Wirral Peninsula
The Wirral Peninsula, known locally as the Wirral, is a peninsula in North West England. The roughly rectangular peninsula is about long and wide, and is bounded by the Dee Estuary to the west, the Mersey Estuary to the east and Liverpool Bay to the north.
Historically, the Wirral was wholly in Cheshire; in the Domesday Book, its border with the rest of the county was placed at "two arrow falls from Chester city walls". However, since the Local Government Act 1972, only the southern third has been in Cheshire, with almost all the rest lying in the Metropolitan Borough of Wirral, Merseyside. An area of saltmarsh and reclaimed land adjoining the south-west of the peninsula lies in the Welsh county of Flintshire.
Toponymy
The name Wirral literally means "myrtle corner", from the Old English wir, a myrtle tree, and heal, an angle, corner or slope. It is supposed that the land was once overgrown with bog myrtle, a plant no longer found in the area, but plentiful around Formby, to which the Wirral would once have had a similar habitat. The name was given to the Hundred of Wirral around the 8th century.History
Prehistoric settlement
The earliest evidence of human occupation of the Wirral dates from the Mesolithic period, around 12,000BC. Excavations at Greasby have uncovered flint tools, signs of stake holes and a hearth used by a hunter-gatherer community. Other evidence from about the same period has been found at Irby, Hoylake and New Brighton. Later Neolithic stone axes and pottery have been found in Oxton, Neston, and Meols. At Meols and New Brighton there is evidence of occupation through to the Bronze Age, around 1000BC, and funerary urns of the period have been found at West Kirby and Hilbre.Before the time of the Romans, the Wirral was inhabited by a Celtic tribe, the Cornovii. Artefacts discovered in Meols suggest it was an important port from at least 500BC. Traders came from Gaul and the Mediterranean localities to seek minerals from North Wales and Cheshire. There are remains of a small Iron Age fort at Burton, for which the town was named.
The Romans and Britons
Around AD70, the Romans founded Chester. Evidence of their occupation on the Wirral has been found, including the remains of a road near Prenton, Mollington, Ledsham and Willaston. This road may have continued to the port at Meols, which may have been used as a base for attacking the north Wales coast. Storeton Quarry may also have been used by Romans for materials for sculpture. Remains of possible Roman roads have also been found at Greasby and at Bidston. By the end of the Roman period, pirates were a menace to traders in the Irish Sea, and soldiers may have been garrisoned at Meols to combat this threat.Although Roman rule ended with the departure of the last Roman troops in 410, later coins and other material found at Meols show that it continued to operate as a trading port. Evidence of Celtic Christianity from the 5th or 6th centuries is shown in the originally circular shape of churchyards at Bromborough, Woodchurch and elsewhere, and also in the dedication of the parish church at Wallasey to a 4th-century bishop, Hilary of Poitiers. The Celtic names of Liscard and Landican both suggest an ancient British origin. The name of Wallasey, meaning "Welsh island", is evidence of British settlement. The Welsh name, both ancient and modern, for the Wirral is Cilgwri. In Welsh mythology, the ouzel of Cilgwri was one of the most ancient creatures in the world.
English and Norse
The Anglo-Saxons under Æthelfrith, king of Northumbria, laid waste to Chester around 616. Æthelfrith withdrew, leaving the area west and south of the Mersey to become part of Mercia, and Anglo-Saxon settlers took over the Wirral except the northern tip. Many of the Wirral's villages, such as Willaston, Eastham and Sutton, were established and named at this time.Towards the end of the 9th century, Vikings began raiding the area. They settled along the Dee side of the peninsula, and along the sea coast, giving their villages names such as Kirby, Greasby and Meols. They introduced their own local government system with a parliament at Thingwall. The pseudo-historical Fragmentary Annals of Ireland appears to record the Hiberno-Scandinavian settlement of the Wirral peninsula in its account of the immigration of Ingimundr near Chester. This Irish source places this settlement in the aftermath of the Vikings' expulsion from Dublin in 902, and an unsuccessful attempt to settle on Anglesey soon afterwards. Following these setbacks, Ingimundr is stated to have settled near Chester with the consent of Æthelflæd, co-ruler of Mercia. The boundary of the Viking colony is believed to have passed south of Neston and Raby, and along Dibbinsdale. Evidence of Norse speech on the Wirral can still be seen from place name evidence – such as the common -by – suffixes and names such as Tranmere, which comes from trani melr. Viking Age sculpture corroborates this. Recent Y-DNA research has also revealed the genetic trail left by Scandinavians on the Wirral, specifically relatively high rates of the haplogroup R1a, associated in Britain with Scandinavian ancestry.
