A Walk In The Woods

From Hooton, Robert and I walked onto the old railway line that forms the Wirral Way. There is still the odd remnant of the old line at Hooton - the platforms are there, and there's an old waiting room, grown over with ivy. The station really was a behemoth in its day, with goods facilities to add to the mix as well. Unlike Rock Ferry, which is a shadow of its former self, Hooton still manages a brave aura of importance, a sense of place.

The Wirral Way curves south from the station, then heads due west. I had no idea how far we were going to walk, only the vaguest notion that it was a nice warm day, I had good company, and there was nothing else to do of a Sunday afternoon. The path was well maintained - it forms part of the National Cycle Route, and is popular with horses too - but the foliage either side of us was a disappointment: weeds and stinging nettles. There's maintaining the natural landscape, and there's letting it go to pot.

As we walked, we chatted idly. Robert has recently come back from a holiday in Scotland, and he told me about his misadventures there. I'm afraid that after clambering up and down mountains and glens, the almost flat landscapes around the Wirral Way were a bit of a come down. He spent a lot of time moaning about the lack of bracing vistas and inspiring views.

Normally I'd have told him to shut up and pushed him into a bank of stingers. In this case, he had a point. The path follows the track of the old railway exactly, and so it tends to be at a lower level than the surrounding landscape: it's also surrounded by high trees and hedgerows. The net effect is that you feel like a bit of a Borrower, stumbling around at the bottom of the vegetation.

It also quickly became clear why the railway failed. We had absolutely no idea where we were once we left Hooton. According to the map, we were passing to the south of Willaston, a large Cheshire village; but there was no sign of it at all. The railway builders had followed the path of least resistance, with the cheapest land and the simplest routes, so as a result the line passes close to a fair few settlements - but not close enough.

The first sign of civilisation was when we emerged at the preserved station at Hadlow Road. I came here back in the early days of the blog; when the line closed, the council kept the station as it was as a tourist attraction. When I had visited before, though, the ticket office had been closed, and we took the opportunity to have a poke around inside.

It's easy to romanticise old railways. Easy to forget that the service on this line was infrequent, and in noisy, filthy steam trains. Looking around the ticket office, with its bare wooden floors and charming anachronisms, you can forget that it would have been freezing cold, and there were only bare wooden benches to sit on. There was an undeniable power to it though, a whole mix of whistles and Bernard Cribbins and the smell of ash. Nostalgia for something which was dead long before I was even born. Another of those strange ideas that goes through the male psyche like words in a stick of rock.

We pressed on down the path, our conversation having turned, as it usually does, distinctly x-rated. I won't go into it here, as this is a public website: all I'll say is that Robert has a dirty mind.

Once again I gave thanks that I'm a man as I nipped into the bushes for a pee, and then we were passing under the Chester road through a dark concrete tunnel that the local teenagers had "decorated". If you believe the graffiti there, everyone in Willaston is inbred, Liverpool FC will last for ever, and a boy called John sucks cocks. I don't know where Frank Muir used to find his witty graffiti for the books he used to produce every Christmas: all I ever see is crudely drawn penises and insults. What's worse is text speak has crept onto the walls as well - there was actually an LOL up there, which is depressing for a hundred reasons.

A sense of magic began to infuse the path then, as we descended into a cutting. We were suddenly walking between high rock walls, slick with moisture and moss. I loved it. It was like being underground, or in a secret cave. I've always loved caves, and alcoves, and niches: it comes from reading too much Enid Blyton as a child, when middle-class children couldn't nip to the shops for a pint of milk without encountering smugglers hidden in a labyrinth of potholes. My absolute favourite was The Valley of Adventure, where four well-scrubbed youths and a parrot are isolated in the middle of a Mittel-European country and have to hide out in a cave behind a waterfall. I loved that idea. Maybe not the parrot though.

I expect that's where my love of underground railways comes from, too - the world of secret trains, of exciting hidden places. Either that or it's something deeply psychologically disturbing it's probably best not to dwell on.

At Neston, the line is broken by people, as the town has grown over the old railway line. There's still a Station Road, but now it's been subsumed by suburbia. Of course, as soon as we hit a population centre, it began to rain, and Robert and I must have looked a sight: wet, sweaty, slightly dirty from the mud.

