Take a Walk in the Macclesfield Area
Take a guided walk in the countryside around Macclesfield, where the Cheshire Plain meets the Peak District. The countryside around Macclesfield is quite varied, so you can walk along riverbanks, canal towpaths, bridleways or footpaths. The walk routes presented here follow many different rights-of-way: quiet lanes, way-marked trails, bridleways, concessionary paths and public footpaths. Each walk follows a circular route (starting and finishing at the same point). The walk selection presented here has a range of distances and difficulty levels, so hopefully you'll find a walk to suit. Here’s a summary of each walk:
| Macc Forest and Tegg’s Nose | 4.2 miles (6.8 km) | Medium |
| Over Alderley and the Edge | 4.5 miles (7.2 km) | Medium |
| Shutlingsloe and Wildboarclough | 7.5 miles (12.1 km) | Medium to hard |
| Rainow and Kerridge | 5.6 miles (9.1 km) | Medium to hard |
| Trentabank and Higher Sutton | 3.8 miles (6.1 km) | Easy to medium |
| Tegg’s Nose and Walker Barn | 3.9 miles (6.3 km) | Medium |
| Rainow and Lamaload | 5.6 miles (9.1 km) | Medium |
| Rainow and Bollington | 4.9 miles (8.0 km) | Easy to Medium |
| Alderley Edge to Bradford Lane | 4 miles (6 km) | Medium |
| Bollington to Adlington | 7 miles (11 km) | Medium to hard |
| Ridgegate to Croker Hill | 7 miles (11 km) | Medium to hard |
| Higher Hurdsfield to Bollington | 5 miles (8 km) | Medium |
| Prestbury to Mottram | 6 miles (10 km) | Easy to Medium |
| Bollington to Lyme Park | 8 miles (14 km) | Medium to hard |
I have also designed some “pub walks”, which start and finish at a pub. There are several good pubs in the Macclesfield area that I would recommend for food and real ale. Here’s a summary of the pub walks:
| The Vale Inn and Bollington | 4, 6 or 8 miles | Medium |
| Leather’s Smithy and Tegg’s Nose | 4.5 miles (7 km) | Medium |
| Crag Inn to Danebridge | 8 miles (13 km) | Medium |
| The Poachers Inn and Bollington | 4, 6 or 8 miles | Medium |
All walks are graded, in accordance with the Walkingworld grading system. Also, an “ascent” figure is given for each walk, in metres. This is the total ascent of the whole walk.
All walk pages have a printer-friendly version, which just contains the text part of the page when printed. A printable PDF-format route card is available for each walk, which is a plain page containing a map of the local area with route step numbers superimposed, plus the route directions. This may also be printed to take on the walk with you.
To view and print PDF files, you must have Adobe® Acrobat® Reader installed: click the logo below to download the software.
Adobe Acrobat documents can be converted back to plain text using Adobe's Online conversion tools for Adobe PDF documents.
Also at the bottom of each walk page is a button to download a GPS file for the walk. Clicking on this will give you the option to ‘Open’ or ‘Save’ the file and you should choose to ‘Save’ it. The files are in a GPX (GPS eXchange) format because this can be read by most different models and makes of GPS receiver, and opened by most mapping software, including Google Earth (Plus version only), Memory Map, Anquet Maps and Tracklogs.
Each walk route has been been tried and tested, so hopefully the directions will be sufficiently clear. If you have any comments about a walk, or suggestions for improvements or new routes, please send them to me, and I'll update the details accordingly.