Day 3, Weds 23rd May 2018 Thurstaston to Burton Village

I just love the smell of hawthorn, for me it heralds ‘summertime’ … and today it was gloriously wafting throughout our walk, accompanied by blue cloudless skies – summer clearly comes early in these parts. ☀️

We’re still walking the route along the Dee Estuary, this area’s coastal path. We have had to follow the Wirral Circular trail for large parts of it – this took us inland so a lot of countryside walking today. We did try to find a way of walking nearer to the coastline – this however involved boggy marshland that got boggier as we progressed, so we had to retrace our steps.

We passed through some beautiful villages though such as Parkgate – it has a picturesque seafront with fish and chip shops, ice-cream shops and village pubs … but sadly no sea! Instead it has vast salt marshes rich with wildlife including ducks, geese, wading birds and birds of prey. On the few occasions a year when the tide is high, you can see small mammals fleeing to the sea wall including field voles, shrews, moles, rats and harvest mice – apparently tourists come especially to witness this – not really my kind of thing, I’ll stick to the fish and chips!! 😉

We also passed through the village of Neston which has a fine cricket ground, much admired by Steve. The old ‘country boy’ skills came in handy too as we walked up towards Burton Village – a couple of lambs had escaped from their field and were scurrying and bleeting around on the country lane – their Mum was anxiously baaing out to them! Farmer Steve managed to open the gate and safely herd them home to safety. His good deed for the day!

So it was truly a beautiful sunny 9 mile stroll today – very few hills – magnificent views of the Welsh coastline to our right (looking forward to exploring that next week), luscious countryside (gained a few nettle stings) with its magnificent scents. It’s days like this that you can really appreciate the fine country we live in and Steve and I are loving the new parts of the UK that this coastal adventure takes us to.

Again today we passed some spectacular houses in beautiful locations and it crossed our minds as to what money could buy in contrast to the South! However, we had a taxi ride back to the car and the driver requested that we don’t tell anyone how stunning life is in The Wirral – they prefer to keep it to themselves!! He suggested we pass that word that The Wirral is (in his Liverpudlian accented words) a S***hole!!!

And we achieved that 9 miles in 2 and a half hours – oh yes, I have to speed walk to keep up with the ‘Scout Master.’ And it’s all about ‘minutes per mile’ and ‘miles per hour – that’s how our life rolls!! Bring on tomorrow – we’re walking to Chester.