Walk 328 -- Wallasey to Neston

Ages:  Colin was 71 years and 52 days.  Rosemary was 68 years and 194 days.

Weather:  Mostly dry with some sun.  Occasional very slight drizzle which never came to anything.
Location:  Wallasey to Neston.
Distance:  16 miles.
Total distance:  3378 miles.
Terrain:  Concrete promenades.  Firm beach sand.  Cycle track on old railway.  Flat.
Tide:  Out, coming in this afternoon.
Rivers: None.
Ferries:  None.
Piers:  None.
Kissing gates:  No.422 as we left West Kirby.
Pubs:  None.
‘English Heritage’ properties:  None.
Ferris wheels:  None.
Diversions:  None.
How we got there and back:  We were staying in our caravan which was on a small farm site in North Wales, near St Asaph.  This morning we drove to Neston where we parked on the water front, again for free!  We walked up to Neston town centre where we caught a bus to Birkenhead, then another bus to Wallasey village.  (We used our bus passes today, but we won’t be able to use them in Wales because they are for England only.)  We walked down to the seafront to where we finished the last Walk two days ago.
At the end we came, exhausted, to our car.  We had our tea and chocolate biscuits, then we drove back to the caravan in North Wales.

We sat in a shelter and ate our pies before we began today’s Walk.  The weather was much, much better than it was two days ago (well, it could hardly be worse, could it?) and we looked forward to a pleasant hike.  The visibility was so much better too, and, looking behind us, we could clearly see cranes etc at Liverpool Docks which were only a couple of miles away at most.  We watched a Stenaline ferry go out towards Belfast.  In the far distance to the north we could see an offshore windfarm.

The tide was out, so we went down on to the sand fairly soon.  Such a pleasure to walk along a sandy beach once again!  There was a plethora of razor shells, jellyfish and sea urchins on the sands, but we just crunched through them — it was impossible to avoid them.  There were lots of cyclists along the prom, so we much preferred being down on the sand.
Colin discovered his pad had leaked even though he’d only just sorted himself out in the public toilets at the start of the Walk.  He has been referred to one of the top urologists in the country at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, but his appointments are twelve weeks apart and they haven’t yet said what they are going to do about his problem.  He can’t go on like this!  It seems to be far worse when we go walking.  I looked on the map for the next public conveniences, and saw that there was a leisure centre past the next two rock islands.  So we trudged up to the prom after the second island, but only found a posh golf hotel.  However, there was a pill-box on a corner, so Colin climbed over the wall and changed his pad hidden in the privacy of this Second World War artefact.

Much more comfortable, we returned to the beach.  The tide was now so far out it was over the horizon.  Looking back we couldn’t see the river at all between us and the docks.  (The Mersey’s gone!  Who’s pinched it?)   

We saw some bait-diggers, and we passed three lifeguards sitting in a kind of open shed — but there was no water in front of them!  (Perhaps they were there to rescue idiots caught out by the incoming tide.)  The sand got a bit muddy and slippery, so we returned to the prom to walk.  I slipped on a stranded jellyfish on the way up, it was difficult to avoid them.

We found a single bench up above a car park, with a disused lighthouse behind.  So we sat on it to eat our sarnies.  We just sat there thinking, “This is very pleasant!”  It’s days like this when we know why we’re doing this Trek.  The weather’s calm and pleasant, and it brings us to places we have never thought of visiting before — like the Wirral.  As we got up to leave, a cycling couple stopped and we got chatting.  They were staying in their motor caravan and were cycling the Wirral Way — which we were also following for most of today.  They were very interested in our venture, and cycled alongside us for quite some distance, chatting.  It was nice.

We continued on the concrete prom for a few miles towards Hoylake.  A river ran alongside us along the top of the beach, but as the tide was out there was very little water in it.  Quite a few boats though, tipped sideways as they were stranded on the sand.  As we entered Hoylake we passed a very pretty Victorian drinking fountain — the Victorians certainly knew how to build practical things with style!

Hoylake is a popular resort, and it was a nice sunny Saturday in June so there were a lot of people about on the prom and the beach.  We bought ice creams and sat by a model boat lake to eat them, watching children sail their toy boats.  It felt quaintly old-fashioned and rather comforting in this modern digital age.

Further along we watched families playing beach cricket, and a pony galloping along the sands with a young rider on its back — the age-old things that people have always loved doing at the seaside.

We passed the lifeboat station with a fine sculpture outside.  Full of energy, the statue is a memorial to a number of lifeboatmen (mostly teenagers) who died in a tragedy back in 1810.  A long time ago, but never forgotten.

