The Herculaneum Bridge, Herculaneum Road, Riverside

Mar 10 2007 by Mike Chapple, Liverpool Daily Post

YOU can stuff your Paris in the spring - there's only one place to be at this time, and it's here in Liverpool.

With the sun beaming down from a cloudless sky and a mellow salt-sprayed wind wafting in off the Mersey Bar, it was time to emerge butterfly like from the dungeons of Castle Greyskull and take a short trip across town to another pub with a fascinating name to conjure with.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Herculaneum Bridge.

Quite why a pub situated in the middle of the Dingle should be called after an ancient Roman town whose name was a derivation of the god Hercules, and which was destroyed along with Pompeii when Vesuvius erupted in 79AD is anybody's guess.

Duuuuuuur, or so I thought until realising that the pub stands on Herculaneum Road on what could be a bridge. Oh, and it's just inland from the old Herculaneum Dock and would have been filled with oo-ar me hearty types when Britannia really did rule the waves.

What is more important is that it's easily reached from Greyskull Towers by popping into Moorfields, jumping the Hunt's Cross train and getting off two stops down at Brunswick Station where the Bridge is but a short walk away.

Built in the mid 19th century, it has a solid, stately Victorian standing which, if you ignore the gasometer that rudely interrupts the vista, affords fantastic views out over the Mersey and the Clwydian hills, glimmering in the distance.

And it is, indeed, a hotel, with 13 en suite bedrooms offering a cheaper alternative to the more modern hotels a short way down the waterfront. If its website testimonials from people who have stayed there from all over the world are to be believed, it also serves some of the finest trenchermen's full English breakfasts in Christendom.

Not many people call it by its somewhat long winded proper name, though, preferring instead to use its nickname Peglegs, which is emblazoned above the main entrance. According to Barbara Murray, the benevolent landlady of 22 years' standing, it's named after one of its first landlords, "a big, ugly feller" she says, who in true sea-faring tradition had a wooden leg and whose portrait glowers down from above the long and ornate wooden bar.

It's very much a community pub she maintains. When the Pub Column visited in Billy No Mates mode, the usual posse being otherwise engaged, this was confirmed by the cleaner, Ann, who is a keen darts player along with her two daughters. The pub has both ladies' and men's teams, which is becoming a bit of a rarity in the city nowadays.