Cheddar Gorge & Wells: England's Deepest Gorge and Smallest City

Cheddar Gorge

Cheddar Gorge is the largest gorge in Britain, a 137-meter-deep limestone canyon in the Mendip Hills with a road running through the bottom of it, show caves at the village end, and a clifftop loop above.

The gorge is Carboniferous limestone, cut by meltwater floods over roughly the last 1.2 million years as the ground froze and thawed through repeated glaciations, and it reaches 137 meters at its deepest, which makes it the largest in the country. The B3135 runs the whole length of it, so the classic first look is from the road: two walls of grey rock closing in, ledges of moss and stunted trees, and feral goats on ground no walker would attempt. Cars, cyclists and coaches share a lane and a half with no pavement at the narrowest points, so the honest advice is to park at the village end and walk in. For height, Jacob's Ladder climbs 274 steps out of the village to a viewpoint on the southern rim, where a three-mile clifftop circuit runs around the top of the gorge and looks down on the road you drove in on.

‹›

A frozen hedgerow lane on the Mendip plateau above the gorge

The caves at the foot of the gorge are the other half of the story. Gough's Cave runs about 3.4 kilometers into the hillside, and in 1903 workmen digging there uncovered Cheddar Man, Britain's oldest complete human skeleton, dated to roughly 9,000 years old and now in London's Natural History Museum. The caves also explain the cheese: their steady temperature and humidity made them a natural maturing store, a practice from the era before refrigeration that the Cheddar Gorge Cheese Company revived, and you can still buy cave-matured cheddar aged inside Gough's Cave itself. Above the gorge the landscape flattens into Mendip farmland, all drystone walls and hedgerows, which on a cold morning does more for a photograph than the cliffs do.

Where to take photos

• The gorge road — the B3135 running the length of the canyon between 137-meter limestone walls, best walked from the village end rather than driven.
• Jacob's Ladder and the clifftop loop — 274 steps up to the southern rim and a three-mile circuit around the top of the gorge.
• Gough's Cave — 3.4 kilometers of chambers under the hillside, where Cheddar Man was found in 1903.
• Cave-matured cheddar — cheese aged inside Gough's Cave itself, sold at the village end of the gorge.

Wells

Wells is England's smallest city, a market town of about 12,000 people that qualifies only because of its cathedral, and the cathedral is worth the whole trip on its own.

Wells Cathedral's west front is a wall of medieval sculpture, close to 300 figures set in tiers across the facade, and it faces a lawn wide enough to take the whole thing in without a lens. Inside, the surprise is structural: by the 1330s the central tower was sinking into its foundations and cracking the piers, so master mason William Joy inserted a set of scissor arches between 1338 and 1348, an inverted arch stacked on an upright one, forming a stone hourglass across the crossing. It was an engineering fix, it is still doing its job nearly seven centuries later, and it looks like nothing else in England. In the north transept, the cathedral clock dates from around 1390, and on every quarter hour a set of model knights above the dial ride out and joust, the same one taking a hit each time.

‹›

The tiered sculpture of Wells Cathedral's west front against a clear winter sky

The rest of the close is the reason to stay longer than the nave takes. Worn steps curve up from the north transept to the chapter house, an octagon of 1306 where the ribs of the vault fan out from a single central shaft like a stone palm. Through the Chain Gate is Vicars' Close, built in 1348 for the cathedral's vicars choral and generally described as the oldest purely residential street in Europe with its original buildings intact, a straight run of stone houses with tall chimneys narrowing toward the chapel at the far end. Behind the cathedral, the moated Bishop's Palace has its own long-running party trick: the swans on the moat have been trained across generations to ring a bell by the gatehouse when they want feeding.

Where to take photos

• Wells Cathedral west front — close to 300 medieval statues across the facade, best seen from the green in low afternoon light.
• The scissor arches — William Joy's inverted stone arches of 1338 to 1348, built to stop the central tower sinking and still doing it.
• Chapter house and Vicars' Close — a 1306 octagon with a palm-like vault, and the 1348 street behind the Chain Gate.
• The cathedral clock — a mechanism from around 1390 whose model knights joust on the quarter hour.

More guides to explore

Bath, England

Bath Travel Guide: Roman Baths, Georgian Crescents & the River Avon

London, England

London Travel Guide: Big Ben, the Thames & the Royal Guard

Castleton, England

Castleton Travel Guide: Peveril Castle & the Peak District's Winnats Pass