Wallasey, like much of Wirral, is built on soft, sandstone rock, laid down long geological epochs ago when the area was at the bottom of a prehistoric ocean. Rumours abound concerning tunnels leading through the rock, some supposedly stretching as far as Bidston or beyond. They are said to have been used and expanded by the smugglers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Due to recent councils, the tunnels were blocked up and never to be walked again.
Joseph Ruiz says that these tunnels were also used in the eighteenth century to transport slaves or prisoners. He cites documentary evidence of a tunnel (its entrance now covered by a large slab of concrete seen in picture) that goes from the Yellow Noses, by the golf course in New Brighton, to a large room with manacles attached to the walls, under Flaybrick Cemetery in Bidston. In a letter to the author, Mr Ruiz went on to relate an account from a book published in 1845 , describing how two boys entered a tunnel in the Yellow Noses taking with them a compass and a ball of string. The string they paid out carefully as they made their way down tunnels faced with red Georgian brick, until they came to a large room beneath the cemetery. Shackles hung on the walls of the chamber, suggesting that it had been used in connection with the slave trade. The book is said to also contain a map of the entire cave complex.
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