Liverpool to Wirral Peninsula at Thornton Hough

August 11, 2025

Today we whirled our way around the Wirral Peninsula. And we had a beautiful day for it, a rare day where we started in shorts and short-sleeved tops with nary a rain jacket, warm jacket, windbreaker, or ear band in sight. Since we have reliably needed to wear our outerwear everyday we don’t have much experience packing this stuff and it was a bit of a chore to fit them in our panniers.

We checked out at 11 am and made our way down the waterfront to visit the Museum of Liverpool - discussed yesterday.

The Royal Liver building, constructed in 1911 to house the Royal Liver Assurance Group.

They are very nice in Liverpool - we had lots of help on how to use the fancy lockers, store our panniers, what to see in the Museum - from the Museum staff. All good. And the Museum was free (but the locker was two pounds!)

Afterwards we made our way two blocks to the James Street Station, where we needed to buy a ticket and ride the train “across the water” which is how Liverpudlians describe crossing the Mersey River to the Wirral Peninsula. (Dave was corrected by the station guard when we said we needed a ticket to cross the Mersey!)

There were three theoretical ways to cross the water and I had to do some research to figure out the best way. There is no bridge. Rather, drivers use the Queensway and Kingsway Tunnels. Cyclists are theoretically allowed to use the Queensway tunnel after 8 pm and before 7 am but the reviews were awful. There is a long downhill stretch followed by a long uphill stretch. There is no shoulder and drivers are not allowed to pass so all the cars are forced to line up behind a cyclist climbing uphill through the rest of the tunnel. Extreme noise, fumes and exhaust were also mentioned. No thanks, we will pass on that opportunity!

The second option was a ferry. The ferry that runs between Liverpool and Seacombe (on the Wirral peninsula) only operates until 9:40 am as it’s set up for commuters, not random Americans on bikes. It would mean a serious early morning. Not the best choice.

So, we opted for the train, because MerseyRail (the Liverpool train agency) advertises their new, handy, dandy bike cars.

Stock image of bikes on Mersey rail car.

And indeed, they were handy, and dandy. We walked into the station at 12:30, and two guards directed us to the ticket booth where there was no line up. The annoying part of riding the train with a bike is that the bike is free but you can’t buy a bike ticket in the machine or on-line; it is necessary to buy it from a human at the station. In our case that is no problem since we needed the reassurance from a live body we are doing the right thing - but I can see it would be annoying to a local. In any event we successfully purchased the needed tickets, the guard opened the gate for us so we could avoid the turnstile and told us to ride the lift down to platform 3, turn right and “there were only a a few steps after that.” The lift was the nicest metro lift we had ever been in: it holds 40 Liverpudlians, so it easily held two cyclists with bikes. When we got off the lift, the “few steps” were actually a full flight. Dave however, can successfully haul our bikes DOWN a set of stairs, it’s up that is the issue, so he maneuvered them down with no incident and without taking off the panniers.

The guard had said to watch for the train car with a bike symbol and it was pretty clear - first car — so we dashed to the front and were able to wheel our bikes on very smoothly. The three indicated bike slots were pretty useless for us: way too small and tight. It didn’t matter for a two-minute ride on an empty train, but it gives me pause for the upcoming longer train rides we have in our future in, likely, more crowded circumstances. Oh well. A challenge for another day.

We got off at Hamilton Square on the Wirral Peninsula. It was a little tangled getting out of the station because the lift was hard to find and then when we found it, it was too tight to fit a bike. We reverted to the escalators - which again, Dave can manage, but I can’t.

There is an entire bike trail around the Wirral Peninsula called the Wirral Circular Trail, and today we rode about three quarters of it. We had lovely views back to LIverpool.

The view from Birkenhead over the Mersey back to Liverpool.

We learned, as if we didn’t know already, that the Brit’s love their seaside. Given it was a lovely sunny day, we should not have been surprised there were so many people out, even on a Monday. The upshot of the combination of people and the beach, was that it was a fun, albeit slow ride, and not a route to take if you were in a hurry. The resort at New Brighton on the northern end was particularly busy.

And crowded. The beach scene at New Brighton.

We had a few spots where the sand encroached on the path, and these were hard because you absolutely can’t ride through that. It was bad enough that we seriously contemplated taking an interior route across the Wirral Peninsula. We stuck with it, though, and were glad.

We stopped at the Coffee Bean van and had a chai, an apple and split a bag of peanuts - it was a good thing we stopped when we did because there were no other places to eat that we could see after that.

Just after the town of West Kirby we got caught at a rail crossing, waited for two trains to cross and then for all the built up car traffic to do the same before proceeding onto a new section of the Wirral Trail. It was gravel, but fine, and that stretch was the only stretch of the day where we actually made progress in a consistent fashion.

Near the end we peeled off the Wirral Trail, maneuvering through a particularly troublesome gate, to the road that would lead us to Thornton Hall Hotel. We didn’t arrive until almost 4:30, a long day for us.

Relief for having successfully negotiated a tricky trail gate.

I was especially glad to have found this hotel, because in my first pass through the Wirral Peninsula I didn’t find it. There were very few accommodations and accordingly I had initially planned a much longer day with a stay at an uncharming-looking Holiday Inn in Mold, Wales, a further 28 km down the road. But the Thornton Hall Hotel showed up, only 3 km off the route and it was lovely.

We opted to eat in the hotel grill, had oysters and split a ribeye (a weird choice for us but very good). The only downside of the hotel was there was no air conditioning and it was a warm day. Dave did his usual machinations in the room to cool things down and it was okay. We are moving into a warming trend as we enter Wales so the lack of a/c may be more of an issue. We shall see. Onward.

Today's ride: 34 km (21 miles)
Total: 3,479 km (2,160 miles)

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