Scenic Place in Liverpool City Region

The Perch Rock Lighthouse and Battery at New Brighton on the Wirral Peninsula stands at the mouth of the River Mersey, guarding the northern approach to the port of Liverpool from a sandstone outcrop that has been a hazard to shipping since vessels first used the river. The lighthouse, built in 1830 to replace an earlier wooden structure, is one of the few remaining examples of a traditional lighthouse still standing at the mouth of a major British port and has become an iconic feature of the Mersey estuary landscape, its white-painted tower visible for miles from the Merseyside coast and the passing vessel traffic. The fort adjacent to the lighthouse was built at the same time in response to concerns about the defensibility of Liverpool against naval attack, its guns intended to control access to the river. The fort never saw action in earnest but remained in military use through both World Wars, its heavy artillery and coastal defence facilities updated to meet successive generations of threat. Today the fort and lighthouse form a visitor attraction that provides access to the interior of both structures and tells the story of the port's defences and navigation aids across nearly two centuries. New Brighton itself was developed as a seaside resort from the 1830s, its position at the northern tip of the Wirral Peninsula giving it beaches facing the open Irish Sea to the north and fine views across the Mersey to the Liverpool waterfront to the south. The resort reached its peak of popularity in the Victorian and Edwardian periods when it attracted day trippers from Liverpool and beyond, and though much of the Victorian entertainment infrastructure has been lost, the waterfront and beaches retain considerable character. The views across the Mersey from the lighthouse toward the Liverpool waterfront, with its distinctive skyline of the Three Graces and the modern buildings of the commercial waterfront, are among the finest available of this internationally recognised cityscape.

Formby Beach on the Merseyside coast north of Liverpool is the finest and most ecologically important stretch of coastal dune and beach on the northwest coast of England, a National Trust property whose combination of the extensive sandy beach, the tall dune system planted with Scots pine, the red squirrel reserve in the pine woodland and the ancient human footprints preserved in the foreshore peat creates a coastal nature reserve of exceptional variety and national importance. The red squirrel colony at Formby is the most visited in England, the squirrels becoming remarkably accustomed to visitors at the nut feeding areas. The pinewoods planted on the dunes in the late nineteenth century provide the habitat for one of the largest red squirrel populations in England, the isolation of the Formby woodland from other red squirrel populations by the surrounding urban development having maintained a population uncontaminated by the grey squirrel competition that has reduced red squirrels across most of Britain. The squirrel watching facilities in the pinewood provide some of the most reliable red squirrel encounters available anywhere in England. The ancient human footprints preserved in the intertidal peat at the northern end of the beach represent one of the most significant palaeontological discoveries on the northwest coast, the footprints of Mesolithic and Neolithic people and animals preserved in the peat in conditions that allow individual prints to be identified by age, sex and even gait in some cases. The prints are revealed and covered by the tidal action that exposed them and their significance for understanding prehistoric human activity on this coast is considerable.