Macclesfield Forest and Tegg's Nose: A Local Loop

Not every walk has to be a massive expedition with packed lunches and 4am alarms. Some weekends you just want to get out for a few hours, get muddy, and be home in time for a roast. Macclesfield Forest and Tegg's Nose is exactly that kind of walk, and it happens to be one of the closest hills to where we live, so we end up here loads.

We parked at the Tegg's Nose Country Park car park, which is high up already so you get a head start on the views. Within five minutes of leaving the car you're looking out over the Cheshire Plain – on a clear day you can see Liverpool cathedral, the Welsh hills, Jodrell Bank radio telescope (it looks like a giant white satellite dish in a field), and even the Beetham Tower in Manchester. Not bad for a hill in your own back garden.

Tegg's Nose itself used to be a working quarry, and there are still loads of the old stone-cutting machines left scattered about as a kind of outdoor museum. There's a massive saw with a circular blade taller than Hugo, all rusted and frozen in time. We always stop to play on them (carefully, Mum insists). The path from there drops down a really steep set of steps – the kind where your knees are complaining the whole way – and into the edge of Macclesfield Forest.

The forest is mostly tall, dark pines planted in long straight rows, with deep mossy floors and very little undergrowth. It's really quiet in there, the kind of quiet where you can hear a single pinecone fall from forty metres up. We saw a red squirrel last time we did this walk – Hugo swears it was a red one and not a grey, but Dad reckons it was just a particularly ginger grey. Either way, lots of squirrels.

The path takes you past Trentabank Reservoir, which is a calm dark mirror surrounded by trees. There's a heronry here – one of the biggest in the Peak District – and you can see the messy stick nests high up in the pines. In spring there are dozens of herons standing around like tall grumpy old men. Then you climb back up through Tegg's Nose Wood, which is a steady slog but never horrible.

We finished with hot chocolate from the café at the Country Park visitor centre, sitting on a bench watching paragliders launch off the edge of Tegg's Nose into the wind. The whole loop is about 4 miles, takes maybe two and a half hours with stops, and proves you don't need to drive to Wales every weekend to feel like you've had an adventure. Local walks count just as much. We're lucky to have this on our doorstep.