Phil took twenty of us on an interesting 7½ mile walk from Ticknall, round the edge of Foremark Reservoir to
Carvers Rocks and then along the course of the old
Ticknall Tramway, including its tunnels, to the old
limestone workings that the tramway served.
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| The start at Ticknall Village Hall |
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| St George's Church, Ticknall (1842) and the remains of the old church dedicated to St Thomas Becket and blown up with gunpowder
in 1841 |
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| Foremark Reservoir - no picnics today |
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| Carvers Rocks - Millstone grit sandstone crags, part natural outcrop and part man-made, were
quarried in the 19th century for the construction of local buildings. |
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| The Ticknall Tramway was part of a complex of tramways constructed to link the brickyards, lime quarries and lime yards of Ticknall to the Ashby de la Zouch Canal at the Willesley basin near Donisthorpe. |
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| The Ticknall Tramway Tunnels
(1802) are Grade II listed structures. Comprising some of the oldest
railway arches in the world, they were restored by the National Trust and
converted into a footpath in 1995. |
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Ticknall Limeyards lime
kilns were operating as early as the fifteenth century. Lime was burnt to make mortar and plaster or to spread on the fields. |
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| The good, the bad and the ugly (+1), not necessarily in that order |
Note, this route was a Ramblers Route. The description is good (providing you are on route!) but the GPS file downloaded from the Ramblers website was poor, with leg lengths averaging over 90m. Route finding using the file was therefore difficult, especially in the woods near Carvers Rocks.
