Easter Fun Packs for the children to enjoy and breakfast with our very own Wookey Hole Witch!

Includes FREE tickets to Wookey Hole Attractions

Easter Hotel Package

With the all-new Easter Circus Show during the day and evening entertainment with Bippo the Clown while you eat in the Big Top Restaurant, an exciting time is sure to be had by all, and it doesn’t stop there…the Monster Mill will also be open to Hotel Guests in the evening, including the Wizard’s Play Castle and Vintage Penny Arcade.

Easter Package Includes:

Continental Breakfast with the Wookey Hole Witch
Tickets to Wookey Hole Attractions
One Round of Crazy Golf
FREE Kids Fun Packs
FREE Entry to the Mill and Children’s Play Areas in the evening
Come and be a part of our Easter celebrations and bring the whole family, with family rooms starting from £129 for 2 adults and 2 children, you’ll have a fun-packed stay at Wookey Hole this Easter!

A staggering 700,000 abused, bullied and worried children are expected to need ChildLine by the end of 2012 and without YOUR help, ChildLine can’t be on the phone and online for them.

The clocks go back this month and we all Gain An Hour, so we are asking you to give an hour of what YOU earn – and if you can get 10 people from YOUR company to donate an hour of their time then WOOKEY hole Caves have promised they will send your BOSS in their spooky cave for an hour all alone!

Visit www.heart.co.uk for more details >>

27/07/2011

A Cave Aged Cheddar from Dorset based cheese makers, Ford Farm Wookey Hole Cave age Cheddar  has been crowned Supreme Champion at this year’s International Cheese Awards, winning the accolade ahead of more than 3,700 other competitors.

A panel of 150 expert judges from the dairy industry judged the Farm’s Traditional Farmhouse Cheddar which was made in April 2010 as best in show.

Ford Farm has been dedicated to the art of traditional cheese making for decades.  Five years, ago, Mike Pullin, Managing Director of the Farm decided to revive the age old tradition of maturing cheese in caves.

‘We persuaded Gerry Cottle, owner of the Wookey Hole Caves to dedicate an area of the caves to our truckles.  The concept was really successful.  From our point of view, the Caves provide a fantastic environment for cheese maturing due to the constant humidity and all year round temperature which results in the cheese taking on a deliciously distinctive, earthy flavour. From Gerry’s point of view, the cheese provides an added attraction to visitors to Wookey Hole.

‘We know the cheese is good.  We have won several of awards and we have fans all over the world who praise it regularly.  But to have this verified by a panel of world experts is more than we could possibly hope for.’

Richard Paul, Nantwich Cheese Show Chairman, commented: “We had more than 3,700 entries in all and for the Wookey Hole  Aged Cave Cheddar to have beaten them all to become Supreme Champion means it is a truly exceptional cheese.

“Our panel of 150 expert judges are looking for flavour, for overall appearance and for the truly remarkable – and with our Supreme Champion, along with all the other category winners and runner ups, they found it.’

Ford Farm Wookey Hole Cave Aged Cheddar is available at Wookey Hole and  nationally from the deli counter in Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose and selected independents across the country.

Are they taking a well-earned holiday
after ten long years of appearing in Harry Potter films?

NO ONE WANTS TO BE A WIZARD
Audition Cancelled

If you think Rupert Murdoch’s looking glum, you should see Gerry Cottle, entrepreneur, Circus icon and owner of legendary West Country attraction Wookey Hole. With its spectacular haunted caverns, dinosaur park, and resident Witch of Wookey Hole, all it needed, thought Gerry, was its own wizard Wizard, so up went the cry and off went the recruitment ads.

But so far there’ve been no takers whatsoever for the role of Wookey’s resident Wizard, despite the extremely attractive and exciting venue and a whopping £60k per annum pro rata salary, which is a lot more than most of what’s on offer down at the Job Centre.

“We can’t understand it…” muses Director  Daniel Medley.  “When we recruited our Witch last year there were over 500 hopefuls arriving on their broomsticks and you could barely hear yourself for the cackling, but this time…well, we’ve had to pull the auditions: even though the press and TV were keen to come and cover it, we haven’t managed to attract the Wizards themselves. We’ve even advertised in Witch? Magazine.

“Perhaps they’re striking in protest at what happened to The News of The World, or perhaps the Grand High Murdock, Wizard of Wizards, has warned them off accepting our excellent pay and conditions. It would be typical of his underhand tactics.  At this rate we’ll have to kit Gerry himself out with a pointy hat and a cauldron or two, and that won’t be a pretty sight”.

Wookey Hole is still interested in hearing from any would-be wizards. The minimum qualifications for the £60,000 post are

• A WHITE BEARD -  can be natural or completely artificial
• MAGICAL POWERS - You need to be able to perform convincing magic and cast spells
• WITCH- COMPLIANCE – must be happy working alongside scary hags and witch-babes
• ANIMAL MAGICAL -  must show empathy with cats, owls, frogs, children and vampire bats
• TIME TRAVEL -  You must be able to work at weekends and during school holidays
• PHONE HACKING is no substitute for proper mind-reading so DON’T DO IT.

For more information please contact Daniel Medley 01749 672243

wizard@wookey.co.uk

Wookey Hole Caves, The Mill, Wookey Hole, Somerset BA5 1BB

WIZARD AUDITIONS CANCELLED

John Buxton from Bedford marked his 80th birthday with a cave dive, swimming 2,000 metres underground and underwater.

He managed to reach more than 20 of the underwater chambers in the Wookey Hole Cave system.

Mr Buxton, who has been cave diving since 1953 is believed to be the oldest man ever to cave dive, though he said very firmly that he wasn’t making any claim of this kind.

Fellow cave diver Martin Grass said: “I’ve spoken to people all over the world, and while there have been plenty of people open water diving into their 80s, nobody has ever heard of an octogenarian cave diver.

Mr Buxton said: “I would have liked to have reached the 22nd chamber, but I had an air leak on my jacket and had to turn back.

“The leak, in a buoyancy waistcoat made it difficult to move about underwater.”

There are three chambers with air in them, and 22 chambers in total.

“I’ve just always liked doing it,” said Mr Buxton.

“I was a caver first, and would come across these cave passages made by water and forming puddles, which are called sumps, and said that it was a shame that you couldn’t explore them.

“When someone pointed out the rope leading into the water and said that people were already doing it, so it sounded like a good idea to me.”

In the early days of cave diving, divers used diving suits and after the Second World War would use the re-breathers used by submariners to escape from crippled submarines.

Later Mr Buxton moved to using air tanks underwater.

For his effort in Wookey Hole Caves he used two 12-litre cylinders weighing more than 50 lbs.

Mr Buxton, who has also cave dived in the Bahamas, Florida and Mexico has no intention of hanging up his air tanks.

Here, too are mysteries of man himself. How did the early cavemen, who inhabited these caves, really live from day to day? And what makes a modern diver explore the caverns beyond the sunlight?

Even the earliest men who lived in the valley of Wookey Hole 50,000 years ago, hunting bear and rhinoceros with stone weapons, must have been in awe of the great caves for they had already existed for millions of years.

When, much later, the Celtic peoples of the Iron Age were moving into Britain, they found the caves a safe and even comfortable place to live – inside, the temperature is a constant 11° Celsius. Yet by the 15th century only bones, broken pottery and legends remained.

Then, in 1914 the archaeologist Herbert Balch, having completed a two year excavation of the caves, published his findings, and the age of real exploration had begun…

Visitors came to wonder at the secret river and its encrusted caverns. Perhaps Coleridge was inspired to write the lines: “Where Alph, the sacred river, ran, Through caverns measureless to man”