We were at a metaphorical crossroads now. I'd done this section of the Wirral Way before, last year, so there wasn't really any need for me to do it again. On top of that, if we carried on, there'd be a while before we would find a way out again, and it was starting to rain. Neston had buses and trains that could take us somewhere dry.

Never underestimate cheapness. Yes, we could have left the track at that point, but we both had Saveaways, the Merseyside only ticket, and we were still in Cheshire. We'd have had to pay for a bus out of there, at least to the county line.

We walked on.

Fortunately the rain was only a shower, enough to get us mildly damp but not soak us. The path was a lot busier at this point as there were walkers out with their dogs, families out for a stroll, and bikers. Lots of bikers. Lots of nice families out cycling together. I never went cycling with my family when I was younger - me and my brother had BMXs, and we'd race around the estate on them or try and do wheelies, but my Dad never cycled, and it would have been a cold day in hell before you got my mum on one of them. I didn't think we were missing much. We used to go on walks as a family, where you can all talk to one another - it's hard to bond as a unit when you're whizzing along at fifteen miles an hour in a straight line.

Soon we were at Parkgate, home of the Famous Parkgate Ice Creams. I don't have a sweet tooth, at all: I mean, I like ice-cream, and I'll happily have the odd Magnum or Cornetto, but I wouldn't go out of my way for it. I'm far more a Cornish Pasty kind of guy. So Robert volunteered to find out why the ice cream was so famous, and bought himself a twin cone. For some reason, he then decided to perform oral sex on it:

Yes, folks, he is single and available. Just in case you want to find out what it's like to be a ball of toffee ice cream.

Once he'd eaten his ice cream, and sucked the sticky liquid off his fingers (steady...), we returned to the Wirral Way. We inadvertently ended up on the bridleway, which sounds fine, until you realise it's (a) soft and moist and (b) littered with horse muck. I mean, everywhere. Can't horse riders take a plastic bag out with them, like dog walkers? Though the quantities we saw would mean you'd probably have to cart a bin bag around with you.

Fortunately we were able to get back on the path in time to cross the border into Wirral, and with it, Merseyside. A plan was forming, as the afternoon was getting on and we were increasingly tired. We'd walk to Heswall, then go to the bus station in the town for a (Saveaway-funded) bus home. It wasn't that far, and in the meantime, we could admire the scenery: finally we were properly above ground, and we could see the Welsh mountains across the estuary.

I'm at a loss to explain what happened next. For some reason, we managed to walk past Heswall altogether, something which passed us by until we realised we were stood in the middle of nowhere with fields all around us. I can't explain how my normally fantastic sense of direction let me down. It must have been Robert's fault. Yeah, that's it.

We could have turned around, walked back, but that's an incredibly depressing prospect, so we decided we'd carry on to the next village, Thurstaston, and see if we could get a bus there. Robert was immensely disappointed that this would mean we wouldn't get to visit the not-funny-at-all Gayton, but there was no alternative. We was tempted to make a detour for this:

I mean, The Dungeon? What? We decided not to bother looking in the end, as the reality could never be as interesting as the Orc-manned torture chamber we had in our heads, and Thurstaston couldn't be too far away - could it?

It depends what you mean by Thurstaston, I suppose. We stumbled upon the old railway platform there, still preserved: the line was only single track, so this would have served up and down trains. More interestingly, behind the platform was a proper visitor centre, with a cafe, toilets, and exhibition space.

Inside were the usual rag-tag elements that the name "visitor centre" implies: a few stuffed animals in a diorama about the nature of the Wirral Way, a model ship, a few informative plaques. There was a brief history of the line's railway past, too. Once we'd spent a respectable amount of time cooing over the exhibits, and tried to work the hi-tech public transport kiosk (which could only tell us that yes, the Wirral had buses), we ventured into the village.

You know how I said the railway bosses had built the line some distance from the village they served? Well, take what I said about Willaston, and times it by a thousand for Thurstaston.

There was an astonishing distance between the village and the railway station. With planning like this, it's no wonder that Doctor Beeching decided to give the axe to the route. It's a shame it went, but there's no way it would survive, not in today's economy: there are vast lengths of route without anyone nearby - fine in an intercity railway, not so good on a little local one. Robert suggested that it might have been nice as a preserved railway, a steam train running between West Kirby and Hooton. That might have worked, but sadly, the line's now been built over in places, so it's never going to happen. Instead it's being slowly reclaimed by the earth: the only wheels that'll pass over it now are bicycle wheels.

