England #7 - More Cheddar, with Caves and Gorge in The England Chronicles - September 2024

(Wednesday, September 11 2024) Continuing from the last entry: 

After wandering around the village area of the Cheddar Gorge, we toured Gouge’s Cave. It’s a very interesting cavern, full of beautiful formations. It was excavated and opened to the public between 1892-1898 by a retired sea captain named Richard Gouge, pictured here looking very sea-captainy:   

I see from the Wikipedia article that remains were found of people who were living in the caves 14,000 years ago, and were probably cannibals - yikes!! I don’t remember hearing anything about that during the tour - which was an audio tour, taken at your own pace. We DID see Cheddar Man, though!   

Of course that’s not REALLY Cheddar Man, but a reproduction of where he was found in 1903. Still, it’s startling to see him just hanging out over there near the entrance of the cave. He is Britain’s oldest complete human skeleton, dating to around 7150 BC. There is apparently a Cheddar Man and the Cannibals museum, which would be a great name for a band. I did see the Museum of Prehistory, although we didn’t visit it - maybe that’s in the same place??

ANYHOW, it was a really interesting cave to tour. I love caves - normal tours where you wander around with a guide or an audio thing, not so interested in spelunking but I’m kind of a scaredy cat as far as cave adventures beyond strolling around go. This was very nice, no crawling through crevices, plenty of light where it was needed, and beautiful formations. 

Oddly there were big rounds of Cheddar cheese maturing off in one nook - apparently the caves were used for maturing cheese even in prehistoric times. 

This was a tableau of cavers working away.

After the cave, it was on to the actual gorge, just a mile or so up the road. There were several places to park so we stopped a couple of times and walked up the road a bit. Unfortunately the road is really really REALLY narrow in spots, with no edge for walking on, so our initial plan of just taking a long walk through it instead of going up the cliff paths didn’t pan out that well. Nor did driving through it, since there was quite a bit of traffic and a whole lot of blind curves where the road would suddenly turn into one lane, and people were absolutely flying by. It was just way too scary and we did not want to die! But even walking a little  rewarded us with spectacular views of the cliffs-

This goat was up on the hill above us and he made us a little nervous too because he kept staring at us. For a very very long time, he just stood there staring!! We kept wondering if goats make a habit of attacking tourists who are disturbing their space — until we realized he actually had stopped staring some time ago and had laid down and gone to sleep. This is zoomed way in, and he was kind of hard to see clearly way up there, obviously. 

After that it was back into the town of Cheddar for dinner. We stopped at the Riverside Inn. I had a delicious Thai veggie curry and a Fullers - Kim had shrimp and I think a cider. Ciders were all over the place this time - they have gotten popular here too- and she was very into the cider. Apples give me fever blisters, bizarrely enough, so I steered clear of them all.

Well this says it was a Cheddar Ale, but I have Fullers in my journal - whatever it was, it was very enjoyable!

And then it was back to the Airbnb. We took the correct A road back, so no trouble at all until we got to the neighborhood. I mentioned earlier how hard it was to find our apartment. The address is Windell Street, yet Windell Street basically makes a big circle around this neighborhood which is full of identical buildings and a whole bunch of side streets cutting through to each end of Windell Street. These side streets couldn’t be Windell Street, yet they apparently are since our apartment was on one of them and the address was Windell Street. Neither the phone GPS’s or the actual GPS could ever find it and we’d had to hunt it every night. 

Usually we’d stumble onto it after a few attempts. This time we went around and around and around in the dark and everything looked exactly the same and nothing made sense. Baker B called while we were driving in circles and I said “Call back in a few minutes- we can’t find the Airbnb AGAIN!!”

We swore and searched and were baffled and annoyed and finally I said “I AM PARKING THE CAR AND WALKING AROUND TILL I FIND IT!!! It has to be RIGHT HERE!!!” Kim agreed and hopped out to walk around and find it too. And it actually was not that far away — just down one of the Windell-Street-Not-Windell-Street side streets. I was so relieved to see the lamp we’d left on in the window that I could have cried! 

So then we had to go back and get the car because we had a specific place to park it and couldn’t just leave it where we’d given up. We walked back the way we came and….couldn’t remember where we’d left the car. We went back up Windell Street and walked some more and walked some more and it was cold and we were SO TIRED. Baker B called back as instructed and got to hear me wail, “We found the Airbnb, but NOW WE CAN’T FIND THE CAR!!!!” He burst into laughter. I was not amused. Three months later it’s pretty funny, but at the time …NO.

Here in the US you can use your remote’s lock/unlock function to beep the car but in England locking/unlocking is silent. I always liked that since it means you don’t hear constant car beeping like you do here, but IS a disadvantage when you can’t find your car. The lights do flash though, so I kept trying that, and finally, FINALLY we saw lights flash way off down the street. Yay!!! At last, we were reunited with both the Airbnb AND the car!!! I think the next morning was when we realized there’s a community center very close to our parking spot which was an easy way to locate the spot AND the Airbnb that was just around the corner from the parking spot and even had coffee and breakfast. 

And next up is our second Bath day, so stay tuned!