Cheddar Gorge

Yesterday we visited cheddar. If you are wondering why this town is named after cheese--it's because cheddar was invented here. One method that people used to age cheese was to lock it in caves. The reason they did that was the caves kept a even temperature of 11° C. It was a perfect temperature for the cheese. I also got to tour around Cheddar and look at some cool stuff.

Cheddar Gorge is a really old rock formation, it took 300 million years to form. It was carved from the melting of the glaciers. It is made mostly out of limestone. When archeologists where exploring Cheddar Gorge and its caverns, they came across England’s oldest complete skeleton; they named him “the Cheddar Man”. Another interesting tourist attraction is Jacob’s Latter, it is 274 steps leading from the bottom of the gorge to the top. People that live in Cheddar say that “ how long the human race has been on the face of the world is about as thick as a piece of paper, then look down the stairs. All of those stairs is how long the the world has been around; 250 million years”. If humans have been on earth for about 5,000 years, I calculated that all that paper would not



stretch down the whole flight of stairs. 250 million years would only be 5,000 sheets of paper; that amount of paper would only cover about 10 steps instead of 274.