Teggs Nose Country Park is near Macclesfield with facilities including loos and a tea room. Journey time is the same as to Ambleside.

From Teggs Nose, you can survey not just the Cheshire Plain, with Jodrell Bank in the middle distance and the Welsh mountains on the horizon, but also the hills undulating towards the Macclesfield Forest.

All walks are circular from the Visitor Centre and on the White Peak OS map.

The A walk, led by Jim, descends S to Teggsnose and Bottoms Reservoirs then SE past Ridgegate and Trentaback Reservoirs to Shutlingsloe. From there it's generally NE alongside Cumberland Brook and on to the Cat & Fiddle on the A537, continuing N to Shining Tor. Dropping down NW to Lamaload Reservoir it's then SW back to Teggs Nose.

13 miles with 2700' of ascent A route on Google Earth A route gpx download

The B walk is to White Nancy which was built in 1817 by John Gaskell of North End Farm to commemorate the Battle of Waterloo. From the car park the route initially goes S to the view points before heading N to Kerridge Hill and White Nancy. Return is via Bollington and Rainow (home of the Robin Hood Inn) then on the Gritstone Trail back to Teggs Nose.

8 miles with 1550' of ascent Map and photos here B route on Google Earth B route gpx download

The C walk is a figure of 8 walk to Trentabank Reservoir Wildlife Reserve (where the Visitor Centre has loos and a possibly a cafe) returning via Langley, home of St Dunstan Inn. The route heads S following the steep path down to Teggsnose Reservoir (description & photos of this section here) and the adjacent Bottoms Reservoir then E past Ridgegate Reservoir to Trentabank Reservoir. Minor roads are followed to Langley, after which the outgoing route is crossed between Teggsnose and Bottoms Reservoirs to follow the path along the base of Teggs Nose hill to the final 300' climb up Saddlers Way back to the start.

6 miles with 1050' of ascent C route on Google Earth C route gpx download

Teggs Nose History

We cannot be sure how this chunk of sandstone got its name. Early maps give it as ‘Tegge’s Naze’. Was ‘Tegge’ an early Norse settler, or does the name come from ‘teg’ for sheep, because the hill was once thought to resemble a sheep?

One thing of which we can be sure: Tegg’s Nose now looks very different from when it was first named. Five hundred years or so of quarrying have seen to that. The sheer stone faces now used for climbing and abseiling were where men once spent long, miserable and dangerous days extracting millstone grit; the hillocks now decked with heather and bilberry were once the quarry’s spoil heaps. At first, that high-quality stone was prised away using pick axes and bars but as demand for this traditional raw material declined, the quarry’s output shifted towards pulverised rubble for road construction. The rock-crushing machine, installed in 1938, which smashed 100 tonnes of sandstone a day, is still to be seen on the path around Tegg’s Nose. Quarrying ceased in 1955. Sixty years on, the activity on this hill is all to do with leisure.