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Download audio/visual of 'Tegg's Nose From Your Armchair Track 1'
The text below is a transcript of Track 1 of the walk.
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Hello, my name is Ian Coppack, and welcome to this most unusual guided walk. It’s a guided walk for those folk who are possibly not too good at walking for one reason or another, but still love the countryside, so you’re welcome to use my legs. I’m one of the two rangers that work at Tegg’s Nose Country Park and I’ve got one of the finest jobs in the country. Tegg’s Nose Country Park is owned and managed by Cheshire County Council Countryside Management Service.
If you like, I’ll take you for a short walk around Tegg’s Nose. Off we go, as we walk out of the country park centre, we’re met with a sensational view as the park is about 1200ft above sea level. You can often hear the dogs of Windy Way rescue kennel and that’s just up the road from us.
We’re on top of a hill so everywhere we look is nearly always down hill. We’re surrounded by fields which have dry stone walls for their boundaries, none of them are ploughed and many of the fields have sheep in them. |
On the dry stone walls grows lichen or lichens. The expression is a bit like scone and scones. These lichens are a greeny grey colour and they’re on every stone nearly round here and if we just touch them; they’re quite rough to touch. People used to collect them to make a dye for wool and they get all their nutrients from the air as they’ve got no roots and they just hang on to the stone.
The sheep in the fields are often of the tough grit stone type, they’re not the best groomed sheep in the world and they’ve got speckled faces. We can just hear them over the wall here.
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On the right is a stand of about twenty sycamore trees. This tree is quite a common site in the hills as it’s tough and hardy. In the summer it’s got very large leaves and these leaves have black dots on them which is caused by a fungus called “tar spot”. It just looks like a tar spot, they must have spent ages thinking up that name.
The sycamore leaves are quite large and when they fall they can cause problems for trains. It’s generally the leaf that the railway companies refer to when they say that they’ve got the wrong sort of leaves on the line.
Out on the plain, you can see views out, and on a very good day, people say that they can see the sea, and Liverpool Cathedral.
In the very far distance over there is Fiddler’s Ferry power station and very much nearer is the long hill of Alderley Edge. The mines at Alderley have been in use since the bronze age until the early 20th Century. |
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The two towns down the hill of course are Macclesfield to the left and Bollington to the right. Manchester Airport is to the right of Alderley, the white bit on the left of Manchester Airport is Concorde, now on permanent display.
As you walk out of the country park and off down the path towards the old quarry. There are views out over the Cheshire Plain.
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The most outstanding item on the plane is the Jodrell Bank Observatory and the telescope, well the first telescope was built by Sir Bernard Lovell in 1945, just out of scaffold poles and wire netting and when it was built it was the largest radio telescope in the world.
That telescope enabled him to get funding to build this enormous tracking telescope. This was built using tracks from the gun turrets of HMS Royal Sovereign which was scrapped in 1949. He’s into recycling in a big way.
Now Jodrell Bank is very much an open research centre and every week they invite the public to contribute to their work. One workshop this week is about microlensing using red clump giants. Must see if we can get to that.
Recently I had the pleasure to meet Sir Bernard at his lovely home near Jodrell Bank and I had the opportunity 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.
Ian – He really is quite an amazing man.
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