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The text below is a transcript of Track 5 of the walk.

There’s a lovely view out in front of us; Langley and Croaker Hill in the distance. We’re on part of the Gritstone Trail here, it’s a long distance trail that Cheshire County Council manages. It's 35 miles long now and it stretches from Kidsgrove to Disley and it goes through some of the most enchanting and at times wild scenery of Cheshire.

You can just hear the crow shouting over there, it’s one of the bother boys of the bird world, I’m sure if it were human it would wear a leather jacket with studs in. You can generally tell it's a crow by the old country saying that a “crow in a crowd is a rook and a rook on it's own is a crow.”

Now if you visit the park in the summer, the meadow here that I’m walking through is covered in tiny yellow mountain pansy flowers. The flower flourishes in this meadow and it’s quite an unusual flower in Cheshire and it’s a relative of the pansy. The quarry workers used to play football on this field at dinnertime. Needless to say, now it’s called the football field. As we walk further down the slope we come to an area that gently becomes more tree covered. In the distance as we come down here, we can just hear the yaffle of the green woodpecker. Oh I think I might have disturbed it. There it goes. It’s like all woodpeckers, it’s got a very distinctive flight up and down like a wave. As I was saying, it’s the largest of the woodpeckers, the green woodpecker. Three woodpeckers in Britain, the Great Spotted Woodpecker, and the Lesser Spotted Woodpecker which I have seen on the site but I haven’t seen here for about 5 years, it’s getting quite rare now. They all nest in holes that they dig out of trees.

During the summer, we have the Bollin Valley’s Longhorn cattle on site, one of the most placid breeds of cow. Two hundred years ago, Longhorns were the most popular breeds of cow in Cheshire but now it’s a rare breed. The meat is 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 DEFRA (the Department of Environment and Rural Affairs) gave us and we were able to rebuild all our walls in this part of the field which has made such a difference and hopefully last for another couple of hundred years now.

I was talking to a local stone mason a couple of weeks ago and he was telling me how he built stone walls when he was young and here he is talking about it, 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? Arthur – 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.

Now as we walk down the track here, we come to a small stream which we’ll cross by these stepping stones and we’ll take a short cut over the bridleway.

There, just there! Wow! That’s just, down on that field of swallows, brilliant, just flying down. They’re eating the flies on the wing. They spend most of their life on the wing and they say they even mate on the wing. I’d expect that takes some practice.

Until the 19th century, the disappearance of the swallows in the summer was something of a mystery. Because, you see, at the end of the summer they would just gather in large numbers around the ponds and coastal marshes and then they'd suddenly disappear. Many people thought that they went down into the mud to sleep through the winter with the frogs. But of course the true story is even more amazing as they fly to South Africa and it’s known from the ring birds that they catch; they catch them both ends of the journey so they can see what’s going on. They can take as little as five weeks to do the journey. It must be quite tough on the chick in their first year to do that journey.

The first swallows we generally see in England are the males and they are on the lookout for the nesting sites. The same pair will nest in the same spot year after year. The number of swallows visiting Britain has dropped sharply since the 60s and 70s. The problem is easy to see really as you drive round in the summer. The number of insects on the car windscreens is decreasing rapidly year by year and these of course are food for many a bird species. Bluebottles they say are supposed to be the swallows favourite food. So think twice before you swat the next fly in the house.

And as we walk down the track here to the centre, the view over the last 50 years has changed quite a bit as the big house in the distance used to be the Quarry Manager’s house.

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