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Walk Details:
Start point: Car park 100m north of Cottage Loaf on the A540, Thurstaston
Countryside Rangers' office: Explorer 266, Landranger 108
Ordanance Survey: Explorer 266, Landranger 108
Distance: approx 1.5 miles
Time: approx 1 hour

Getting there:
By bus: Regular bus service 82A from West Kirby/ Heswall Bus Station.
By car: Drive to start point, car park 100m north of Cottage Loaf on A540.

Facilities:
Public Toilets: Wirral Country Park Centre, Station Road, Thurstaston.
Food and Drink: Cottage Loaf, Wirral Country Park Café.
Shops: Irby

Walk Conditions:
Paths are sandy or bare sandstone, and can become slippy when wet. Care must be taken on the short set of steps from the car park and when negotiating an awkward sandstone step on the way to Thor's Stone.

At the other extreme, 20,000 years ago the landscape was scraped clean by the last ice sheet, and there are still areas of rock with no soil cover dating back to that time. When the ice retreated, plants, animals and then people returned. Today the largest wild animals you may be lucky enough to see on the Common are foxes or badgers. Back then there would have been cave bears, woolly rhinoceros, giant Irish elk, and woolly mammoth, all now extinct, as well as the more familiar beaver, bison, brown bear and wolf. Your walk at that time might have been quite exciting!

Think of the walk as a detective story. There are clues to be found to the past, it is like a jig saw puzzle waiting to be pieced together. Explore the landscape, and see what you can find.

Thurstaston Common Local Nature Reserve, jointly managed by the Metropolitan Borough of Wirral and the National Trust, is the largest and best remaining example of lowland heath in Merseyside. It has been designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) due to its regional importance and the occurrence of locally endangered plants and habitats.

Start: Take either of the sandy paths from the car park and climb gently left to the top of Thurstaston Hill.

Although only a modest 255ft high, this is a spectacular viewpoint. The Dee Estuary and North Wales lie to the west, Liverpool Bay to the north, the Mersey and Liverpool skyline across Wirral to the east.
There is a viewfinder erected in memory of Andrew Blair, founder of Liverpool and District Ramblers Association, to help you find your bearings.

The ridge is higher than the surrounding countryside because it is formed of a harder sandstone and has resisted erosion. The dry sandstone ridges have always been good places to settle, and traces of a Mesolithic (middle Stone Age) hunter-gatherer camp have been found less than a mile to the south, perhaps hunting some of the animals we mentioned.

So just think, all those thousands of years ago a family could have stood on this very spot looking at the same view as you can see now, though with much more woodland rather than fields, golf courses and houses. Tracks of animals and people from this time have been found preserved in the mud off the north Wirral and Sefton coasts. Later settlers cleared the trees from the ridge to create grazing for their livestock, and so the lowland heath of the Common came into existence.

Down below is the village of Thurstaston with its church and ancient hall. Another hall, Dawpool, was the home of the Ismay family, owners of the White Star Line and 'Titanic'. The hall has gone, but many of the outbuildings and farm remain.

Follow the path leading east down off the ridge.

The heath is ablaze with colour, yellows and purples, especially in late summer. Three types of heather grow on the Common, common heather (ling), bell heather and crossed- leaved heath, along with gorse and bilberry, but notice that much of the area is now dominated by birch scrub. Without control measures - cutting, spraying and grazing by Herdwick sheep - the whole area would disappear under scrub and bracken, so constant management is required to maintain the heath and associated wildlife.

Common lizards, also known as the viviparous lizard (as they give birth to young rather than lay eggs), are still found here, though we have lost the much rarer sand lizard.

Silver-studded blue butterflies were reintroduced to the area from Shropshire in 1994 but are struggling to survive. It is the only colony in Cheshire and Merseyside. The adults are on the wing between late June and early August, but only live for 4 or 5 days. Watch out for them flitting around on hot summer days, drinking nectar from bell heather and laying eggs on ling.

The heather is also very good for bees. You can watch for honey bees collecting pollen and nectar to take back to nearby hives (local heather honey is the tastiest you can get), or the larger, hairier, bumble bees visiting flower after flower. Older workers learn to detect the 'smell' of other bees and so avoid wasting time at flowers already visited. Bumblebees are disappearing, so take time to watch their industry - they are essential in the pollination of many plant species.