We came across another pirate ship built from beach rubbish, very like the one we had passed in the wet at New Brighton two days ago.  Branches were lined up on the grass, and people were still constructing this one.  Colin spoke to one of the workers who told him they have to continually repair them because children play on them — but that’s what they’re for so they don’t really mind.  However, they did mind when vandals set fire to the one in New Brighton.  The local community responded by two hundred of them turning up to build a new one!

We came to the end of the prom and took an “alternative beach route” which was signposted.  This led us back on to the sand, but it was quite firm here.  It got a bit slippy as we approached the corner, and we came across a huge jellyfish there.  We could see the mountains of Wales in the distance well before we got to the corner.

As we rounded the corner I climbed over swirly rocks but Colin walked round on the sand.  He said it was OK, not at all slippery, so I went down an old concrete lifeboat ramp and joined him.

We turned south and decided to walk to West Kirby on the beach because it was so nice.  We thought the tide should be in by now, but there was still no water between us and an island on which there seemed to be several houses — well, buildings anyway.  There was no sign of a causeway, and we wondered how the people got there across soft and slippery sand.
The beach began to get a bit muddy.  We were now in the Dee Estuary, and there was marsh-grass growing everywhere.   So we decided to go up to the beach top which we could see was busy with people.  We felt it was a bit déjà-vu as we leapt from tuft to tuft of marsh-grass — we have definitely done this before!  But we reached the path unscathed, and found there was a sandy track all the way into West Kirby.

We sat on the first bench we came to and ate our apples.  Colin declared he “couldn’t be bothered” to walk round the huge marine lake which was in front of us.  I thought that the path must be narrow and possibly slippery (I was remembering Brighton Marina all those years ago!) because it looked like that from a distance.  But whilst waiting (for ages and for the umpteenth time, poor Colin) for him to sort himself out in the nearby public loo, I noticed that families with small children, dogs and buggies were walking it.  Surely it must be safe?  So I changed my mind, and when Colin rejoined me he was much more comfortable, and he agreed.

We found it to be a wide safe tarmacked path after all.  We were requested to keep off the rocks, no cyclists and no dog fouling, but we had no difficulty complying with these requests.  It was a very pleasant walk, and we watched novice wind-surfers practising on the lake as we marched by.
At the further end we had to go inland a bit, then through a housing estate to a little country park.  Colin insisted we sat on a bench overlooking the estuary to eat our chocolate, and it was rather pleasant.  But we had no food left now — neither of us realised we were little more than halfway along today’s Walk.

We turned on to the track of an old railway which we followed for miles!  There were two parallel tracks, a wider one for cyclists and a narrower one for walkers.  We followed the latter mostly, except where it was overgrown and muddy.  The only other walkers we came across were a girl, her mother and their dog — but they were sauntering along and we soon left them behind.  Quite a few cyclists were using the route, in both directions.  We passed under a number of bridges, one was badly cracked!

Through one bridge Colin stood on a station platform and pretended to wait for a train.  Sorry, you’ve got to walk!  Sometimes we could see the estuary away to our right, but it was not as far away as it looked because there was an increasing amount of marsh-grass which looked like fields.

In Heswall the cycle track turned on to a residential road, then it turned back on to the old railway at the next bridge.  The following bridge was supported by a colossal buttress — they’d obviously had a lot of trouble with it.  We turned off the railway there, walked over the supported bridge (it didn’t creak!) and down to the marsh.  Concrete steps led us round a corner on to a concrete-based footpath along the edge of the marsh.  We were pleased that this footpath was in an excellent state, much better than we had been expecting — we had been wondering, because we have been let down so many times before, especially when it comes to marshes.  We even met a couple coming the other way.

We crossed a footbridge which marked the boundary between Merseyside and Cheshire, and the footpath immediately improved dramatically.  It was now of wheelchair quality.  We passed a wooden seat on which were carved pictures of the numerous birds to be found on the estuary just here.  A real work of Art!

We came to a car park, and then on to a road which ran along the ‘sea’ front.  It reminded us of Grange-over-Sands because there was a lovely prom with railings, but grass instead of a beach!  A notice told us that ships used to anchor in the main river channel a mere fifty yards out from this spot.  But this all came to an end when the river was artificially forced to flow along the Welsh shore.  This place was also a bathing resort until the 1930s.

We read a notice telling us about the Parkgate Marsh project to reduce the mosquito population in an environmentally friendly way.  This is by de-silting the main drainage gutter and creating deeper pools.  I wonder if it is working.

