The Tap, Eastham village

Apr 7 2007 by Mike Chapple, Liverpool Daily Post

FINDING great pubs around Merseyside isn’t like delving into some bottomless pit.

There’s a fear that at some stage there won’t be any more new ones to choose from and this column, to paraphrase Rutger Hauer’s Roy the Replicant in sci-fi classic Blade Runner, “will be lost like tears in rain. Time to die.”

But, wahey! There’s still life in the old dog yet – as was reaffirmed this week during a trip to Eastham, on the Wirral bank of the Mersey.

The only previous visit to this place was as a teenager on a drizzle-drenched, cold winter’s day to visit Cousin Rob, then a radio officer working on a merchant ship berthed in the nearby Manchester Ship Canal.

Everywhere was dockside bleak as bleak can be.

But somehow Yours Truly had managed to avoid Eastham village itself which, by contrast, is a beautiful little place with a history stretching back to Saxon times.

Its links to Liverpool are also steeped in antiquity.

A ferry service that acted as a connection to the Chester road existed from the Middle Ages, the earliest being run by monks from the Abbey of St Werburgh. Paddle steamers replaced the sailboats in the 19th century, but traffic started to decline in the 1840s with the opening of a rail link between Chester and Birkenhead Woodside ferry.

The last ferry sailed in 1929 but, though the landing stages may have disappeared, what’s been left behind are two hostelries, the Eastham Ferry Hotel and the nearby Tap, flourishing to this day despite the end to the flow of passengers.

The Pub Column opted for a snifter in the latter.