I thought I'd put a couple of pictures up of the cliffs after seeing the "Thurstaston face" image in the Photo Gallery.

These cliffs are eroding boulder clay, and are designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest and cannot be protected from erosion - it is the erosion that is important to their status.


There's a couple of pics of slips attached somewhere to this message



Sometimes this can cause unstable-looking outcrops to appear - here's one from a couple of years back


See the big crack from the top coming vertically down towards a smaller crack at lower left.... just to the left of this there was a lens of sand in the boulder clay which had been eroded/dug out by kids. That just made the potential for a collapse here worse. Also, within the dug-out hole, several horizontal holes had been driven in by an escape committee of rabbits, further undermining the overhang. Anyway, safest solution was to pull the lot down in a controlled fashion, as shown.

Final picture shows how everything looked 6 months later.

(There may or may not be 5 photos attached to this post, in some sort of random order, depending how badly I've messed it up)

Part of me thinks it good to let nature take it's course and let the erosion continue but then I think how far can it go before it impacts elsewhere????
I'm surprised that you don't seem to get loads of fossil hunters there - I would think there were loads if you're into that sort of thing.

I've looked for fossils there Softy. Didn't find much, if anything. The clay contains a good variety of rocks though. If I were a keen geologist I'd get excited about where the rocks had originally come from. I was told by my geology teacher that a lot of them came from the Lake District.

Thank god youre not

Good interesting pics. The East Coast thinks they're the only ones that are eroding, mind you the worried ones are those that bought houses set back from the coast and now they are part of the beach, unlucky.

would the machine have to have gotten on to the beach at West Kirby and gone along the shoreline to that spot
I take it thats where the steps are at the bottom of Station Road

Anyone any idea where it got on to the shore and how far the tide
goes up to (if it does) the cliffs

many moons have passed since I was last there

The machine could have got on to the beach at West Kirby marine lake, at the end of Macdonna drive or the other end of Cubbins green. Also it could have gone down the slope at Caldy sailing club which is nearest and most likely. The tide obviously does reach the cliffs but not very often. It is not eroding any where near as fast as places in the east coast I visited last year.

Hi

The machine came down Thurstaston Slipway (Dee Sailing Club). The steps are south of Station Road (sometimes known as Tinker's Dell). The tide can come up the side of the cliffs a good metre or two depending if its a high spring tide or not. If it's windy you can have waves on top of that.

When we were down there last weekend, when I took the 'face' photo, we could only just get past the bottom of the cliffs and the tide had turned.

Those houses down by Caldy steps look particularly vulnerable. Okay, they have big gardens, but you can tell by some of the out-buildings and summer houses now teetering on the brink that the cliff is still receding, despite boulders being placed at its foot.

Is erosion all due to the action of the sea I wonder, or can land drainage also eat away at the soft boulder-clay cliffs?

The problem with defending against erosion is that it is a natural process, and what is lost from one area is usually deposited down the coast, forming a defence there - so interfere with this, and the likely outcome is short-term success in a very specific spot, but much increased damage elsewhere.