Cheddar Gorge
— — the road that disappears between the cliffs.
Not only on a wall.
“A limestone canyon cut deep into the Mendip Hills, with cliffs rising about 450 feet above a road that threads its narrowest pinch. Inside Gough's Cave the cheese that took the village's name still ages on rough wooden racks. Buzzards work the thermals overhead. People drive through it, then stop, then go back on foot.
Cheddar Gorge, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Cheddar Gorge sits in the Mendip Hills of Somerset, about twenty miles south of Bristol. It is the largest gorge in Britain, roughly three miles long with cliffs reaching 137 metres above the floor. The B3135 winds through the cleft and out onto the upland. The site is jointly cared for by the National Trust, which holds the northern cliff and the open plateau above, and by Longleat, which operates the show caves and visitor centre on the southern side. Cheddar village itself sits at the western mouth of the gorge.
The walls are Carboniferous limestone, laid down in a shallow tropical sea more than 320 million years ago and lifted later by the same forces that built the Mendip plateau. Water did the rest. Meltwater from the last glaciation carved the gorge over hundreds of thousands of years, and underground rivers cut Gough's Cave and Cox's Cave into the same rock. In 1903 a workman in Gough's Cave found the skeleton of Cheddar Man, a roughly 10,000-year-old hunter still considered the oldest complete human skeleton in Britain.
The gorge itself is open and free to drive or walk; the show caves and the clifftop walk are ticketed by the Cheddar Gorge and Caves attraction. The B3135 is steep and narrow at the pinch, with passing places rather than two clean lanes. Walkers can take the three-mile Gorge Walk along both rims, returning across the top of the plateau. Gough's Cave keeps a small section of cheese store where wheels of Cheddar still mature in the cool dark, on rotation through the seasons.