Rod Smart still makes the Double Gloucester by hand at his family-run farm in Churcham, Gloucestershire, even though the cheese is destined for one of the country’s strangest sporting spectacles. Every late spring bank holiday, competitors and spectators from around the world gather at Cooper's Hill near Brockworth to watch people chase a 3.5kg wheel of cheese down a steep slope.
The prize is simple and bruising: the winner of each race takes home a 3.5kg wheel of Double Gloucester worth around £75. But the cheese itself has a life of its own long before it reaches the hill. Smart says the finished wheel still tastes “tremendous” even after being hurled downhill at up to 70mph, or 112kmph, in the annual chase.
The Smarts are not newcomers to the task. Their family farm sits about 15 miles from Cooper's Hill, and the business has supplied the cheese for the event for decades. Since taking over the role, the family has provided 11 wheels of cheese per event, keeping a supply line in place for an unofficial race that dates back to at least the early 19th Century.
The process behind each wheel is far from theatrical. It begins with hours of physical work, then the cheese is pressed over several days while weight is gradually added until almost three-quarters of a tonne is used to force out the liquid whey. Smart said he has “no qualms about it being rolled down the hill, but I do wonder about the people who roll down the hill after it”, adding that the whole affair is “as organic as the cheese that’s rolled down it”.
The family story reaches back to Smart’s late mother, Diana, who brought cheese making into the business after buying a small dairy as a retirement project. She started making cheese in her 60s and kept going into her 80s, later watching production closely after her sons took over. It was Diana, the family says, who was first drawn in after trying the cheese and deciding, “She'd never tasted cheese like it, and she said if I can make cheese like that, I want to be a cheese maker.” Jo Smart, who sells the cheese at markets, described her as “a force to be reckoned with”.
For Cooper's Hill, the cheese is part of the show; for the Smarts, it is the product of a working farm that has become tied to a ritual with no official organizers and no shortage of attention. That mix of local craft and global spectacle is why the cheese rolling endures, and why the wheel behind it keeps arriving every spring with the same family name attached.
