A walk on the wild side . . .

This afternoon Gill and I took our little dog, Sam, out for a walk on Wigg Island, which is a local nature reserve. It's a great place to see plenty of birdlife as you stroll along, and offers a choice of woodland walk or alongside the estuary. Wigg Island Community Park is a former 'brownfield' site. The site is wholly made ground resulting from a series of industrial processes including the construction of the adjacent Manchester Ship Canal and the former chemical industry usage, notably the production of sulphuric acid. The heavily disturbed ground contains a mix of soil types, still to be classified, although poor draining brown-earths and alluvial gleys are known to be present.

Located on the edge of the Mersey Estuary, abutting the Astmoor Saltmarsh, it's a superb site to observe some of the more specialised wildlife of the area. The picture above shows one of the new viewing areas which enable visitors to see a wide variety of wildfowl and waders, without disturbing them, including readily recognised species such as Shelduck Tadorna tadorna and Curlew Numenius arquata. Common Buzzard are observed year round while migrant Marsh Harriers often summer on the saltmarsh.

All in all it's a great way to get some fresh air into your lungs, get some exercise and walk the dog --- a veritable 3-in-1 factor! The thing that's so great about this site is that it used to be a dumping ground for chemical waste, and the local council, Halton Borough, deserve a real pat on the back for what they have achieved. And it's still an ongoing project, which is even better news. The picture of Wigg's Chemical Works below shows what it was once like.