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Download audio/visual 'Tegg's Nose From Your Armchair Track 3'
The text below is a transcript of Track 3 of the walk.
In Britain, we only have fifty six species of butterfly compared to two and a half thousand species of moth. In summer, these wild bits are an important busy feeding station.
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Each of these plants has its own fascinating history. Just take rosebay willow herb for example. It’s about four feet tall and during the last war, it got the name of fire weed as it cropped up wherever there was a fire and at one time it was suggested that the Germans were putting the seeds into nosecones of bombs as it always came up on bomb sites. In 1840, it was described as quite a rare plant and now it can be found in every county. It’s journey probably followed the introduction of the railways.
Most plants and animals have a Latin name as well as a common name. Epilobium Angustifolium is rosebay’s Latin name. Some people ask why this is? Why they have Latin names, and I’m not too sure myself really. But the Latin name comes in handy as if you’re giving a guided walk, you can guarantee that some bright spark will ask you some plant’s name that you’ve never seen before so it’s always good to pop in your spare Latin name; “oh, er, I can’t remember that one but it’s Latin name’s Lactusapolyfrillicamacrophilia". It seems to keep them quiet for a while anyway. |
As we go into the quarry proper, we can see a small shrubby tree and these are willow. Now willow is quite a remarkable tree.
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It’s been used for lots of things in the past but one of the most remarkable is it’s medicinal properties. As early as the fifth century BC, people were grinding down willow bark to make a painkilling drug to help cure arthritis. Now who first decided to do this, I don’t know but I’ve tried it and it’s the most appalling bitter taste.
Now if I just try it and pull a bit of bark off this twig here and stick it in my mouth and chew it, it’s very bitter and it makes your mouth... ew! As if you’ve eaten lemons. However, the new drug that they extracted from this bark and registered in 1899 was of course aspirin. |
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Now we often hear the willow warbler and right on cue, here it is. I find them difficult to see as they’re often hiding deep in the tree, they’re particularly fond of willow scrub, and birch trees. Just hear it now, the call goes down at the end with a little flourish at the end. In Britain we’ve got about two million pairs, but you don’t often find them in gardens. They like to eat small insects and spiders, I’ll leave him now, and the fruit berries in the autumn. Amazingly every winter, they fly to west Africa and they come back to us for the summer. They only live for five or six years.
I remember as a small boy going out and collecting birds eggs. I had quite a collection. Now of course I’d end up in jail even just for disturbing the nest, let alone removing an egg.
Tegg’s Nose has been a quarry for some time. We think possibly as far back as the fifteenth century. The quarry can be quite a wild place in winter and walkers can often get caught out as the weather is very different from the plane six hundred foot below. The stone on the right side here is very poor quality and it tends to be quite friable.
As we walk on, we find some display machinery that used to work in the quarry. A small stone crusher, a crane and a big square thing that’s actually an old stone saw that used to be run by a steam engine. You can just imagine it years ago with all the noise of the quarry and then men clambering over the rocks, levering them off and it’s said if you stand very quietly, you can still hear the distant sounds of a steam engine.
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The quarry was used to quarry stone for stone kerbs, flagstones and stone cobbles. Some of the time it was quite small scale. Other times, teams of men worked the quarry extensively. There’s evidence of a railway track around the quarry. The rubble was dropped over the end of the nose which we’ll see when we get to the viewpoint.
Tegg’s Nose stone was actually used to widen the promenade at Douglas on the Isle of Man. The work took place between 1928 and 1934.
During the last war, the Americans came and brought big lorries and pneumatic drills and quarried for aggregates to make runways. The pneumatic drills were very welcome by the locals as they had a break from the blasting which actually threw stone into the surrounding valleys.
The wind's just picking up as I walk round here, you can probably hear it. |
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