Nightjar, another heathland specialist, has also been lost from Thurstaston within living memory, but there are still plenty of other birds to see. Swallows hawk for insects overhead, long-tailed tits and wrens nest in the gorse, yellowhammers sing 'a little bit of bread and no cheese' all summer, linnets and goldfinches twitter around, and all try to avoid the hunting sparrowhawks and kestrels.

The low cliff on the right of the path is a good place to see how the sandstone is made up of many thin layers or beds. It is thought they are the result of successive flash floods, each depositing a fresh layer of sand. Notice that the sand grains in the various layers are different sizes. Some layers are made up of fine sand, others coarse, the coarser layers representing deposits from stronger, more energetic, floods.

A short distance on, a sandstone 'step' has to be descended. Take care, it can be slippy, and the best way down is at the right hand side.

The isolated house-sized block of very red sandstone is known as Thor's Stone. There are several theories to explain the origins of both the stone and name, some more romantic than others. Some say the stone was raised by the Danes to commemorate the great battle of Brunanburh (Bromborough?) which took place in 937, others that Vikings made blood-sacrifices to their thunder-god on its summit, but, unfortunately, these are Victorian flights of fancy. More realistic theories are that it was scoured by water flows under the ice sheet, or post-glacial erosion has removed the softer surrounding rocks. The most likely explanation is that it is the remains of a quarry, perhaps even the site of the crane for loading blocks into horse-drawn carts.

Look carefully at the layers in the rock and you can make out the outline of 230 million year old desert sand dunes!

The small pool to the left of Thor's Stone is one of the wetland areas to be found on the heath. Wet areas support important plant and animal communities unusual in this area; sundew, marsh gentian, damsel and dragonflies - hawkers, darters and chasers.

The oak trees here have been attacked by gall wasps. These tiny wasps lay their eggs into the plant tissue, which reacts by forming a gall. The wasp larvae then develop within the gall, before emerging as adults. Each wasp species produces a specific gall, and three types can be seen here - spangle, artichoke and knopper.

Follow the path around to the left until you emerge from the trees back on to the ridge.

At this point on the ridge-top notice the way the sandstone surface is curved. The curves reflect the original layers of the sand as it accumulated all those millions of years ago.

On a clear day you can see the Great Orme in the distance beyond the Point of Air. To the left, Moel Famau is the isolated peak behind the Welsh hills.
Follow the ridge left, back towards the hill top, looking out for water ripple marks on the sandstone surface.

An obvious step across the ridge, which can be avoided to the left, is the remains of quarrying, the harder stone being taken away for local building material, mainly for boundary walls.

Just beyond this quarry a diversion can be taken onto a small lower path which drops down right and winds between fallen blocks. You are now below the hard layer of sandstone (the Thurstaston Hard Bed) and can see that the underlying Wilmslow Sandstone Formation is much softer and erodes easily. Look out for the 20cm thick band which is creamy white in contrast to the usual red colour; the red iron oxide has been leached away by water.

Back on the hill top, find the vertical fault plane cutting through the rocks - it shows as a white ridge just below and left of the view point. The surface of the fault was polished by the action of the two rock surfaces sliding past each other. Striations on the fault plane surface are known as 'slickensides' and they point to the direction of slip of the fault.

The underlying rocks across the whole region from the Pennines to Snowdonia were affected by the tectonic movements associated with the final opening of the Atlantic Ocean between Europe and North America about 60 million years ago. Many of the smaller faults caused by these stresses and strains show up on the path as thin parallel veins of a harder white material, quartz, which is more resistant to erosion than the sandstone. The quartz has crystallized from solution in water flowing through the sandstone. Minerals that have crystallized within sediments, turning them into a sedimentary rock, determine how tough the rock will be; in the case of the Thurstaston Hard Bed, this quartz is the cementing mineral.

From the hill top, return down the path to the car park - take care on the steps.

Other features nearby:

Thurstaston Road Cutting (Map ref SJ 242 849)
A long exposure of the Triassic sandstones, one of the best areas in the north-west to see evidence of windblown sand dunes. These beds are similar to those from which gas has been extracted in the Morecambe Bay gas field. WARNING - the A540 is a very busy road, cross to the pavement from the car park with great care. View from pavement only.

Thurstaston Shore and Cliffs (Map ref SJ 235 835)


Martyn Jamieson, Head Ranger