Wirral's Viking Trail

  The boat beneath the car park January 13, 2022 New pub being built behind original Railway Inn, 1938 In 2007 a planning application was made to construct a patio extension at the Railway Inn, Meols. The assessment that routinely followed by the County Archaeology Office revealed a document reporting a vessel of unknown antiquity that had been buried underneath. Potentially an archaeologist’s dream: a major find under a pub! In 1938, when the Railway Inn was being knocked down and rebuilt further from the road, the site of the old pub being made into a car park, workmen had revealed part of a clinker vessel from under the waterlogged blue clay 2-3 metres below the original pub. A  clinker  has overlapping planks, a style which originated from Scandinavia over 2000 years ago  –  mastered by the Angles and Vikings and characteristic of all their shipping – and a style of boatbuilding so successful it has subsequently been used through the ages and is still used t...

  A hogback in Bidston A Viking Age stone carving, believed to be a hogback, was discovered in Bidston in 1994 and is the smallest known example of this type of stone monument. It was found in a rockery in a garden in School Lane, Bidston and was subsequently recognised as of pre-Norman date by landscape archaeologist Jenny Whalley. Stylistically it can be dated to the tenth century. The house had been the vicarage for the nearby St Oswald’s church from 1936 to 1986. The stone probably originally came from St Oswald’s churchyard. The earliest documentary record of the church dates to the late thirteenth century, although the present building is mainly work of a restoration of 1855-6. The circular shape of the grounds at St Oswald’s suggests that this may have been the site of an early medieval church before Vikings arrived. The original parish stretched across much of the north end of the Wirral from the edge of West Kirby to the Mersey, including Bidston, Moreton, Saughall Mas...

In 2007 Steve published a peer reviewed paper in the  Journal of the English Place Name Society  (vol 39, pages 46-57) describing the distribution of the Old Norse topological names referring to marshy, wetland areas - namely  carrs  (Old Norse  kjarr  - brushwood on a marsh) and  holms  (Old Norse  holmr  - island of dry land in a marshy/wetland area) - and then its relevance to the Battle of Brunanburh. The Wirral Carrs and Holms Stephen Harding University of Nottingham The Wirral peninsula in north-west England (Figure 1) was once home to a vibrant colony of Scandinavian settlers, many of whom were Norsemen expelled from Ireland. The arrival of one group, led by Ingimund in AD 902, has now been well described but there were others, including Danes (Cavill et al. 2000 & refs therein). The intensity of the settlement is borne out by the distribution of major or settlement names in Wirral, such as Arrowe, Caldy, Claughton...