As for us, we'd walked nearly ten miles in an afternoon, which isn't bad for two slightly podgy men with little or no athletic aptitude. There's now only a little strip between Thurstaston and West Kirby that I haven't walked, so I'll have to do that for completion's sake. In the meantime, we decided to celebrate the end of the walk as men always do:

Marvellous.

A Golden Day

The recent foray into the old maps of Merseyside's railways got me thinking about the history of the network and, more particularly, what's been lost. Liverpool and the Wirral have always been blessed with train routes; it's one of the reasons we still have a good network today. It hasn't stopped the closure of some lines however.

Principal among these was the West Kirby to Hooton line. Opened in 1886, this line curved up along the west of the peninsula, taking in the likes of Parkgate and Heswall on its way to the terminus at West Kirby. Unlike its brother line on the east coast, this meant it passed through a lot of rural communities, small places without much of a commuter base; it also failed to reach any major destinations, and almost inevitably it closed completely in 1962. Almost nothing remains of the line; it's been turned into the Wirral Way, though a station has been preserved at Hadlow Road, which I visited years ago.

I was curious to see what remained of the terminus. At West Kirby, the Hooton branch had its own station, just a single platform off to one side of the electrified lines, with a goods yard separating the two. I thought, as it was a nice April day, I'd take a trip out there to have a poke around.

West Kirby was one of the first stations I did, three years ago, and I was curious to see how it was getting on. I'm pleased to say that it's a very pretty little station, with a nice glass atrium area at its centre. The last time I was here the shop units were vacant; now there's a toy shop, and a stripped pine and frappucino coffee shop with outdoor seating spilling over into the station area. Pleasingly, the cafe is accessible from the street and the station itself, giving the building a little dose of activity and life. Out on the pavement the Victorian building looked good, just as a small town terminus should, though I'm forced to ask - exactly how difficult is it to fix a clock? A good station clock in such a prominent place should be maintained and loved. Surely these days it's not too difficult to do? We can put a man on the moon, etc.

Stopped clock or not, it's still a lot better than its neighbour. After the station closed, and the goods yard went too, the council took over the unused land and built a civic centre there. A council office, a library, a health centre, a leisure centre and a fire station were all put onsite. To tie these disparate buildings together, they decided to stick with one architectural style. That style was "breathtakingly awful public convenience".

It's a marvel, isn't it? It's like someone saw the Royal Festival Hall and decided to copy it on a local authority budget. Then ran out of cash halfway through. West Kirby is a very pretty town, and the stained white tiles of the Concourse building are incredibly jarring. I have a kind of grudging admiration for their brutality and ugliness, but the idea that they may soon be replaced and rebuilt doesn't fill me with sadness.

I skirted the building, heading south along Orrysdale Road, which was created when the old railway went. I was heading for the railway bridge at the throat of the line, which used to host a junction which enabled traffic to move between the two branches (but was in reality barely used). From there I could get an idea of just what a huge site had once been devoted to the railways.

Everything left of the current station was given over to trains. Walking round the quiet town now, it's amazing to think that such a vast quarter of it had once been busy with steam engines, timber yards and industry. It's like Stratford Upon Avon used to have a nuclear power plant at its centre; it doesn't seem feasible.

I headed back into town through a green space which had once been a trackbed. There's very little remaining of the old station, a few walls, some contours in the ground. The trees planted here with the redevelopment have matured and were just starting to bud alongside a bank of daffodils. I paused; perhaps the Concourse would look better when viewed through nature in this way?

Yeah, maybe not.

The West Kirby to Hooton line came at the site from the opposite direction to the Birkenhead trains, so I crossed the road and headed for the Wirral Way. A nice signpost and information board pointed the way into this little oasis of green. I stepped onto the path and it almost immediately fell silent; so strange how sometimes you can move away from the town with just the slightest movement. The houses along here would once have been buffeted by noise and chaos from the trains - now they had trees, and greenery out their back windows. I bet there were a fair few householders who saw a sharp rise in their investment when they sold on.