We walked past all the buildings to find our car parked at the end.  We have been pleasantly surprised to discover that the Wirral is such a pleasant place to be.  We really liked it.

That ended Walk no.328, we shall pick up Walk no.329 by the ‘sea’ front in Neston.   It was eight o’clock, so the Walk had taken us eight and a half hours.  We had our tea and chocolate biscuits, then we drove back to the caravan in North Wales.

Walk 327 -- Crosby, via Liverpool, to Wallasey

Ages:  Colin was 71 years and 50 days.  Rosemary was 68 years and 192 days.

Weather:  Persistent rain which got increasingly unpleasant as the day progressed.
Location:  Crosby, via Liverpool, to Wallasey.
Distance:  14 miles.
Total distance:  3362 miles.
Terrain:  Sandy beach at start.  Then all concrete.  Flat.
Tide:  Out, coming in.  Out at end.
Rivers: No.402, River Mersey.
Ferries:  No.24 across the Mersey — “The Most Famous Ferry in the World!”  Fare:  £3 each.
Piers:  None.
Kissing gates:  None.
Pubs:  ‘Queen’s Royal’ in New Brighton, where we drank Hawkshead ‘Windermere Pale’ and Phoenix ‘Monkeytown Mild’ and ‘Wobbly Bob’.
‘English Heritage’ properties:  None.
Ferris wheels:  None.
Diversions:  None.
How we got there and back:  Yesterday we towed our caravan from home to a small farm site in North Wales, near St Asaph.  This morning we drove to Wallasey where we parked on the sea front — free parking all along!  We walked to nearby Wallasey Grove Road station where we caught a train to Liverpool, then another train to Hall Road.  (The trains in Liverpool are a bit like the London Underground!)  We walked down the road to Crosby beach.
At the end we came to our car soaking wet and feeling very cold.  We took off our wet stuff and then drove back to the pub in New Brighton to warm up with refreshing beer.  Then we drove back to our caravan in North Wales.

The toilets at the station were out of order, as they were five weeks ago when we were last in the area.  The toilets on the beach cost 20p a go, even the disabled cubicle — there was no provision for Radar keys.  So we weren’t best pleased, particularly Colin with his bladder problem.  It started raining as soon as we got off the train,  It was very light at first so we didn’t put on our wet-weather gear until we reached the beach.

Along the top of the beach, by the car park, were a number of exercise stations.  Some youngsters were hanging off the apparatus, we were glad to see.  (They’d put aside their mobile phones for a few moments!)

We looked at Anthony Gormley’s sculpture “Another Place” — we didn’t realise there were so many of these iron men.  They are all exactly the same, each a replica of the artist’s naked body.  We walked along the sandy beach for miles, and still we could see these statues stretching from the top of the beach to the low tide line.  (We learned, later, that there are one hundred of them.)  Some of them were half-buried in the sand and some stood high on little platforms as the tides washed the sands along.

They had previously stood on beaches in Germany, Norway and Belgium before coming to Crosby Beach.  They were supposed to be moving on to New York in 2007, but the local people liked them so much they asked to keep them.  They bring in an enormous number of tourists.  Anthony Gormley agreed to leave them here permanently, saying that Crosby was the ideal place.

We watched a ferry going out, presumably to Ireland.  The tide was right out, and the ferry was so close to the edge of the sea the water didn’t look deep enough for a ship of that size.
We were getting hungry.  Colin speculated that a domed building behind the sand dunes was a leisure centre.  It was raining quite hard by then, and there was a cold wind on the open sands.  We walked up the beach, past a load of stranded jellyfish, to discover that the building was indeed an indoor swimming pool.  What’s more, it had an overhanging roof with a memorial bench under it out of the rain — and we were relieved to find there was a free toilet in the entrance!  So we sat and ate our sandwiches — we hadn’t had the opportunity to find a pie shop today.

We continued along the cycleway behind the dunes.  The rain was still pelting down, but at least we were partially sheltered from the biting wind.  We noticed old Christmas trees had been used to stabilise the dunes.  We’d heard about this project on a television programme — the trees don’t grow because, of course, they have no roots, but if enough of them are stuck in the soft sand it slows the erosion of the dunes.

