One of the most mellow, blue-skied and sunny afternoons that I have enjoyed in a long time was a sublimely relaxed and chatty visit to The Harp Inn on the Dee estuary, just outside Little Neston.  It is a super little pub dating to the 1700s with lovely views over the marshes towards the impressively long line of the Welsh foothills.  The pub’s official opening time is 12 noon, but we arrived to find it open at 1145 because due to queues outside their doors at 12 they are currently opening at 11. Very gratifying!  The beers and ciders change from time to time (just check their website), there are plenty of soft drinks on offer and the lunches that were being paraded past us as the afternoon advanced looked gorgeous.  The staff are lovely, and the atmosphere is great.  There are lots of tables perched on the grassland at the edge of the lush green estuary, and on a stiflingly hot day, a wonderfully warm but cooling breeze came off the Dee to make the peaceful, endless vistas a delectable place to linger, interrupted only by birdsong.  The breeze was so perfect.  I do love the heat, but it is lovely to be able to sit in the sunshine without dripping like a tap.  Update:  We went back the following week to have lunch after a visit to the Williamson Art Gallery and Museum in Birkenhead, and the food (haddock, chunky chips, tartare sauce and garden peas for one of us and an enormous ham and cheese ploughman’s with all the trimmings and more for the other) was just as good as it had looked as it was passing us on trays the previous week.

Most of the photos taken on my aged iPhone. Enlarge at your own risk!

 

 

According to the pub’s website, the building has stood there since the 1750s, when it was originally built as three coal-miners’ cottages, before being converted to an inn in 1780 to serve the expanding coal-mining community at Ness.  This segues nicely into the second major benefit of the pub, which is its location a stone’s throw from Denhall Quay, an intriguing and picturesque line of wall, made of massive red sandstone blocks, that stretches out into the marshland, and is clearly the remaining echo of a substantial structure.  In fact, the wall is what remains of a long pier that served the Ness Colliery, built in 1839 to replace an earlier quay in the same location.  The wall was much deeper than it is now, its lower tiers lying beneath 200 years of silt accumulation, but it it sufficient to give an idea of how impressive the structure originally was.

This was not the most obvious location for a quay because the river did not run past the colliery, veering towards Wales just before Little Neston, meaning that a channel had to be created to link the quay to the main river, which became known as the Colliery Gutter.  It was not ideal, as vessels often had to wait for two tides to turn before being able to navigate all the way to the quay, forcing colliers to beach on the muds in the interval between tides.

There were two collieries at Ness:  Ness Colliery, which opened in 1759, and Little Neston Colliery immediately to the north, which opened in 1820.  Most people, myself included, would not automatically associate coal mining with the Wirral, although it is a very familiar industry from North Wales.  Fortunately, Anthony Annakin-Smith wrote an excellent book on the subject in 2019, which I read shortly after its publication, and he gave a really enjoyable lecture about the collieries at the Festival of Ideas this year (July 2026).  The Wirral coal seams are an extension of the Welsh ones, but although a slither of the seams can be found on the Wirral landmass itself, most of them lie under the estuary, and it was here that most of the mining took place.  A whole network of tunnels was built below the estuary, and subterranean canals were added to help remove the coal in long narrow vessels called “starvationers.”  Both the tunnels and the canals lead back to shafts where the coal was hoisted to the surface.  It was a dangerous and sometimes tragic business.  Once extracted and processed the coal was transported to ports in Britain, Ireland, France, Spain and as far away as America and even Barbados.

The two collieries were located either side of a border dividing land between two different family interests.  The original colliery, Ness, owned by the Stanley family, handled the arrival of the new colliery very badly, and its owner, Sir Thomas Stanley, who sounds like an absolute monster of a man, pursued a course of aggression that eventually, on several occasions, erupted into blatant sabotage, including destruction of machinery, flooding of their rival’s tunnels and, on one particularly violent occasion, an attempt to use explosives to completely obliterate the opposition.  The collieries were both closed between 1845 and 1855 due to silting of the estuary, but they were revived in 1875, and the last coal was worked in 1927.

It is difficult to assess just how the collieries initially impacted local people, because most of the coal miners were brought in from North Wales and Lancashire, with Wirral residents only working in minor and administrative roles.  But both the collieries and the miners became part of the community, and Denhall Quay is an important reminder of the unexpected industrial and social heritage of this small corner of the Wirral.

The Harp Inn, on Quayside in Little Neston, is at the end of a residential lane, Marshlands Road, turning left along the Quayside, before it eventually becomes a track and then a footpath.  There are three main parking areas, first just as you round the bend to turn left from Marshlands Road onto Quayside (What3Words ///regarding.solving.mirroring, about a two minute walk, heading in the same direction), then at the pub itself where there is parking for about 10 cars (What3Words ///when.grumbling.kicks), and finally at Denhall Quay (///bike.outcasts.tarred, about a two minute walk back to the pub).

If you are interested in finding out more about the Wirral collieries I sincerely recommend Anthony Annakin-Smith’s The Neston Collieries, 1759–1855: An Industrial Revolution in Rural Cheshire published by the University of Chester Press (a second edition was released in 2023), and also check out his website at https://www.nestoncollieries.org.

At the entrance to Denhall Quay there are two helpful information boards that are faded but still just about legible, covering the earlier and later colliery phases, and you can walk out into the marshland along well-worn paths (dry in a hot summer, but probably not as foot-friendly in the autumn and winter).

Both the pub and the quay are on the King Charles III England Coast Path, and would make a great destination if you are visiting either Ness Botanic Gardens or the RSPB reserve at Burton Mere. 

Other posts on this blog re the southwest Wirral area:

• Ness Gardens, late June 2026
• Ness Gardens, May 2026
• Hampston’s Well, near Burton village
• RSPB Burton Mere, June 2026
• RSPB Burton Mere, August 2025
• An autumnal walk from Burton to Parkgate
• Burton Point Iron Age promontory fort