Cheese Rolling, Stilton Teams and the World Cheese Awards

Chasing a Double Gloucester down a 200-yard cliff, rolling a wooden Stilton through a village, and judging 4,786 cheeses — the world's great cheese festivals.

Most cheese is celebrated the slow way — cut, tasted, discussed. But cheese cultures around the world also throw their cheese down hills, race wooden versions of it through village streets, and gather nearly five thousand wheels in one hall to pick a champion. These are the festivals where cheese stops being groceries and becomes sport and spectacle.

Cooper's Hill: the downhill classic

Every Spring Bank Holiday, on Cooper's Hill at Brockworth in Gloucestershire, England, a wheel of Double Gloucester is rolled down a 200-yard (180 m) hill with a gradient of around 50 percent in its steepest stretch — and a crowd of adults runs after it. The cheese, a 7–9 pound (3–4 kg) wheel protected by a wooden casing and decorated with ribbons, gets about a one-second head start. It has never, in the modern event, actually been caught: the winner is simply the first person across the finish line at the bottom, and the prize is the cheese.

Nobody knows how old it is. The first written evidence is a message to the Gloucester town crier published in Berrow's Worcester Journal on 9 June 1836, and the tradition is likely older. Two origin theories persist: that the rolling maintained villagers' grazing rights on the common, and that it descends from a pagan custom of rolling burning brushwood down the hill to mark the new year — a rite echoed today in the buns, biscuits and sweets the Master of Ceremonies still scatters at the top. Since 1988 the cheese itself has come from one farm: local cheesemaker Diana Smart of Churcham supplied it for over three decades.

The hill collects its toll. In 1993, sixteen people were injured, four of them seriously. In 2009 about 15,000 spectators squeezed onto a site with room for perhaps 5,000, and safety concerns cancelled the official event in 2010 — whereupon roughly a hundred people turned up and ran it unofficially anyway. In May 2013 a police inspector warned everyone involved in planning the event, including the 86-year-old Smart, that they could be held responsible for injuries; that year's races used a lightweight foam replica, which an Australian competitor, Caleb Stalder, actually managed to catch. Real cheese returned in 2014. In 2023, Canadian competitor Delaney Irving won the ladies' race despite being knocked unconscious on the way down — she learned she had won in the medical enclosure. Winners have come from the United States, Canada, Japan, Germany, Egypt, Australia and New Zealand. It is, by any measure, the world's most famous cheese event, and it is not remotely safe.

Stilton: the sensible version, invented by publicans

The village of Stilton in Cambridgeshire runs the same idea at a survivable angle. On May Day, teams of four roll a "cheese" — actually a 12-inch (30 cm) section of old telegraph pole, painted to look like a Stilton — down the High Street in a knockout competition, every team member rolling at least once, many in fancy dress.

The Stilton festival makes no claim to ancient origins: it began in the 1950s, after the village was bypassed by the A1 road in 1959 and its inns lost their passing trade. Four publicans, by the organisers' own telling, dreamed up cheese rolling to bring visitors back — and by the 1990s it had become an international event. After a seven-year hiatus driven by rising costs and fading cool, the festival returned in 2024, drawing crowds of more than 4,000 for the racing, the Maypole dancing and the crowning of the May King and Queen.

The World Cheese Awards: 4,786 cheeses, one winner

If Cooper's Hill is cheese as contact sport, the World Cheese Awards are cheese as Olympics. Run by the Guild of Fine Food since 1988, the 36th edition — held in Viseu, Portugal, in November 2024 — was the largest yet: a record 4,786 cheeses from 47 countries, assessed blind by 240 judges from 40 countries working in teams across 104 tables, awarding Bronze, Silver, Gold and Super Gold medals before a Super Jury settled the title.

The 2024 World Champion was Queijo de Ovelha Amanteigado from Quinta do Pomar in Soalheira, Portugal — a soft, spoonable raw sheep's milk cheese made by Spanish-born cheesemaker Sonia Marroyo, set with thistle (cardoon) rennet and eaten by slicing off the top and spooning out the nearly liquid paste. It won on its home turf, less than 40 miles from where it is made. American makers had their best showing in years: Jasper Hill Farm's Bayley Hazen Blue took the Best American Cheese trophy and a fifth-place overall finish, scoring 83 points to the winner's 86.

The calendar, in one table

Two of these festivals revolve around cheeses with protected names and centuries of technique behind them — and the third hands its crown to a cheese set with thistle rennet, one of the oldest coagulants there is. If the spectacle has you curious about the cheeses themselves, start with the by-cheese guides, which cover fifteen styles from brie to halloumi and the cultures each one needs.