We could still see iron men, right to the end of the beach.  A huge tanker left the docks ahead, ships are so very big these days.  We had to turn inland where the beach gave way to docks, and we walked round a large leisure lake.  We met a man with a plastic bag on his head to ward off the rain.  He said, “I knew these poo-bags would come in useful one day!”  (It takes all sorts!)  Colin suddenly turned into a park — I almost missed it because my head was down and my hood was up against the awful weather.  It wasn’t a short cut, it just meant we were walking a parallel path away from the traffic.
We exited through a majestic stone gate of which I didn’t take a photograph because it was too wet.  We turned right along a main road which was very busy, and the pavement we had to walk along was not very wide and right next to the traffic.  Colin said, “At least it’s not as bad as the A9 experience!”  (He was referring to Walk 205 — which was easily the most horrendous Walk we have done — alongside the A9 into Wick in similar weather and traffic conditions as today, but no pavement.)  Then he got splashed by a passing lorry and changed his mind!  (Walk 205 was in the far north of Scotland and we walked it in March.  Today we were much further south, in Liverpool, and it is the end of June!  We really can’t believe this weather.)

Few photos were taken because first Colin had to get his umbrella out to hold it up for me, next I had to extract the camera from a poly-bag in my rucksack and set it up in the right direction — and still the wind blew the rain on to the camera lens!  I did take a couple of pictures of Liverpool Dock entrance, and one of a gate labelled ‘emergency access, no parking at any time’ which was blocked by a big lump of concrete — I couldn’t resist that one.
We passed a couple of cafés where, amazingly, they were only just taking in tables from the pavement.  It had been raining for hours, and the wind was bitingly cold.  We agreed not to stop for a café until we reached the ferry.  We were wearing shirts, jumpers, fleeces, hats, gloves and kags — and we were still cold!  Is it summer, or is it not? 
We passed a ‘flat-iron’ shaped building which was obviously a closed pub — so sad to see these fine buildings standing derelict.  We got really fed up with the constant traffic passing so close to us that we constantly got splashed.  We got past the docks, and noticed that there seemed to be another road parallel to the one we were on but nearer the waterfront — where did it come from?  We walked down a side-street to it, and found it was wider and marginally quieter.  We crossed a metal lifting bridge with an ornate tower at the sea end of the lock.  Frustratingly we couldn’t photograph it because it was far too wet and windy to get the camera out.  We were almost at the Liver Birds buildings before we got to the reconstructed waterfront and away from the traffic.  At last we were in the touristy bit.  But we weren’t interested in any of it, we were too wet and cold.
We came to the ferry building and discovered we had nearly an hour to wait for the boat to Seacombe.  That didn’t matter because there was a café there — tea and sticky buns were soon on order!  It gave us an opportunity to warm up and dry out a bit.  We felt quite refreshed after that.

We boarded the ferry and sat under a corrugated plastic roof.  Seagulls were walking about on top of it, we could hear them and see their feet.  I took a video of them.

It was so misty by then we could hardly see the other side of the Mersey!  They kept telling us it was “The Most Famous Ferry in the World” but it seemed a pretty ordinary ferry to us.  As we were leaving I took lots of pictures of Liverpool from under the plastic roof.  Ten minutes later we docked at Seacombe.

It was still raining cats and dogs, and it was still cold.  There was a cycleway all along the waterfront to Wallasey, we were very impressed about that.  It kept us away from the traffic, but there wasn’t much of that either.  Only the wretched weather spoilt things. We route-marched all the way to New Brighton.  We could hardly see across the Mersey to the docks as we passed them, it felt like the depths of winter!

We stopped at a large shelter where we were able to sit out of the rain and eat our apples.  Just round the corner in the same shelter a group of teenagers were fooling about and smoking, but they didn’t bother us.
We came to the end, New Brighton, where the Mersey flows out into the sea.  There was a pirate ship made out of beach rubbish on the shore — we admired it, but not for long because we were too cold.

We bypassed a fort, but without any interest because the weather was so foul.  We had to turn west, into the wind with the rain in our faces.  Yuk!  We didn’t notice a lighthouse because our heads were down and our hoods pulled forward.  Colin even gave up fighting with his umbrella — things were getting serious!
Colin noticed we were passing the pub he wanted to go to, but we agreed to finish the Walk first and then drive back to it because once inside we wouldn’t want to do any more walking in this weather.  We passed a clown sculpture which said “Welcome to New Brighton”, but by then we were only interested in surviving so it went un-photographed.  We stomped on.
As we approached the car the rain ceased, but the cold wind didn’t drop.  The sky at last began to clear — Sod’s Law! 

That ended Walk no.327, we shall pick up Walk no.328 on the seafront in Wallasey.   It was quarter past six, so the Walk had taken us seven hours.  We took off our wet stuff and then drove back to the pub in New Brighton to warm up with refreshing beer.  After that we drove back to our caravan in North Wales.