearby pub in Shurdington, about 3 miles from Cooper's Hill. Competitors will frequent this venue for some pre-event Dutch courage or discussion of tactics, and after the event for some convalescence.

Cooper's Hill is also known as a stop on the Cotswold Way.

The next event will start at midday on 26 May 2008.

Injuries

A view down Cooper's Hill, from the start point of the race to the finish (where the dog-walkers are). The face of the hill itself is concave and hence cannot be seen from this angle. The posts at the bottom are signs from the local council requesting that, to avoid soil erosion, people do not walk on the face of the hill. The posts are removed for the annual event.

Due to the steepness and uneven surface of the hill there are usually a number of injuries, ranging from sprained ankles to broken bones and concussions. A first aid service is provided by the local St John Ambulance (Gloucester, Cheltenham and Stroud Divisions) at the bottom of the hill, with a volunteer rescue group on hand to carry down to them any casualties who do not end up at the bottom through gravity. A number of ambulance vehicles will attend the event, since there is invariably at least one and often several more injuries requiring hospital treatment. Cooper's Hill Cheese Rolling has been summarized as "twenty young men chase a cheese off a cliff and tumble 200 yards to the bottom, where they are scraped up by paramedics and packed off to hospital".

The race of 2005 was delayed while the ambulances returned from the hospital, all of them having been required to transport casualties from previous races. Nevertheless, it was one of the most popular events in recent years, with many more participants than were able to run in the four races. ^[1]

References

1. ^ Chasing the cheese in 2005 - BBC Gloucestershire news report

External links

www.cheese-rolling.co.uk - main event website
BBC Gloucestershire multi media features
SoGlos.com - 2007 event round-up, photos and video

Coordinates:

There are many places called Cooper's Hill:

at Brockworth, where the Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake takes place
near Englefield Green, Surrey

Cooper's Hill is also the name of a poem by John Denham.
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Cheltenham (or Cheltenham Spa) is a large spa town and borough in Gloucestershire, England, near Gloucester and Cirencester. The town has a population of 110,013 (2001 census) and the people of the town are known as "Cheltonians".
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Gloucester

Gloucester ()

|240px|Gloucester (

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Cotswolds

The village of Bibury features Cotswold stone cottages

Country England
Counties Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Somerset, Warwickshire, Wiltshire, Worcestershire.
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Motto
Dieu et mon droit (French)
"God and my right"
Anthem
No official anthem specific to England — the anthem of the United Kingdom is "God Save the Queen".
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Gloucester cheese is a traditional, unpasteurized, semi-hard cheese which has been made in Gloucestershire in England, since the sixteenth century.

Gloucester cheeses were at one time made only with the milk from Gloucester cows, which are now almost extinct.
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Cheese is a solid food made from the milk of cows, goats, sheep and other mammals. Cheese is made by coagulating milk. This is accomplished by first acidification with a bacterial culture and then employing an enzyme, rennet (or rennet substitutes) to coagulate the milk to "curds
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Miles per hour is a unit of speed, expressing the number of international miles covered per hour.

Miles per hour is the unit used for speed limits, and speeds, on roads in the United Kingdom, United States and some other nations, where it is commonly abbreviated in everyday
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Year 1997 (MCMXCVII
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Roman Britain refers to those parts of the island of Great Britain controlled by the Roman Empire between AD 43 and 410. The Romans referred to their province as Britannia.
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Paganism (from Latin paganus, meaning "an old country dweller, rustic") is a term which, from a Western perspective, has come to connote a broad set of spiritual or cultic practices or beliefs of any folk religion, and of historical and contemporary polytheistic religions
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Shurdington is a village near Cheltenham in Gloucestershire, England. The area constitutes a civil parish within the Borough of Tewkesbury.

Shurdington has an 11th century church (St.
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The phrase Dutch courage is a slang term for courage gained from intoxication by alcohol. It is synonymous with liquid courage.

Phrases using Dutch were created because the Netherlands used to be a rival to Britain (especially the Dutch East India Company), and
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The Cotswold Way is a 102 miles (164 km) long-distance footpath, running along the Cotswold Edge escarpment of the Cotswold Hills in England from Chipping Campden to Bath.
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May 26 is the 1st day of the year (2nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 0 days remaining.

Events

451 - The Battle of Avarayr between Armenian rebels and the Sassanid Empire takes place.

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This article or section contains information about scheduled or expected future events.
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surface is a two-dimensional manifold. The most familiar examples are those that arise as the boundaries of solid objects in ordinary three-dimensional Euclidean space, EÂ³.
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St. John Ambulance is the common name used by a number of affiliated organisations in different countries dedicated to the teaching and practice of medical first aid and the provision of ambulance services, all of which derive their origins from the St.
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Rescue refers to operations that usually involve the saving of life, or prevention of injury.

Tools used might include search dogs, search and rescue horses, helicopters, and the "Jaws of Life" and other hydraulic cutting and spreading tools used to extricate individuals
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Jan - Feb - Mar - Apr - May - Jun
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geographic coordinate system enables every location on the earth to be specified by the three coordinates of a spherical coordinate system aligned with the spin axis of the Earth.
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