OS Explorer map 266, Wirral & Chester – I do not own this map, and had not visited it before starting this blog. Visited for the first time 19th September 2022.
Google Maps location links: Bidston Hill, Liverpool Lime Street
I visited this map area as part of my All Line Rover trip in September 2022, for which I did day-by-day blog posts already, and am now going through doing my regular posts about the new map areas I visited. The main content below will therefore be just a lightly edited version of relevant parts from my post about Day 3 of the trip; for a more connected narrative I recommend taking a look there instead.
I arrived in this map area on the The Borderlands Line, which runs from Wrexham through the north-east corner of Wales up to Bidston on the Wirral Peninsula. I’d been planning to get in a bit of a walk at some point on this day, and considered a few options – perhaps getting off in the Welsh countryside at Caergwrle or Hope for a walk in the direction of Hope Mountain / Waun-y-Llyn, or to one of the nice heathy green spaces that seem to be plentiful along the western side of the Wirral, such as Heswall Dales or Thurstaston Common. However, the Hope Mountain option was rather too long, and the Wirral green spaces would all have required a lot of walking and bus use to get to and from, which wasn’t very convenient on this bank holiday with its reduced bus frequencies.
I therefore instead got off the train just one stop early, at Upton, for a forty-or-so-minute walk over to Birkenhead North station, which would take me through the green space on Bidston Hill. The walk was pretty nice! There was a nice open heathy space on top of the hill, with an old windmill at the centre. Most notably, there were long views out both westwards over the Irish Sea, where I could see countless wind turbines disappearaing into the distance, and eastwards to central Liverpool.
I made a stop at an Asda, which was surprisingly open though most supermarkets had closed for the funeral day, before entering Birkenhead North station – via its truly giant car park – for a Merseyrail train into central Liverpool. Merseyrail is formally a train operator like any other, operating on the ordinary national rail network, but in practice it’s much more like a metro in central Liverpool, with its frequent service and underground stations running separately from the regional and inter-city trains that stop at the surface stations. Merseyrail is getting shiny new trains, which would’ve been in operation already but whose introuction was, alas, delayed until early 2023, meaning I was on a rather tired, though perfectly functional (and nearly empty) forty-year old train.
Evening was approaching and I was getting tired after my long day’s travelling, so after I got off at Liverpool James Street I decided on just a short walk through the docks and city centre, rather than exploring any more deeply. What I did see of the city seemed very pleasant, so I’d like to come back and explore more thoroughly sometime!
I did, though, go over for a look at the Church of St Luke, which was bombed in the war, and has been left as a roofless shell as a memorial. Unfortunately it was locked, so I couldn’t go inside, but it was still interesting to look at – I could see it for a long wasy as I approached across the city, and since its tower and walls are complete, it’s not at all obvious it’s a ruin, until you get close enough to see that the windows have no glass in, and you can see open sky through them instead of a roof. It also just looked very pretty in the evening sun!
(You may notice that I’m talking about my visit to Liverpool, even though the name of this map is Wirral & Chester. The main map for Liverpool is the separate map 275, however the city centre is also featured on the Wirral map, being in an overlap between the two. Since Bidston Hill is unique to the Wirral map, that means this whole visit counts for that map under The Rules. Map 275 will remain un-visited until I come to a unique area of it!
I got some lunch from a fun little food court just across from the church, before heading back to Lime Street station for my final train of the day, to Manchester, where I’d be staying the next two nights!
Visiting all the maps! 