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Cheddar caves on the hottest day in May on record? Are you crazy? Not at all. If you knew anything at all and had stood in the caves for 8 hours a day for several weeks in 1986, then you would know from the repeating commentary that the temperature is a constant 11 degrees celsius in the caves. So it was actually a bit chilly.
As expected it took a lot to get Ernie into the cave and for a good five minutes I thought we'd have to abandon our attempt, but somehow Catie persuaded him to get through the gates and though he threatened to run away a couple of times and was worried about passageways falling on his head, we got him round. He had a pretty crap time, but we did it.
We didn't take an audio guide (though good to know that things have moved on and staff don't have to listen to the commentary non-stop any more) as I thought I'd know enough to guide the family. I'd forgotten everything. I even had to google the temperature thing just now.
The cave was hosting an Aardman illuminated show, with depictions of Wallace and Gromit and all the other characters dotted around the passageways. I love Aardman and it's a local-ish success story, but the cave purist in me didn't like it so much. Gough's cave is good enough on its own and it felt like a slightly desperate attempt to gain relevance, by hiding some of the features behind admittedly impressive lifesize Aardman figures. Maybe it's good none of my projects came to fruition or there might be lifesize mes dotted around the caves.
I had forgotten how glorious the big caverns are at Gough's Cave. And Cox's is more exquisite (though unsurprisingly we didn't go there as Ernie had suffered enough). Isn't St Paul's chamber good enough for you, tourists?
We then went across to the museum where a man dressed in stone age clothing (though with a walkie talkie and goggles) was demonstrating flint knapping and other old ways of life and showed us a cow's skull and told us about the extinct aurochs which was a predecessor of our modern cow, but which died out because we ate them all.
It was a real highlight of our trip. The kids were enthralled and both later played with rocks in their grandparents' garden and tapped at them to see if they would make the tinkling sound that indicated that they'd make sharp bits of flint. Then they tried to smash them against each other to make weapons. But at least they'd learned something. As had I. Which is a surprise given the amount of flint I have handled.
We thought about climbing Jacob's Ladder and I had been quite keen. But it was already sweltering and I am pretty sure the effort would have killed me. The walk home in the sun was tough enough.