It being a spring day in the Easter holidays, I wasn't alone on the footpath. There were families out strolling, dog walkers, cyclists - even a couple of horse riders at one point. I was being stalked by a woman on a bike, which was a bit disconcerting because she clearly could have overtaken me if she wanted, but for some reason she refused to. Perhaps she just liked staring at my arse.

The path passed through Ashton Park, and I walked underneath what once would have been the only connection between the two sides of the railway line. The tennis courts on one side and the lake on the other were separated by the railway; with its closure, they had been allowed to grow together again, and the trees and bushes had smeared the division between them. The bridge had been made redundant as the park's users formed their own muddy footpaths as they crossed from one side to the other. It did provide one key service now: somewhere for the local teenagers to hang out, looking sullen and pretending they were bored. Why do teenagers always have to hang out somewhere? I mean, they never just pick a random wall in the middle of an avenue - they always cling to a landmark, like a bridge, or a tree, or a corner. I used to loiter round a green BT junction box when I was growing up. Teenagers are like the human equivalent of pigeons.

I had no intention of walking the length of the Wirral Way. I had things to do, for starters, and besides which, it goes for miles. Instead I came off at the next bridge, which had once been home to Kirby Park station. Kirby Park was about as simple a station as you can get; a platform with a ramp going up to the street, and a coal siding. There was only one track here, though they optimistically built the road bridge big enough for two. Fat chance. Again, there's practically nothing to see, apart from the gap in the fence at the road level which was once the route to the platform.

I had a meander back into town ahead of me now, but I didn't mind. It was a lovely day, really bright and fresh, and I was glad I'd left my coat at home (I wasn't so glad when I got back that evening and realised my door keys were in my coat pocket, meaning I had to sit in the garage for an hour and a half waiting for the Bf to return). I did at one point consider going back to conscript a couple of those teenagers though:

Come ON, youth of West Kirby - a simple application of magic marker and you can make that "Maddona [sic] Drive". Where's your drive to commit acts of petty vandalism? Why aren't you altering road signs to commemorate pop legends? I suppose you're all studying for GCSEs and having part time jobs and being productive members of society. Kids today, tch.

Growing up in the Home Counties, I never really saw the sea; it was something reserved for special days out to Brighton (we couldn't afford holidays, either). It still comes as a surprise to me to realise how close I am to water. The Dee estuary grew larger as I followed Sandy Lane to the parade and the Marine Lake, and there was the diamond glint of the water in the sun, and the rugged peaks of Wales across the other side of the bay. The low tide created a vista of golden sand pockmarked with pools. I love my home, and I wouldn't move for the world, but looking out at that view I became envious of the householders who woke up to that every morning.

I relaxed my walk, taking "promenade" literally, and strolling alongside the lake towards the town proper. Again, there were families crowding round me, little girls wearing heelies scooting ahead, toddlers trying out their bikes with stabilisers. Pensioners had installed themselves on the benches and in the shelters, sitting beside one another and not needing to speak as they watched the light dance on the surface of the lake. There were a couple of windsurfers, but there wasn't much of a wind, so they moved idly around, seemingly as lazy and quiet as the rest of us. I gained a strange pleasure from watching people just enjoying their surroundings - they weren't here to go to the arcades or the funfair or any of the other cheap amusements you get at the "seaside". An ice lolly on a bench is about as exciting as West Kirby gets. It's a coastal town where the coast itself is the prize, and I love it.

Back into town though, past a cafe called Lattetude (I can't decide if that's awful or genius); past the famous branch of Boots where Glenda Jackson used to work (can you imagine trying to return an item without a receipt and finding her behind the counter? One Elizabeth I glare and you'd be scuttling back behind the Lemsips). I had a scout round Linghams bookshop, but to be honest I'd been put off by the display on the environment in the window which featured a book called Global Warming and Other Bollocks. Plus, it failed the Fleming Test, where I go in and check how many James Bond books they have instore; all they had was Devil May Care, the terrible Sebastian Faulks novel, so I turned on my heel and left without bothering with their local book section. I continued on to the Dee Hotel, a Wetherspoons pub which I can safely declare is one of the finest drinking establishments in the UK. Not only is it clean and tidy, not only do they have leather sofas, not only do they have free wi-fi, but most importantly, the barmaid asked me if I was over 18. When you reach your thirties, you'll take what you can get.

