Qualla: Cheddar Gorge

Cheddar Gorge: Introduction

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Troxx, CC BY 2.5. In 1903, a road crew widening a path into a cave at the head of Cheddar Gorge cracked open a passage that had been sealed for millennia. Inside they found a complete human skeleton, lying where someone had laid him down, still wearing fragments of his world. He was 9,000 years old. Cheddar Man, as he came to be known, is the oldest complete skeleton ever found in Britain - and when scientists at the Natural History Museum sequenced his DNA in 2018, they discovered something that startled the public: he had dark to black skin, dark curly hair, and pale blue eyes. The face of the first British family was not the face most British people had imagined.

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Image: Troxx | CC BY 2.5

Cheddar Gorge: How a Gorge Gets Made

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit George Evans, CC BY-SA 2.0. Cheddar Gorge cuts 137 metres deep into the southern edge of the Mendip Hills, its walls rising in tiered limestone cliffs that drop almost vertically to the B3135 road below. The rock is Carboniferous Limestone, laid down on the bed of a warm tropical sea more than 300 million y...

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Image: George Evans | CC BY-SA 2.0

Cheddar Gorge: Caves and Cheese

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gary Bembridge, CC BY 2.0. Two caves are open to the public, both on the Longleat estate's south side of the gorge: Gough's Cave, discovered by Richard Cox Gough in 1903, leading 400 metres into the cliff face and containing the chambers where Cheddar Man was found; and the smaller Cox's Cave, discovered b...

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Image: Gary Bembridge | CC BY 2.0

Cheddar Gorge: The Cliffs and Their Climbers

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Toby, CC BY-SA 2.0. The cliffs hold around 590 graded climbing routes on the south side and another 380 on the north. The Coronation Street route, named for the year it was first climbed - 1965, the year of the Tour of Britain stage race that ran up the gorge - was put up by Chris Bonington, who wou...

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Image: Toby | CC BY-SA 2.0

Cheddar Gorge: Voting and the Cable Car That Wasn't

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jbattersby, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 2005 a poll of Radio Times readers ranked Cheddar Gorge the second-greatest natural wonder in Britain, beaten only by the Dan yr Ogof caves in South Wales. Five hundred thousand visitors come every year. In 2013 the visitor numbers at the show caves had dropped from a 1980s pe...

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Image: Jbattersby | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cheddar Gorge: Standing in the Gorge

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Thorn, CC BY-SA 2.0. The B3135 runs the gorge's length with a maximum gradient of 16 percent, which is why the Tour of Britain has used it for hill-climb stages, and why cyclists treat it as a benchmark climb. Stand at the bottom on a summer morning and the cliffs lean inward, throwing the road into ...

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Image: John Thorn | CC BY-SA 2.0