Cheddar Gorge

[Dave]

Cheddar Gorge

Well it would not be Sunday without a Daves day out in the westcoutry.

How can you spend five hours walking a gorge and nearly miss the real gorge itself? Well that’s what Carol and I did, but we know how it happened. You see we had been to Lydford Gorge only two weeks before and there you walk along the top of the gorge and half way through the walk end up on the floor of the gorge. Then you walk back along the floor only climbing back to the top of it near the end of the walk.

When you arrive at Cheddar Gorge there is a building were you can go into and pay, but there are all different tickets as they have two main caves and some other attractions, you can pay to go in one or the other, or a ticket that gets you into both, or a ticket to include everything and this one includes a bus ride through the gorge and a walk that is just called the gorge walk.

Not really wanting to see the caves but only enjoy the gorge walk, we soon discovered that paying for the walk was a rip-off, but as we were not local we did not know this. Anyway you can’t just buy the walk ticket at this building, no we had to walk down the road and into a small shop where we paid I think about £4 each.

You then go through the shop and into an area behind a fence that stops anyone just being able to do the walk. The first part is really hard work, its up steps know as the Jacobs Ladder and there are 274 steps to go up, you sure know you have walked up them when you get to the top of them. I think we just expecting to see the gorge, but what we were doing was just walking on the very top of it.

The views back toward Cheddar are very good and there is a large lake you can see, the walk now was not to hard going but still pulled a bit on those leg muscles.
What we could not work out at this stage was why people were walking toward us, it seemed you could only start the walk from the end you paid, but so many people were walking back that way, well we thought maybe you get to the end and have to walk back the way you came, how wrong that turned out to be.

Sometime later we found that we were starting to go down hill and then we came to an open walk through gate that went out onto the road, this now explained why everyone was going what we thought was the wrong way, they must have all known that you do not need to pay to walk the top of the gorge.

We looked at the map we had been given and then made our next mistake; mind you it was showing that the walk continued across the road and onto the other side of the gorge. If we had known then what we latter found out, we would have turned left and walked down the road and saw the gorge that we went to see.

So we went across the road and soon found we were having to go up many sets of steps as we climbed to the top of the gorge again, one dear couple much older than Carol and I, were starting to have problems with the walk. Well at least we could see the top of the gorge that we had spent nearly two hours walking on( we did stop to eat some food we had taken) and now I was starting to flag a bit as it was not only a long walk, but was so hilly and really hard on the legs. We did see some man right on the edge of the gorge on the other side, when we were on that side you really had to be mindful of the edge as there was nothing to stop you going over it. Then we were dropping down again and the path was very dangerous as it was steep and the floor was full of rocks sticking up from the mud. In the end we found we were back on the road and some way further down from the shop we had paid in to the walk. We went and got an ice-cream and were talking about our day, we both felt based on what we had seen, we thought Lydford George was much better. So we were getting in the car an about to set of back toward the M5, but for some strange reason I decided to turn left and not right, this was then heading over toward Glastonbury

It was only then that we saw the gorge in all its glory. As now we were driving through it and saw all the rocks that we had just walked over the top off. Soon I had the car parked again and was taking some pictures as I walked back down the road to
Where my car had been parked all day.

I do wonder if like us so many other people have done the walk we did and missed the real magic of Cheddar Gorge, yes I’m sure that has been many before us and will be many more that do it.