Bromborough on the Wirral is also one of the possible sites of an epic battle in 937, the Battle of Brunanburh, which confirmed England as an Anglo-Saxon kingdom. This is the first battle where England united to fight the combined forces of the Norsemen and the Scots, and thus historians consider it the birthplace of England. The battle site covered a large area of the Wirral. Egil's Saga, a story which tells of the battle, may have referred to the Wirral as Wen Heath, Vínheíþr in Icelandic.
The Normans and the early Middle Ages
After invading England in 1066 and subduing Northumbria in 1069–1070, William the Conqueror invaded and ravaged Chester and its surrounding area, laying waste to much of the Wirral. The Domesday survey of 1086 shows that the Wirral then was more densely populated than most of England, and the manor of Eastham, which covered most of the east of the peninsula from Bidston to the River Gowy, was the second largest in Cheshire. Of the 28 former lords of the Wirral manors listed, 12 bore Norse names. By 1086, most of the area was in the hands of Norman lords such as Robert of Rhuddlan, his cousin Hugh d'Avranches, and Hamo de Mascy. The survey shows 405 family heads living in the peninsula, suggesting a total population of 2,000–3,000.The Earls of Chester ruled the whole of the County Palatine, including the Wirral, almost as "a kingdom within a kingdom" for about 250years. Between 1120 and 1123, Earl Ranulph le Meschin made several edicts that converted the Wirral into a hunting forest. This made the area subject to Forest Law which made the hunting of game, such as deer and boar, by unauthorised persons subject to harsh penalties. To enforce the forest laws was a chief forester who was appointed with a ceremonial horn, and the position soon became a hereditary responsibility of the Stanley family. However, after complaints from minor Wirral landowners about the wildness of the area and oppression by the Stanleys, Edward the Black Prince as Earl of Chester agreed to a charter confirming the disafforestation of the Wirral, shortly before his death from amoebic dysentery. The proclamation was issued by his father Edward III on 20 July 1376.
At the end of the 12th century, Birkenhead Priory stood on the west bank of the Mersey at a headland of birch trees, from which the town derives its name. The ruined priory is Merseyside's oldest surviving building and its Benedictine monks provided the first official Mersey ferry service around 1330, having been granted a passage to Liverpool by a charter from Edward III. At this time, large areas of Wirral were owned by Chester Abbey. In 1278 the Abbey was granted the right to hold an annual three-day fair at Bromborough, but the fair declined after the Black Death in 1349. Another fair was established in 1299 at Burton. Meanwhile, Meols continued as an important port, and the eroded coastline there has provided what is described as "the largest collection of medieval domestic items to have come from any single site outside London".
16th, 17th and 18th centuries
A Subsidy Roll of 1545 shows that the population of the Wirral was no more than 4,000. The peninsula was divided into 15 parishes. Most parishes were subdivided into smaller townships, of which the largest in terms of population were Neston, Burton, Wallasey, Tranmere and Liscard, and were the same size as small rural villages.The Wirral's proximity to the port of Chester influenced the history of the Dee side of the peninsula. From about the 14th century, Chester provided facilities for trade with Ireland, Spain, and Germany, and seagoing vessels would "lay to" in the Dee awaiting favourable winds and tides. As the Dee started to silt up, harbouring facilities developed at Shotwick, Burton, Neston, Parkgate, Dawpool, and "Hoyle Lake" or Hoylake. However, there was not a gradual progression of development, and downstream anchorages such as that at Hoyle Lake were in occasional use from medieval times, depending on the weather and state of the tide. The main port facilities were at Neston and Parkgate.
At the same time, larger ships and economic growth in Lancashire stimulated the growth of Liverpool. The first wet dock in Britain was opened in Liverpool in 1715, and the town's population grew from some 6,000 to 80,000 during the 18th century. The need to develop and protect the port led to a chain of lighthouses being built along the north Wirral coast. The commercial expansion of Liverpool, and the increase in stage coach traffic from Chester, also spurred the growth of ferries across the River Mersey. By the end of the 18th century the Wirral side of the Mersey had five ferry houses, at Seacombe, Woodside, the Rock, New Ferry and Eastham.
Other communications were also improving. Turnpike roads linking Chester with Eastham, Woodside, and Neston were built after 1787. In 1793, work began on the Ellesmere Canal, connecting the Mersey with Chester and Shropshire through the fluvioglacial landform known as the Backford gap, and the town of Ellesmere Port began to develop.
The excavation of the New Cut of the Dee, opened in 1737, to improve access to Chester, diverted the river's course to the Welsh side of the estuary and took trade away from the Wirral coastline. Although plans were made to overcome its gradual silting up, including one in 1857 to cut a ship canal from a point between Thurstaston and Heswall to run along the length of the Wirral to Chester, this and other schemes came to nothing, and the focus of general trade moved irrevocably to the much deeper Mersey. However, from the late 18th century there was coal mining near Neston, in tunnels stretching up to under the Dee, and a quay at Denhall was used for coal exports.