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.
Photos from out last visit on 8/9/2019.
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 Map GPX download
The B walk,led by Christine, 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 along the flanks of Teggs Nose and Guilshaw Hollow to Tower Hill and White Nancy. Return is S along Kerridge Hill and back to Teggs Nose.
10 miles with 1800' of ascent Map GPX download
The C walk, led by Brian, is a figure of 8 walk starting S following the steep path down to Teggsnose Reservoir (description & photos of this section here) and on a minor road through Langley, home of St Dunstan Inn. Soon a footpath leads to another minor road along Ridge Hill to Higher Sutton to pick up the Gritstone Trail. Heading N the route goes around Ridgegate, Bottoms and Teggsnose Reservoirs, then along the E flank of Teggs Nose to Walker Barn. It's then a short walk SW back to the Visitor Centre.
8.5 miles with 1400' of ascent Map 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. Seventy years on, the activity on this hill is all to do with leisure.