Meols

• 1. Introduction

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  Meols sits on the north coast of the Wirral Peninsula, facing the Irish Sea, and beneath its quiet residential streets lies one of the most remarkable archaeological records in northern England. Since around 1810, the sands near this suburb have been giving up objects from pre-Roman Carthage, the Iron Age, the Roman Empire, Armenia, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Vikings. Coins from the Coriosolites of Brittany. Pilgrim badges. Glass beads. Pieces of worked leather. All of it turned up not through deliberate excavation, but because large-scale dredging to serve the growing seaport of Liverpool began stripping the coastline bare.

  How did so many objects from so many different eras and cultures end up in a single stretch of sand? What was this place before it became a suburb? And what is still buried beneath the car park of a pub called the Railway Inn? Those are the questions Meols will answer.

• 2. A Name From the Norse

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  The Vikings named this place. Their word melr meant sand dunes in Old Norse, a fitting description for a low coastal strip facing open water. By 1086, when the Domesday Book was compiled, the name had shifted to melas, wearing the sounds of Old English around its Norse core. The village was also known for centuries as Great Meols, a name that still survives in the primary school and the Anglican church, and that appeared in postal addresses and on bus destination indicators well into the 1960s.

  A short distance along Meols Drive, between Hoylake and West Kirby, there was once a separate settlement called Little Meols. That name faded in Victorian times as Little Meols was absorbed by Hoylake. Its population had grown from 123 inhabitants in 1801 to 2,850 by 1901, which by that point was more than three times the 821 recorded for Great Meols in the same year.

  Even the spelling of Meols carries a small history of confusion. The place had been written as Meolse until a railway station was built there. When rail managers put up the new signage, they took the spelling not from the local usage but from Meols Cop, a suburb of Southport, and that borrowed spelling stuck.

• 3. The Sands Give Up Their Secrets

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  Around 1810, the coastline near Meols began to erode in earnest, stripped back by currents disturbed by dredging operations serving Liverpool's expanding port. What the sea uncovered was extraordinary. Objects accumulated over thousands of years came loose from the sand: iron tools, flint tools, pottery, brooches, pins, knives, keys, tokens, and glass beads. Pilgrim badges and mounts. Coins belonging to the Coriosolites, a tribe from Brittany in pre-Roman times.

  The range of origins is what stops you: pre-Roman Carthage, the Iron Age, the Roman Empire, Armenia, the Anglo-Saxon era, the Viking age. Finds stretching back to the Neolithic period. Taken together, they point toward a site that served as a working port as far back as the Iron Age, roughly 2,400 years ago, and that was once the most significant seaport in what is now the North West of England. Trading connections from this shore are believed to have reached across much of Europe.

  Some of those artefacts are now on display at the Museum of Liverpool. The story of how they got there ends in the 1890s, when local authorities built the first sea wall to arrest the erosion. The wall saved the coastline but changed the currents again, and the archaeological sites at Meols were buried back under the sand. A submerged forest visible off Dove Point until the spring of 1982 has since disappeared entirely.

• 4. The Boat Under the Car Park

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  In 1938, workers rebuilding the Railway Inn public house broke through into something unexpected. Beneath six to ten feet of clay lay what appeared to be a Viking boat, built in the Nordic clinker style. The workers covered it back over rather than delay construction of the pub's new car park.

  Decades passed. The pub landlord mentioned the discovery to a local police constable named Tim Baldock. Baldock contacted Professor Stephen Harding of the University of Nottingham. On the 10th of September 2007, ground penetrating radar equipment confirmed both the existence of the boat and its precise location beneath the car park.

  Further work followed in February 2023, when a team from Wirral Archaeology CIC, supervised by a professional archaeologist and by Professor Harding, drilled soil cores and removed samples for analysis. The team intended to use carbon-14 dating, dendrochronology, and wood assessment to establish how old the vessel is and where the timber used to build it was originally felled. The answer to that last question could say something important about where the boat was made and who made it.

• 5. Notable Voices From Meols

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  Cyclist Chris Boardman won a gold medal for Great Britain at the 1992 Summer Olympics and lived in Meols before moving to the nearby town of Hoylake.

  Andy McCluskey, co-founder, singer, and bass guitarist of the electronic music band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, grew up in Meols. The band's track "Red Frame/White Light", from their self-titled debut album, referred specifically to the public telephone box that once stood between the church and the Railway Inn on Greenwood Road. Hidden within the lyrics was the actual telephone number of that box: 632-3003. Fans reportedly called it from around the world. BT removed the telephone box in August 2017, but after a campaign by fans of the band it was returned by October of that year. It now carries a plaque marking its significance.

  Miles Kane, who was a member of the Little Flames and the Rascals and one half of the Last Shadow Puppets alongside Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner, is also from Meols. The television sitcom Watching, produced by Granada Television and broadcast between 1987 and 1993, used Meols as a filming location, likely because the characters Malcolm and Mrs Stoneway were written as living in the village.