Standing on the promenade, I’m alone save for a solitary seagull, perched hesitantly on the long, black, bumpy railing. We’re both watching the sky turn from linen grey to shades of tangerine as the sun briefly emerges from mottled clouds before beginning its silent descent.
But there’s a vital element missing from this elegiac seaside picture. Because there’s no water for the sun to slip behind. While I should be hearing the crepitation of waves and the hiss of spume against the shoreline, I’m confronted with nothing except marshland and mud flats. The sea has vanished, long before the sun, and it seems the steepled ranges of the Clwydian Hills in the far distance have been the only witnesses to the theft.
Parkgate is just a village, really. Tucked into the stubby thumb of land known as the Wirral, just south of Liverpool, this is a place I’ve been coming to since I was a teenager; using the promenade as a pretext for ostensibly romantic evening walks with girls from my sixth form college while often (especially after the walks didn’t lead to anything further) attempting to mimic the Mersey Beat poets of the 1960’s by hoping this odd landscape would inspire me to write some compelling verse.
It never did, of course, but it’s only now, three decades on and returning to Parkgate, that I think I’ve stopped accepting it as just ‘that place that thinks it’s by the sea but isn’t’. The truth is that this place is far stranger than I ever gave it credit for at an age when, understandably, silting wasn’t as important as sex, cider and cigarettes.
But silting is at the root of why Parkgate, with its ice cream parlour and long promenade, offers a wide view of mud and marsh where water should be.
Sitting on the eastern edge of the Dee Estuary, Parkgate in the 18th century was a busy port with a sandy shore that was used as a departure point for ships sailing to Ireland. But the estuary, which had been silting up since the 11th century, had different ideas. What used to be open water was heading towards alluvium, and oblivion.
