It’s not all Liver Birds, Beatles, comics, listed buildings and footballers, you know. Merseyside is full of quirks, mysticism and secrets, as we will reveal in our three-day A to Z series

A is for the Arno – a public area of rose gardens, fields and a quarry in Oxton, Birkenhead.

Mums loaded the boots on the bright red tricycles with marmalade and jam sandwiches, alongside the bottle of dandelion and burdock, fizzing under its crown cork top, and we issued blood-chilling shrieks into the fuzzed air of humming summer – our feather war-bonnets of many colours standing proud and our faces painted with lipstick.

"A thousand deaths to the palefaces!" And then the whole tribe pedalled furiously into the high noon of our childhood to do battle with the pesky invaders, insolently holding the sandstone cliffs over the field, where spears grew in the ferny clumps and dogs snouted in the undergrowth.

Today a new mood prevails and children are rarely seen, though the booted feet of dog-walkers still squelch through the mud.

B is for Bird.

Not the colourful species flocking to Mathew Street on Saturday nights, but the seafaring, runcible spoon-possessing owl in the poem by Edward Lear. From 1832-1836, he was engaged to paint the menagerie at Knowsley Hall by 13th Earl of Derby, and during this time wrote his Book of Nonsense for the Earl’s children.

As well as the Owl and the Pussycat, his characters included an Old Person of Leeds, whose head was infested with beads; the Dong with a luminous nose and the Quangle Wangle, who sits on top of the crumpetty tree wearing an enormous hat.

C is for Cathedrals.

Just as medieval spires lead the eye to heaven, the space age Liverpool’s RC Metropolitan Cathedral looks like a lunar module primed to carry us there. This is the only 1960s monolithic concrete building to win affection, hence its nicknames "Paddy’s wigwam" and "the Mersey funnel". It stands at the opposite end of the aptly named Hope Street to its neo-gothic Anglican counterpart Liverpool Cathedral (no nicknames).

This summarises Liverpool’s familiar dichotomy of being together and apart. While thousands of working class Catholics funded their cathedral, Liverpool Cathedral was the last to be bankrolled by the merchant classes.

Most notably those South American meat barons, the Vesteys, funded the central tower echoing a huge funnel on one of their ships and also reflecting that on Edge Lane’s Littlewoods Building. Devotional pub quizzers know the RC cathedral was designed by an Anglican, Frederick Gibberd, and the Anglican cathedral designed by an RC, Giles Gilbert Scott.

D is for Drainpipes – trousers that is.

Well, not everybody had guitars, but most people had legs – except on Friday nights when the lament was, "legless again".

So if you weren’t in a group, at least you could look like you were by wearing tight black trousers, which showed how skinny many people were in the 1950s and ’60s, as Merseyside emerged from the ashen ruins of war.

If you wanted to look real cool, you wore a black leather jacket as well, though some of the more poetic types favoured corduroy. Real drainpipes were for romantic chaps to climb into the bedrooms of lovers, or when they came home late and bevvied without their keys – maybe that’s just a picture in the imagination.