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Download mp3 of A Guided walk with a Park Ranger Track 7'
The text below is a transcript of Track 7 of the walk.
Teggs Nose is in an environmentally sensitive area, designated because it has special landscape and wildlife interest. The area on your left is a good example of this it is a rich tapestry of heather bilberry and wavy hair grass a majestic grass that gently waves in the wind that’s when we get a gentle wind.
I mentioned before about Countryside management being a balance and this area is a good example we lightly graze this area every year to stop it being overrun with trees that would shade out the plants its quite tricky really on our small site as we like trees too.
At the top of the hill we have our Toposcope it was built by sculptor Reece Ingram and local Drystone Waller Robert Sharpley.
Take some time to look at the points of interest, on a clear day we can see Kinder Scout Bosley Minn even “My House”.
On leaving the Toposcope carry on along the summit with the quarry on your right now stay in this field until we meet a drystone wall at the bottom.
During the summer we have Bollin Valleys Longhorn Cattle on site, one of the most placid breed of cow. Two hundred years ago longhorns were the most popular breed of cow in Cheshire, now it is a rare breed.
The meats very lean but we don’t like to talk about it much in this field.
We recently got a grant from the aggregates levy fund which enable us to rebuild all our drystone walls in this field hopefully it will last another couple of hundred of years.
I was talking to a local stonemason a couple of months ago and he was telling me how he built stonewalls when he was young, and here he is Arthur Warrington.
Ian – Did you do walling on the farm?
Arthur – Oh yes that was one of the first things I had to start doing. When my father died, I had to go and help my older brother to build walls. My first job though was putting the little ones in the middle and making sure the outside stones didn’t slope into the middle. Then sort out all the coping stones and make sure you didn’t build a coping stone in the wall and you built all the big stones at the bottom half of the wall. The farm was 130 acres and most of the land was bounded by walls so it was constant…
Ian – So it was take down and rebuild all the time?
Arthur – Yeah well, as they fell down, you rebuilt them. It was a case of building the gaps up, bit of a boring job I’ll tell you, for a young lad.
Ian – Still difficult to get the youngsters in it now, what sort of stone is it up at Harrop, is it from Kerridge?
Arthur – A lot of the field’s walls were outcrops of rock that got stuck on fields and they’ve been quarried not too far away. It was quite good stone, quite thin, very flat stone, it’s not bad stuff to build with, but a lot of it. You needed a lot of courses to make a wall. A lot of walls when you stood in them, when we built up a gap in the wall, you could always see for years where you’d built it. The rest of the wall was quite rough in comparison. When they were built originally, they were piece work builders and they built them very fast and didn’t go to a lot of fuss. I can still see walls now that I built when I was under 15 and I can still see where I built gaps in the wall. They still look tidy compared to the rest of it and I wasn’t very experienced then. That’s how wall building’s gone.
Ian – Did you enjoy it? I know you didn’t as a child, did you later?
Arther – Oh yeah, as I got older, I could enjoy wall building. It was always much better if there was two of you, someone to talk to.
Ian – But don’t you find when you’re working with somebody else, they always pinch the stone you’ve been eying?
Arthur – Oh yeah, they always pinch the best ones.
Ian - Thank you very much Arthur.
This field is used for sledging in the winter if we get any snow, as we feel it takes some of the pressure off the local farmers.
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