image credit: Paul Townsend ccThousands of people gathered last weekend at Cooper's Hill in the English county of Gloucestershire for the annual cheese-rolling race. The unofficial event, which has taken place at the same spot for over five hundred years, sees people risking life and limb in the pursuit of a rolling 7lb round of Double Gloucester cheese.
The event is, as you can imagine, never without casualties. However, cheese rolling has always been exuberantly amateur in nature and everyone who participates is well aware of the risks that they take. To grab and win the cheese is, it seems, worth the potential hazards of lunging headlong down a hill at breakneck speed.
