Land almost encompassed by salty waters,
the Wirral’s peninsula is bounded by
the bird-thronged Dee Estuary to the west,
to the east, the Mersey Estuary
with memories of famine and slaves,
and on its north coast – that stretches straight
as a nautical ruler from Hilbre Point
to Perch Rock – Liverpool Bay, the Irish Sea.
Tradition has it that the Wirral begins
two longbow arrows fall from Chester’s
Roman walls, the city where I write.
There were Viking and Saxon settlements,
their place names surviving – Thingwall, Irby,
Eastham, Moreton. Nelson’s Lady Hamilton
was born in Ness. The carrier Ark Royal
was launched at Cammell Lairds in Birkenhead,
the place of Wilfred Owen’s schooldays,
and one of the first towns to raise a Bantams
Battalion – a thousand small men destined
for slaughter. Port Sunlight was the self-made
Lord Leverhulme’s fiefdom of soap works,
art gallery and war memorial. Some
of England’s poorest wards are in Ellesmere Port,
a town canals and oil and cars created.
There was the ‘wyldrenesse of Wyrale’; wooded,
shallow valleys between low sandstone ridges,
north to south; at its base, a narrow valley
formed by glacial meltwater run-off –
from what would become the two estuaries –
that made Wirral a proper island
until the silts of time grew copses and farmland.
This almost island of my imaginings –
wild thoughts: settlements razed, burning;
the dead unburied under charred beams;
lost orphans, in their thousands, wandering
the ruined fields – not very far from here,
barely two arrows fall.
By David Selzer