Another week has flown by. I had a bit of a head after a big 'do' on Sunday and these days it takes me longer to recover, so I was useless until Tuesday - pathetic! The ol' walking regime fell away for a few days so I did about 8 miles with a pal on Thursday, along the coast from Parkgate to the Harp at Little Neston and back along the Wirral Walk. I had a disaster though.................my favourite fit-flops, so comfy for walking on the flat, fell apart (after four years of almost constant use) and I am gutted! A nice cold glass of wine at the Harp helped, plus wrapping an elastic band around the shoe in order to 'flop' home.
So, the original Harp building was three cottages dating back to the late 17th century designed not for fishermen as you may expect, but for miners who once worked at the long defunct colliery nearby. It has a reputation as being an old smugglers inn as the pub was right on the River Dee until silting up moved the river away from the Cheshire coastline.
On Saturday I went to Wallasey to try and find a venue for some art/craft workshops (another time, another blog). From New Brighton promenade you can see across to Liverpool and although the skyline has altered somewhat with all the new high rise additions, the view never fails to please me. I think of Wirral as a micrcosm of the UK. It has areas of real wealth alongside extreme poverty and you can drive between the different towns in no time at all. Parts of Wallasey are economically deprived but all around are amazing, interesting and historical sections and (as I find with most places) people are so friendly - but maybe that's 'cos I talk to everyone! I walked to The Mazagines, so called because in the 1750's the area was used to store ammunion and shot from ships in port on the Mersey. Some of the cottages there go back to the 17th century and the pub, The Mags for short, was built in 1759 and once used by sailors who were having their outward bound ships reloaded with munitions. I sat in the garden there with my glass of vino and wondered about the lives of people then and now. I guess the nearest to actually seeing the Mersey as they did, was when the Tall Ships came in some years ago, a truly magnificent sight.
A key word in the Blog title is 'random' and this is because I am inclined to go off on tangents, to get engrossed in all sorts of fairly irrelevant stuff out of curiosity. So, true to form, having thought how ignorant I really am about local history, the next day I started to read a couple of books I have here. Sidetracked again, I was reading about the Enclosure Acts - a series of United Kingdom Acts of Parliament (between 1750 and 1860) which enclosed open fields and common land in the country. They removed previously existing rights of local people to carry out activities in these areas, such as cultivation, cutting hay, grazing animals or using other resources such as small timber, fish, and turf. Nothing really changes eh?
Then (are you still with me?) regarding the actual division of land it says “All rights of common shall be forever extinguished over the enclosures made. Infants, married women and lunatics are all treated alike and barred from division of land except through husbands, trustees or attorneys.” I am sure there are a hundred jokes in there somewhere?? I can see that the link might be that at the time of selection, the infants must have been having tantrums and the married women pre-menstual or menopausal. As for the lunatics, I am always wary of trying to define exactly what that means!
