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Download mp3 of A Guided walk with a Park Ranger Track 1'
The text below is a transcript of Track 1 of the walk.
Hello my name Ian Coppack thank you for joining me today for a walk around the Top of Teggs Nose. Before we start the walk you can pick up a free Map from the Country Park Centre, It’s the Teggs Nose Country Park leaflet and its got a purple cover. On the leaflet box you will see a way mark disc with headphones and track numbers on you will find these way marks all around the route.
As we start our walk, go out of the main entrance of the car park and turn left and follow the signs to the country park. The walk is at a gentle pace and will take you about an hour.
Teggs Nose is owned and managed by Cheshire County Council Countryside Management Service. Two rangers are based at Teggs Nose and they are part of the eight strong east Cheshire team. The park is about 134 acres and 54 hectares if you have gone metric.
We are about 1264 feet above sea level here and from Teggs Nose Summit to the bottom of the park it drops about 600 feet to down near the reservoirs.
The fields either side of the path belong to local farmers and is not part of the Country Park.
The stones here by the side of the path, are not from here until about 1820 how they got here was still a mystery. The stones are very round and our local stones are all very flat.
These round ones are called eratics and were carried down from the north of England during the last ice age in the shifting ice.
On the right you can see a small stand of Sycamore trees, the sycamore is quite a common tree in the hill, it is very sturdy tree, but it is not native to Britain but was brought in the 15th or 16th centaury, it has a large leaf and is generally the leaf that Railtrack refer to as the wrong sort of leaves when leaves are on the line, the leaves are slippy and slimy when they fall, the leaf in this part of the world has large black spots, during the summer it is found on ever leaf its caused by a fungus called tar spot, you only get this fungus where you get clean air, another sign that we get clean air at Teggs Nose is the lichens or likens it’s a bit like scone and scones. Lichens are everywhere over the known world and are the first thing to colonize rock, they have no roots and take all their nutrients from the air, look at them closely, they are really quite lovely .
You may see sheep in the fields here they are the tough local Gritstone sheep. They have a speckled face and are quite small.
At Teggs Nose we are in a working landscape many of our visitors come along with their dogs. We are lucky really as the vast majority are well behaved. Sadly there have been incidences of dogs chasing sheep, immediately we become very unpopular with our neighbours as a dog even just chasing sheep can cause them to abort.
As we walk further down the track and through the gate the most outstanding feature is Jodrell Bank Radio Telescope,the first telescope was built by Sir Bernard Lovell in 1945 just out of scaffold poles and wire netting. When it was built it was the largest radio telescope in the world, the discoveries that he made with this telescope enabled him to get funding to build the tracking telescope, that was built using the tracks form the Gun turrets of HMS Royal Sovereign which was scrapped in 1949.
He is into recycling in a big way.
Jodrell Bank is very much an open research centre the public are invited to add to there debates and their work. I noticed one workshop this week is about microlensing using Red Clump Giants, mustn’t miss that one.
Recently I had the pleasure of meeting Sir Bernard Lovell at his lovely home near Jodrell Bank and I was able to ask him a few questions about the telescope……………….
Ian – And what are they looking for now at Jodrell Bank?
Sir Bernard – Oh, well there’s an enormous amount of work going on, mainly connected, well all connected now with the study of the universe. Different regions and far back in space and time.
Ian – How far back in space can they see?
Sir Bernard - Well, we see individual galaxies back for several billion years. Which means we’re seeing them as they were several billion years ago. But with some of the work dealing with the cosmos microwave background, not all of which is being done at Jodrell. We penetrate back to what is believed to be quite close to the origin of the universe. When has it been? Probably 10 or 12 billion years ago. So we’re now almost entirely astronomical although there has been some, in recent years, some work and involvement with the Americans in the attempt to detect signals from extra terrestrial intelligence.
Ian – Do you think that exists?
Sir Bernard – Nobody knows. But I think that there are one hundred thousand million stars, a lot of them with planets in the Milky Way, billions of similar galaxies. I don’t believe that the present searches which cover a small region near to us will ever detect anything. But the answer is but nobody knows.
He really is a quite amazing man…………. and now back to earth with as bump as we come to the gate that leads us into the County Park
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