Cheddar Gorge

On day 2 of our trip, we headed 10 minutes down the road to the village of Cheddar. As you may have guessed, this town is credited with being the first to make Cheddar cheese. Apparently, they have an old order from a king to a cheese-maker in this town for their Cheddar cheese-- hence the name.

We started off our time there with a visit to the Cheddar Gorge Cheese Company. For a small admission price, we could tour the factory and see where and how they make their cheese (which is credited as being the only cheddar made in Cheddar!). We were somewhat familiar with the process after having toured the Wensleydale Cheese Factory 2 years ago. We watched the DVD of how the cheese is made, and we got to see the cheese-maker putting the large casks of cheese into hot water to smooth them out, and then squish out all the liquid again. After the tour was over, we were able to return to the store-front and taste the variety of cheeses that they make on site. Some of the flavors were: mild, medium, mature, vintage, and cave-matured. That's right... cave-matured. I should mention that this town also has a gorge and caves (which I will tell you more about in a minute). Well, what's interesting about the caves is that they stay at a pretty constant temperature of about 11 degrees Celsius, which makes it an ideal location to mature the cheese. This came in very handy to the cheese-makers of yester-year, as it provided them with a kind of constant refrigeration. Anyway, we thoroughly enjoyed the cheese and bought a few blocks to bring home with us. Yummy!

After lunch at a local pub, we got on a bus to tour the Cheddar Gorge. The Gorge is made up of huge limestone cliffs. It was very impressive. We saw both people and goats climbing the gorge!The bus then dropped us off at Gough's Caves. As we walked through the caves, we were able to listen to an audio tour that told us about how Richard Gough excavated the cave in the late 1800s. We also learned about "Cheddar Man," Britian's oldest skeleton (dating to about 7150BC), whose remains were found in this cave in 1903.
Here are some of our favorite shots from inside the caves. And of course, we got to see the Cheddar Cheese cave-maturing!After our time in the cave, we went to the Cheddar Man Museum, which was kind of creepy, to be quite honest. Then, Ethan and Tim finished up our time there by climbing up the Lookout Tower to enjoy the view of the area.It was a great day in Cheddar. Maybe not the most romantic way to spend Valentines' Day, but such is life when you travel with kids....