For once, I wasn't drinking alone. As payback for supplying me with all those signs, I'd offered to give Jamie and Chris a respite from the powdered eggs to buy them a drink. Not only are the two of them rail enthusiasts - making me look like a rank amateur, to be frank - but Chris actually works for Merseyrail. Indeed, Chris is the voice of recorded system messages in the stations: if a bomb goes off in Hamilton Square, it'll be Chris' honeyed tones that guide you to the exits (assuming you still have any legs). He's worked on the railway for over thirty years, and was able to regale me with tales of Merseyrail past and present. They suggested that I could cut a load of time off the Merseytart project by wandering up the stairs in their house, which apparently is covered in station signs, and Chris spoke of his ambition to have a signal in his back garden (Jamie's face at this point strongly indicated that this will happen at roughly the same time our robot overlords put us to work in the spice mines). Most important of all, they have met my hero, Bart Schmeink, and confirmed that not only is he very Dutch and very nice, but he's also roughly eight feet tall. Fantastic.

It was a great afternoon, and the conversation took in a lot more than just Merseystuff, some of which isn't suitable for publication on a family blog. Finally it was time to go home, and they presented me with a gift:

My very own Merseyrail mug! I was ridiculously excited, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. Now I can finally have Merseytea. On the back there's a handy rundown of Merseyfacts, which I presume was put there as an aide memoire for staff every time some wanker turned up to complain about "Miseryrail". Even I was cynical about some of the facts but Chris assured me, yes, they're all true (or at least they were when the mug was fired).

So in short, I had a look at some old train stations, walked down a country path, paraded along the coast, and topped it off with a few pints in good company, culminating in my own souvenir of the network. Life can be awful sometimes, and the world can be a horrible place, but it's not all bad. There are plenty of nice bits left.

Borderlines. Seems like I'm going to lose my mind.

Parkgate is ridiculously pretty. It really is. It was the port on the Wirral in the 18th century, and the buildings around the quay dates from that era. The Dee silted up, and it seems that when the waters abandoned the town, so did everyone else; double yellow lines aside, it feels like a perfect little 18th century quayside. You keep expecting Meryl Streep as the French Lieutenant's Woman to come sweeping up in a big cloak.

The marsh that was left behind is now a nature reserve, because of the huge quantities of rare birds and so on that have made their home here. Twice a year, when the high tides come in, the residents of the grasses all flee to the land. It sounds scenic, but I bet it involves an awful lot of rodents swarming up over the sea wall.

I followed the quayside along, wondering if I should risk one of the pubs for some food. It was lunchtime, and I was in that borderline state between being hungry and just wanting to eat because I suspected by the time I was hungry I'd be miles from anywhere. I wasn't tempted to try Parkgate's most famous export, its home-made ice-cream; there are many things I will do to add local colour to this blog but guzzling a ninety-nine in October isn't one of them. There were quite a few tourists around, even at this time, or so I thought; closer inspection revealed that they were in fact birdwatchers. The difference between a tourist and a birdwatcher is that a tourist has a little digicam dangling on a rope on their neck. A birdwatcher has the kind of industrial-sized surveillance equipment you can only buy from decommissioned army bases in the former Warsaw Pact. They skulked over their enormous lenses, protecting them from the spotty rain with hunched shoulders and the back of their jackets, while their buttocks slowly became moist on the camping stool they'd brought with them.

Even though the pubs looked reasonable enough, they all had signs outside like "toilets are for patrons ONLY" and "food ONLY served between 12 and 2" and "children are welcome in the REAR" which summoned up images of harsh Hattie Jacques-like landladies leaning over a plate of egg and chips with a look of disdain. I decided I wasn't that hungry, really, and pressed on until I got to the opposite end, feeding on the view of Wales in the distance instead.

At the end of the quayside, the road twists to the right, and heads back towards the main Chester road. I'd planned on using this to get back on schedule and to head towards Heswall, but by the side of the Boat House pub I saw a green pedestrain sign for the not at all amusingly named Gayton. In the spirit of adventure, and because, let's face it, I didn't have anything else to do with my time, I took this path instead.

I should pause a moment to explain that I hadn't really planned on doing so much walking. Well, not so much off-road walking. I'd used Google Maps to look at the route and it had seemed like pavements all the way so, foolishly, I'd slipped on a pair of canvas trainers instead of a nice pair of stout Doctor Martens. This had been okay on the pavement of Neston, less good, but still acceptable on the gravelly path of the Wirral Way, but was now a bit of a major mistake on the way to Gayton. Their thin soles meant that I could feel every contour of the stone beneath my feet, and they had little to no purchase on the slippy surface.

