Britain's most scenic drives: The Cheddar Gorge, Somerset

On a quest to find the country's most glorious roads, Annunciata Elwes explores Somerset's Cheddar Gorge.

Aerial drone photo of Cheddar Gorge, Somerset UK. Taken at sunrise to capture the warmth of the light coming through the gorge and light on the rocks
(Image credit: Alamy Stock Photo)

The jaw-dropping Cliff Road — less romantically, the B3135 — presents about as much drama as one can take when travelling on four wheels.

Horse shoe, Cheddar Gorge, Somerset UK bend photographed from above with a drone.

Starting at Cheddar, this road — unquestionably one of Britain's most scenic drives — weaves through England’s deepest natural canyon like a tangled shoelace, in a tight sandwich between limestone cliffs as tall as 453ft.

Cheddar Gorge, Mendip Hills, Somerset, England, UK

After a few slow, careful miles, rocks start to be replaced by trees and, soon enough, the rolling Mendip Hills open up beneath the road as it sweeps more gently over contours in the landscape towards the village of Ashwick.

The windy road through Cheddar Gorge !

Should you stop to walk along the gorge’s rocky footpaths or the West Mendip way, watch out for resident feral goats, Soay sheep so nimble they can cling to clifftops and the famous Cheddar pinks and rock stonecrop flowering in summer.

Soay sheep in Cheddar Gorge, Somerset, UK


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Annunciata Elwes

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.