Water cut it, not ice.
The gorge was made by meltwater and frost. It began forming about 1.2 million years ago, when the climate here was warm and arid, not unlike northern Africa today, and flash floods scoured wadis into the limestone. In the cold phases permafrost plugged the caves below with ice and frozen mud, so the water had nowhere to go but the surface, where it stripped out the softer rock filling the old wadi and cut down.
No glacier ground through: the ice worked at a distance, by blocking the drainage and then melting. What is left is England's largest gorge, three miles long and 137 metres deep at its worst, cut through Carboniferous limestone laid down more than 300 million years ago.
The river is under your feet rather than beside them. The Cheddar Yeo rises near Charterhouse, sinks into the limestone, runs through the rock as the largest underground river system in Britain, and comes back out at Gough's Cave. As early as 1130 the gorge was being listed among the four wonders of England.
A farthing a pound.
The village is in Domesday in 1086, as Cedre. The cheese enters the record eighty-four years later.
The Pipe Roll for 1170 has Henry II buying 10,240 lb of Cheddar at a farthing a pound: ten pounds, thirteen shillings and fourpence, for four and a half tons. The pipe rolls are the oldest continuous series of English government accounts, running from 1155 to 1833, so the cheese arrives in history the way most English things do, as a line in an audit. It stayed dear.
Thomas Fuller, in the Worthies of England, published in 1662, the year after his death, called them the best and biggest in England, and said their worst fault was that they are so few and dear, hardly to be met with, save at some great man's table. By the reign of Charles I the court is said to have bought the cheese before it was made.
Eleven degrees, all year, in the dark under the Mendips.
One cheese, from everybody's milk.
Fuller called them Corporation Cheeses, made by the joint dairies of the whole parish putting their milk together, each one, poor and rich, receiving a share according to their proportion. That is why the cheese is hard, big and long-keeping: bandaged in muslin dipped in melted lard, which forms a rind that lets it breathe and keeps mould out, a cylinder of it travels and waits in a way a small soft cheese cannot.
Joseph Harding, born at Wanstrow in 1805, turned the craft into a method — hygiene, temperature, a revolving breaker for the curd, a formula anyone could repeat — and published it in the Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England in 1860.
He had been taught farming and cheesemaking by his aunt Elizabeth, who ran a dairy of eighty cows at Marksbury, and much of his experimental work was done there. His summary: cheese is not made in the field, nor in the byre, nor even in the cow, it is made in the dairy.
The cave, and the chibol.
Gough's Cave holds a constant eleven degrees and high humidity, and there is cheese maturing on shelves inside it. That started in December 2006, when a dairy in the village began ageing truckles in the gorge; Wookey Hole, about five miles south-east under the same hills, began ageing cheddar in a side tunnel the same year. The trade likes to date the practice to the middle ages.
The product specification lodged with government says only that tradition has it, which is the honest phrasing and the one worth keeping. The onion is better documented.
The Forme of Cury, compiled about 1390 by the master cooks of Richard II, gives one of the earliest salad recipes written in English: parsley, sage, garlic, chibolles, onions, leek and the rest, plucked small by hand and dressed with raw oil, vinegar and salt. Chibolles are young onions, the things we now call spring onions. Thomas Tusser was still listing them, as poret, in Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, first printed in 1573.