Tottering slightly, I carried on along the stones. It was incredibly peaceful. Even the birds seemed to be on their lunch break. All there was was a little breeze coming across the grass, and the rustle of the trees around me.

My reverie was broken by a braying laughter. The trees to my right had thinned and opened out into a grassy field. No, not a field; a golf course. Oh dear. Golf courses are a pet hatred of mine. Not only because they take up huge swathes of land and seal it off to the public, not only because people who join a golf club are usually wankers, but also because it really is the most pointless sport. Knocking a ball around with a stick, then having to walk half a mile before doing it all over again. Yawn. The only good game of golf ever was between James Bond and Goldfinger, and even then the supervillain had to cheat to make it a bit interesting.

These three seemed to definitely be from the "wanker" school of golfers, noisily laughing and clattering around. I shouldn't be so unfair; they were out enjoying themselves, why shouldn't they make a racket? I just resented them for intruding on my afternoon.

I was halfway down the path when I realised it wasn't actually a path; it was a wall. I was actually walking the old sea wall, the line of where the Dee had once gone before it had made its long and undistinguished retreat into the distance. I'm embarrassed by how long it took me to twig this.

Finally the path/wall turned to the right and, just avoiding a man and his two dogs who looked pretty surprised to see someone else round here, I was down some steps and onto a proper roadway again. Looking back I could see that this must have been a slipway, a couple of hundred years ago; I felt a bit like Tony Robinson uncovering historical secrets.

Now it was just an uphill slog through the only funny if you're puerile village of Gayton. Gayton is one of those incredibly wealthy pockets of the Wirral; it's where footballers come to rest with their BMWs and their wags. It oozes wealth and affluence from every tree lined driveway to every clock towered garage to every intercom guarded entrance gate - though of course, some gates are still more impressive than others:

The plan had been to go into Heswall proper to have a coffee, but I was too tired and sweaty by now. Besides, Heswall was the location of my worst ever job interview, ten years ago, an interview so bad I had actually left it and gone and vomited in the public toilets because I was so overcome with embarrassment and horror at what had gone on. It's therefore got negative connotations, so instead I skirted the edge of the town and nipped into the Devon Doorway pub for a pint and something to eat.

I should have realised that when a pub describes its offerings as a "dining experience" it's not going to give you a couple of prawn baps with some cheese and onion crisps on the side. Inside, the pub was all polished copper and curved wood and "Moet Chandon by the glass". I ordered a pint of John Smiths and hid in a quiet corner while the waitresses dashed around serving meals of elegantly proportioned Modern British cuisine. I was a mess, physically drained and covered with sweat, and there was no way I was in the mood for three courses of scallops and lamb. I just wanted something cheap and simple, but even the crisps were the handcooked types that boast about how healthy they are on the front and taste like a piece of bark inside.

I drank my beer, made a few notes in my journal, then walked out and up the hill towards Heswall station. When there were two lines running through the town, it was known as Heswall Hills, and a milepost still referred to it by this name. They opportunistically changed it when the other Heswall station closed, but Heswall Hills would actually be a better name, since the station is about as far out of the town as it's possible to get.

We're back in Merseyside now, though, so there was the familiar yellow and grey of a box sign to greet me at the top of the hill:

I popped into a little One Stop supermarket by the station and bought myself a pack of chicken sandwiches and a Private Eye, and I sat on the wooden platform and polished them off. Heswall was recently given a face lift by Arriva Trains Wales, though what this means in practical terms is they put down a new layer of tarmac on the platform and made sure all the signs had the turquoise stripe. It's not exactly scenic, which is strange for a town which prides itself on being a cut above.

Down on the street, however, there's a little remnant of what used to be; the old ticket office, bricked up and abandoned and graffiti'd. There's no human presence at Heswall at all now - you have to buy your ticket on the train - and it seemed a shame that this little house for the ticket seller was forlornly squatting by the road.

