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Wirral Country Park Friends Group
Wirral Country Park
Celebrates Achieving Green Flag Status.
Green Flag is a nationally recognized ward in excellence for parks and is highly coveted within local authorities and in particular within the parks community. Wirral Country Park Rangers and the friends group where particularly pleased to achieve the award on their first attempt as the award recognizes the high standard of commitment that has been made within the park to ensure it reached the extremely strict criteria for a Green Flag Award.
The award ceremony will be a prestigious event held at the Liverpool Arena on Thursday 24th July 2008 and will be attended by both James Locke the Senior Ranger at Wirral Country Park and Mary Johnston (Chair) who represented The Wirral Country Park Friends Group.
James Locke has said that without the valuable commitment of the friends group this award would not have been possible. James also said that he is looking forward to working closely with the friends group over the next 12 months to improve the park even further ready for next year’s judging.
James Locke Senior Ranger
Wirral Country Park
phone 648 4371 fax 6480776
mailto:jameslocke@wirralcountrypark.gov.uk
Support the friends Group
The Next Meeting Nov 2008: 7.00pm
Wirral Country Park Visitors Centre, Station Road, Thurstaston, Wirral, CH61 0HN
Tel 0151 648 4371 or 0151 648 3384
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Memory Flashback
One of our members has fond memories of the Wirral Way when it was a train track. Living in lower village Heswall where his parents ran the greengrocers shop, Derek at the age of 11 gained a place at Caldy Grange Grammar School. To attend every day he and other boys and girls used to ride on the steam train each morning along with some of the pupils that came from as far away as Ellesmere Port and Neston, etc.
Girls attending West Kirkby High School had to travel in the front carriages. While the boys travelled in the rear carriage. The boys alighting at Kirby Park Station climbed the wooden steps and through a wooden gate, (the gate still exists) onto the road then walked through the old village up and over the hill to school in all weathers, (imagine that today).
I presume the girls went one stop further and alighted in West Kirby just round the corner from their school.
Some years later Derek was secretary of the West Kirby Homing Pigeon Society, birds were sent from West Kirby station to Hooton on the steam trains for races. The racing pigeons were identified and marked in the station waiting room then the baskets carried across to the Electric Train Station Offices to be weighed and paid for. This whole area the old sheep pens, plus a small row of shops is now the site of West Kirby Concourse, Fire Station and car park, with the start of the Wirral Country Park Wirral Way on the opposite side of the road. Many thanks to Derek Cotgrave for this interesting little glimpse into the past.