My last post, Time Off about the various things I’ve been reading, doing and thinking featured a few photographs of the River Park at Port Sunlight. Since when there’s been a good deal of interest from blog readers about visiting the former landfill site while its wildflowers are in their current profusion. It’s a big hill of a place so social distancing is easy and, well, here are all the photographs Sarah and I took to encourage you to visit.
Before it was a landfill site this was Bromborough Dock. Built and owned by Lever Brothers as the dock for its Port Sunlight factory it was closed in the 1980s and then spent fifteen years as the landfill site I’d watch from my walks on the opposite bank of the Mersey. Wondering what had possessed the Wirral authorities to build the gradually growing mountain of rubbish over on their side. Well the always planned glory of it now is what had possessed them.
It’s still an industrial feeling place in the ways you’ll see if you go there, which I like, and there’s still a beautifully brutalist channel where Bromborough Pool enters the Mersey. And anyway, let’s have a look round this recycled miracle with Sarah.
It won’t be this full of wildflowers in flower and going over into seed all year. So why not go today?
Note from Sarah: I have taken selected specimens of plants home as part of my study for the Identiplant course I am doing, and only where they were plentiful. The general rule (from Francis Rose’s Wildflower Key) is to ‘take the book to the plant in the field’. Of course photographs can be taken to help with identification.
Some beautiful pictures there, Ronnie. Any idea what the wriggly stripey thing was?
‘A caterpillar” is the limit of my butterflies and moths knowledge Robert!