Eventually the train turned up. They're only one an hour on this line, less on a Sunday, and once again I gave thanks for the wonders of Merseyrail and it's minimum of 15 minute frequencies. It was barely worth me sitting down though, because I was off again at Upton, and nearly home. I got the station sign and really, that should have been it. There's no station building at all at Upton - it was all demolished when the M53 was built through here and the road system was improved, and a Somerfield now sits on the old goods yard. All there is is a dual carriageway and the steps down to the platform.

There is a little bit of railway history around here, however, though it's of a much more recent vintage. The road signs round here pointing to the station all include the old green "Merseyrail" symbol, the one introduced in the seventies when the Loop line was built. It used to be everywhere, on the trains, the stations, the timetables; but it's been overtaken by the yellow M pretty much everywhere, and the old sign has disappeared. For some reason though, here in Upton, it still hangs on. Perhaps it's because Upton isn't a proper Merseyrail station, it's somehow missed the attentions of the Colour Tsars. Still, it's a great little bit of Merseyrail history to see. Perhaps they'll leave it as a tribute to the old days. Or perhaps, even as I type, there are a load of little men on their way out there with some yellow paint.

Collecting Upton station meant that I'd got the whole of the Borderlands Line; another grey route to cross off the map. Someday, possibly, this might be part of Merseyrail proper, and you'll be able to get a train from Wrexham through to Liverpool city centre. It's still a dream at the moment, but I sort of like that; I like its outcast status. It does mean that there are only three stations left on the entire peninsular for me to get now - Bromborough Rake, Bromborough and Eastham Rake. I'll leave them for a while longer, though. I'm not quite ready to say goodbye to the Wirral.

Two Station Roads* (*actual stations not included)

Looking back over the last couple of months it's become clear that while I have whittered on just as much as before - even more in fact - I've done less and less actual tarting. I'm sorry about this deviation from the blog's remit, and I'm going to try and get things back on course. That's not to say I won't still wander down some random avenue now and then, but hopefully I'll be able to slot in a few more trips than I have been doing.

I was keen to go out this week, while the weather is still passable and while the kids are still in school. A couple of plans to go out to far flung corners of the City Line fell through, for one reason or another, so I finally settled on finishing off the Borderlands Line, the artist formerly known as the Mid-Wirral Line, which stretches from Bidston to Wrexham. Luckily most of the line isn't on the Merseyrail map, so I wouldn't have to end up in the Welsh hinterlands at lonely halts on the side of mountains, and I'd completed the bottom couple of stations months ago. This would constitute the last of the English stations on the line - Neston, Heswall and Upton.

The train wheezed and clattered and moaned its way up to speed, finally reaching maximum velocity somewhere around Beechwood. At which point it immediately had to shift down a gear again so that it could stop at Upton. According to the timetables, Upton's a request only stop, but the train stopped anyway despite no-one getting on or off. It makes sense; Upton is still very much in Birkenhead's suburban sprawl, and it is bound to be busier than some of the other request stops like Penn-Y-Ffordd. After the brief pause, we carried on down the Wirral, and I couldn't resist peering down into the back gardens from the embankment as we passed by. I'm a terrible voyeur. There was nothing exciting to spot in the tiny postage stamp spots of green that lay behind the new build houses along the route - a woman having a cheeky fag, strings of moist washing, and an awful lot of trampolines.

The train moved out into the countryside then, and the housewives were replaced by horses, and brick box houses by tin barns. One more stop, at Heswall, and then I was jumping off at Neston. All the stations on the line are the bus stop type - just a shelter on the platform, with no ticket facilities. Neston's been DDA'd to death, and getting down to the street involves a run down a Mouse Trap of ramps to get there.

There was a nice little surprise in the tunnel under the platforms; a mural, obviously designed by local schoolchildren, showing the Liverpool skyline and its landmarks. It was ok, though the Echo Arena looked like a crab, and the Yellow Submarine is so close to the Superlambbanana's backside it looks like a comically shaped turd. I also thought: where's the Wrexham mural on the other wall? Surely there should be one showing all the landmarks at the other end of the line, like... erm... well, I'm sure there's something.

We're not in Merseyside here, but instead in the brief sliver of Cheshire between the Wirral and Wales, so the station sign was just a bog-standard BR one. I was disappointed to see that if I'd come a day later I'd have been able to visit Neston's brand new Aldi, right next to the station. So. Very. Disappointed.

