Wirral Country Park

Tuesday
Janet and John were busy today, so Roger and I took Bernard, my father-in-law, to the Wirral Country Park. The Wirral, for my American readers, is a peninsula southwest of Liverpool. The peninsula, roughly rectangular in shape, is 15 miles long and 7 miles wide and is bounded by the River Dee to the west that forms a boundary with Wales, the River Mersey to the east, and the Irish Sea to the north. For over 70 years, from the height of the Victorian era onwards, a busy railway linked Hooton, on the main Chester-to-Birkenhead line, to West Kirby, 12 miles away at Wirral's tip. But in 1962 the line was closed. For a while the track lay derelict, but in 1973, backed by money from the Countryside Commission the old railway line was opened as Wirral Country Park. It was the first Country Park in Britain. Unfortunately, our day didn’t go quite as planned. We arrived, and assembled the mobility scooter, only to find we didn’t have the keys! They are on his Dad’s key ring, but as we were leaving the house Bernard realized he didn’t have his keys, and Roger said he’d lock up using his set of keys, none of us realizing the significance at the time! So we had to compromise and were able to push the scooter,(feeling rather foolish!), to a sunny spot not too far from the car, and overlooking the estuary, where his Dad could sit and enjoy the view while we went for a walk along some of the footpaths and part of the rail trail. On our way back home, we went on a trip down Memory lane for Bernard, since when he was evacuated from Guernsey during the war, at the age of almost 12, with two of his brothers, they were sent initially to the Wirral Peninsula, and whilst these days he struggles to remember what happened yesterday, his memories from back then are quite vivid!
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