Forums Forums Wirral History : Chasing the Past Wirral History Stones in Field near Bidston Village

id like to know as to where the bronze age barrows are/where if you wouldnt mind

A bronze age axe was found during the making of Town-field lane school playing fields. I doubt the owner was homeless.

Fascinating thread - so many people with such varied knowledge, too! Really looking forward to hearing about Woodchurch/Landican discoveries; I've always assumed it to be an area rich in history, but it will be very interesting to find out more, in due course.

It will be of great interest to get more details of the Bronze Age barrows that were claimed to exist on the Wirral, as I was under the impression that for some uknown reason the area was singularly lacking, apart from isolated individual artifact finds, in large structures such as barrows, from either the Neolithic or Bronze Age That's one reason why it's so tempting to speculate if the stones under discussion are megaliths of some kind.

There is/was a barrow long noted in Storeton and another in Raby. Further to this, there are a number of other sites known from aerial photography that have been speculated as prehistoric enclosures. Place-name evidence also suggests a number of other sites which are presumably lost to the plough.

There are stacks of prehistoric finds also, go to Bromborough library and read the journals they have. All in there folks.

That's very encouraging to hear, does anyone have some source for the barrows linked to Storeton and Raby?

Raby is on OS Maps, both are mentioned in Cheshire Sheaf and Journal of Chester Archaeological Society and Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire.

That's really helpful, thanks for the info, what dates were those papers?

I'll check for you. I have a digital copy of the sheaf, but not the others, so you'll have to hang on for those ones.

And don't forget that a lot of villages from the bronze age are now in the sea. Even after the bronze age the Mersey joined the Dee and didn't exit at its current estuary (and the Dee joined the Severn), the Isle of Man was joined to the mainland as was Hilbre and Burbo bank was all land. I'll dig up an excellent reference tomorrow, its called something to do with the north west coast and details the rise and fall of the land right down past us.

Re: Environment in Late Neolithic into Bronze Age, thought the following may prove of interest:

"The pattern of small clearances detected in the Neolithic continued throughout the Bronze Age. Evidence suggests a deterioration in climatic conditions and widespread regeneration of secondary woodland in the lowlands, heather moorland in the uplands and wetter conditions on the mire surfaces. At Leasowe Bay, North Wirral, deposits dated to 2700 - 2200 cal BC may be associated with sea level rise, with alder, fen carr and Sphagnum bog the dominant vegetation in the area (Kenna 1986, 5). Sea level was generally lower than today from the Late Neolithic (Tooley 1978), but from c. 1800 BC the present coast and dune system in Merseyside was largely in its present position" Source

If that was so the idea of a marine transgression explaining any paucity of Late-Neolithic and Bronze Age structures on the Wirral may need to be reconsidered? Can such an absence all be down to ploughing, or is it that the lack of recorded burials from that period indicates that the region was not well populated during that time? What puzzles me also is that Southern Britain has a high incidence of such structures, yet arguably has also experienced intense agricultural land use.

From somewhere I had held the notion that for a considerable period the Wirral was thought of as a wild place, heavily forested and accessible more by sea. Certainly the references to the area in Gawain and The Green Knight, compiled nearly 2000 years after the Bronze Age, describes the Wiral as such.

Of course maybe that was simply a literary exagerration, if not however, and the Wiral, apart from coastal fringes, was relatively uncultivated, then the loss of barrows. long or round, must have occured during the post medieval period and onwards?

Errain, the lack of prehistoric monuments in Wirral will be down to a mixture of reasons. They're uncommon across the whole of the Cheshire plains, and I think the growing importance of agriculture in the Neolithic period will explain how the south (with traditionally 'better' arable geology in loose terms) also has a higher density of Neolithic monuments. Cheshire as a whole is known for the quality of its pasture lands which support dispersement of communities rather than nucleation. This is essentially also the Early Medieval pattern of settlement in the area.

Also, on a much broader note, Wirral in particular has traditionally been overlooked academically with the local university of Liverpool concentrating on Classical as opposed to British archaeology. Only recently has Chester University come into its own as a respected department of research-led archaeology. The only other serious research has come from local amateurs (which is not a bad thing, but they obviously lack the resources of academic institutions) and some top-quality work by Dave Griffiths of Oxford & Rob Philpott at Liverpool Museum. There's also a few quality pieces of linguistic work by Coates, Cavill, Fellows-Jensen, etc & stone sculpture by the Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture.

Therefore, it's a case of Wirral still being a fresh story still waiting to be explored rather than it being a vacuum of archaeology. I think the next few years will see a glut of new research that looks at Wirral in a new light, and I imagine a lot of new questions will be both asked and answered (hopefully including these damn stones!)

Great points and hopefully new insights will indeed be possible.

On the subject of Bronze Age barrows, Cheshire's county authority itself reports having over 140 examples. Cheshire Archaeology

In light of that, perhaps we need to review the reason for scarcity of barrows on the Wirral being due to land/farming use, since the intense form of agriculture, suggested as being a possible reason for removing such structures is most prevalent in the Cheshire Plain, yet a significant number of Bronze Age burials survived. This invites us to ask again, why the Wirral seeems to have such an absence of these structures?

Very interesting what you say about archaeological preference operating that appears to have overlooked and under resourced due investigation on the Wirral for the period in question. That said barrows form such an impression on the land, its hard to conceive that those structures which do exist, have not already been known to successive generations on the Wirral. If the reported barrows of Storeton and Raby are the only verifiable examples, and given the questions on farming being responsible for their seemingly mass disappearence, then a larger question emerges as to the location/existence of Bronze Age, or Neolothic, burials on the Wirral.

Deano, thanks for sharing that reference