Neston's quite a nice, pretty little market town. There's the obligatory Tesco Metro, of course, and the banks, but apart from that there seemed to be a few local businesses, and at twelve o'clock on a Wednesday, it felt like it was pleasantly bustling. I queued up at the cash machine for some spends behind an ignorant cyclist who was oblivious to the people waiting behind him. Here's a little tip for you, mate; you need your cash card to get access to an ATM. As such, it might be an idea to extract it from deep inside your lycra shorts before you get to the machine, instead of rustling around inside them for five minutes and making all the people waiting behind you gag.

(The Racecourse Ground! Home to Wrexham FC! They could have done a mural of that. There, that's all my Wrexham knowledge exhausted.)

I'd planned on taking one of the main roads out of the town to my next stop, but at the last minute I had a change of heart, and instead I headed through the town centre to Station Road. Satnav users headed for Neston, be warned; the train station is not on Station Road. In fact, there's not much on Station Road at all, except for an old people's home and the entrance to the Wirral Country Park.

(That's probably why they can't be bothered cleaning the sign). Readers with very long memories might remember that I visited the Country Park once before, when I went to the preserved station building at Hadlow Road. This was a stop on the old Hooton-West Kirby line, the line that disappeared in the Beeching cuts and was subsequently resurrected as the Wirral Way, Britain's first Country Park. Neston South station once stood along here, before being demolished and having a load of houses built on top of it in the sixties. Now all that's here is a car park and an elaborate red-painted bridge to take you over the road and onto the path proper.

The walls of the bridge are etched with a couple of verses, apparently as part of the Millennial improvements (the Wirral Way is also part of the National Cycle Network). Heading towards Neston, you have:

Billowing steam floats to the sky
From the steam train passing by

while heading away from the town there's:

Clickerty clop
Crunching leaves
Whisper of breeze
How quiet and calm.

It's a bit "back page of the People's Friend", but it was probably done by local schoolchildren or something. That would explain the incorrect spelling of "clickety" anyway. If it was an Andrew Motion original I'll be very disappointed. I like the past/present theming though, different depending on which way you are going.

I crunched onto the pathway. Because it's part of the cycle route, it's been nicely tarmacced, so it was a pleasant surface to walk on. The path curves away from the town so I was pushed into peace and quiet fairly quickly. Running alongside the cement road was a soft earth bridleway, dotted with Jurassic Park-like hoofprints.

It was strange to think that this had once been a railway line, because it didn't seem to want to go anywhere very quickly. The Borderlands line travels through a lot of countryside en route, but it was saved from Beeching because of its usefulness for freight to the Birkenhead docks. This line had no saving graces though, just a few country halts, and walking it now it was hard to see what kind of service you could possibly have got out of it.

Under a bridge, I saw how wide the trackbed really was. I also encountered someone else on the path for the first time, two women walking dogs. They both carried leads in their left hand and blue baggies filled with faeces in their right. That, ladies and gentlemen, is why I will never have a dog. I will do many things for a pet; brush it, feed it, walk it, but I refuse to pick up its freshly laid excrement and carry it around with me like a Cath Kidston handbag. I will get a dog the day I can afford to have someone follow me around to do the poop scooping for me.

On I trotted, taking in the day. It's been weeks since I walked quite so much, and my body was quite unused to it; my calves were already starting to strain, and a dark stain of sweat was spreading across the front of my hoodie. Despite it being mid-October, and the skies churning darkly above me, there was still enough warmth for me to do without a coat. I leapt out of the way of two old dears on bikes, gossiping loudly in lieu of having a bell, and clearly far too busy to do anything resembling a Cycling Proficiency Test, and then the Wirral Way broke for another Station Road, this time in Parkgate.

There were actually two stations at Parkgate. The first was the original terminus for the line from Hooton, then a bridge was built across the road and a new station was built on the north side. Nothing remains of the stations now, or the bridge. There is, however, a memorial to the old railway, built at the entrance to a new cul-de-sac. It's the wrong gauge (and God, how things have progressed that I even spotted that!) but it's nice to see none the less.

I could, at that point, have continued on the Wirral Way all the way to Heswall; after all, that was the next stop on the old railway line. However, I was bored with taking the back routes, and I wanted a change of scenery, so I turned and headed down into Parkgate proper. I knew I was moving up in the world, just from the state of the road sign. This one was clean...