Anyone here into there magnet fishing. Looking for some good sites.

I'd never heard of that; had to look it up! Sounds like fun - kind of - with the extra thrill *ahem* of possibly fishing out WWII ordnance, knife to be handed in to police or similar... Have fun - and good luck! You could maybe start with places like the Marine Lake, park lakes etc?

Potentially dangerous !

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-47801408

Birkenhead park ponds used to be great dumps for knives, shotguns, pistols going back a long way. They got cleaned up a while back but I am sure our local and lovable scally lads will have filled them up. As kids in Seacombe we used to watch the ships going through the first (or last) of the four bridges on the Wallasey side in the early sixties. Foreign sailors would throw down coins most of which ended up in the dock. They also would throw knives to us boys and they went in too. Captain's Pit in Wallasey is worth a go. I know anglers might not be happy with magnets being flung in but just go at night or when they are not there. There used to be a guy in the mid 60s called Mad Dougie who lived alone in a big mansion up on Warren Drive. His parents had left a big chest of gold sovereigns and he used to carry it around showing the contents to us kids. They were Victorian and even older. He would offer them to shopkeepers and they refused them so he would throw them in the Captain's Pit. I saw several dozen at least thrown in. Of course gold is not magnetic but the could be scooped out somehow. Mad Dougie was sent to the Deva in about 1968 and the house was demolished and flats built. He always said there was more gold hidden on the land.

Great story europa1, just digging out my snorkel and heading off to captains pit

Oh drat and I’ve not got my metal detector any more!!! He’ll have started the Captains Pit gold rush now, don’t be surprised to see loads of magnet fishers there ha ...

have got one but have yet only used it to retrieve a spanner that dropped into a lake. unfortunately gold is not magnetic.

Someone recently told me he reckons that they were very old halfpennies painted gold. I happen to know this guy was born in 1966 so it is very unlikely he saw or would even remember Mad Dougie. I did see the coins and I remember that they had St George and the Dragon on the front face. I remember a lad at school telling me that he also used to hide coins in the cracks in the rock tunnel that covered part of a path in the grounds of The Grange. I believe that structure was taken down some year back for safety reasons. Probably a couple of lucky lads got rich knocking it down and good on them if they kept it quiet. We would also see him snooping around at the back of the pubic toilets which were in the former gate lodge of Elleray Park, at the Hose Side Road entrance. He would be digging around the back of it. That building too is long gone. Another place we would see him was by the trees which lined the old path in Elleray Park going up to the old school house. That has long gone too but you can follow the line of it by looking at the trees on the left side of the park. Some of them are very old and we would see him climbing up. There are lots of crannies in those trees. We were scared to even look for the coins as to steal one would have meant Mad Dougie would track you down at night..

Wow, I remember those rock tunnel/grotto structures in the Grange grounds, I used to play round there. I can still remember the cool shadiness of them on a warm day. You can still see the lumps and bumps in the ground where they used to be. Never heard of Mad Dougie though - I must have had a sheltered youth!

Yes they were cool! It is a shame they knocked them down but very typical of lovely Wirral where anything that needs maintaining gets knocked down or set on fire in the middle of the night or attacked with mechanical diggers after a storm to make the damage worse. So much has been lost. When I was a teenager we would go in the rock formations in the evening and drink cider and light fires with chip papers. There was a woman who lived in the Grange, think she ran the bar, called Thelma. She was quite cranky about us doing that and would come out and chase us.Mad Dougie (we called him that it was not his name) wore an overcoat and a suit even on a hot day and sometimes spats. He would chat to us kids at the bus stop. His family had been very wealthy it seems but he went mad when he was left alone after his parents died.