Rejected evidence reassessed : Wirral and the Mersey Basin in the Roman and post-Roman periods (first to seventh centuries AD)

Abstract

The Wirral Peninsula is located in the North West of England, between the Mersey and the Dee rivers, with its north shore facing directly onto the Irish Sea. A key site within the region is Meols, an ancient port now eroded by the sea, but which has provided a legacy of finds that are testament to its significance across a very broad period of time. The post-Roman history of the North West of England, has traditionally suffered from a deficit of research, literature on the region is limited, with a bias to Chester, or other specific sites and with no recent texts that have the North West or Cheshire as a focus. The catalogue of finds from Meols (Griffiths, Egan and Philpott, 2007) is an important source of information and has served to emphasise the potential for further archaeological work. There is, also, a growing body of information in the database of finds maintained by the Portable Antiquities Scheme. My research revisits questions about post-Roman Wirral in the light of more recent data. The questions relate to the settlement of the peninsula, how it was connected into wider networks of communication and trade and whether there is any evidence of early Christianity. A fourth question which influences each of the others is what relationship there was between Meols and Chester. An original database has been compiled specifically for this research bringing together both new and legacy data from a wide range of sources. This has allowed the data to be analysed in several ways, through an examination of linkages with Roman times, the context of finds and how the whole might fit into a wider regional framework. Through this analysis, it has been possible to suggest potential narratives relating to activity in this specific place in the post-Roman era.