In the 1930s my dad and his three brothers would lie awake at night in their beds in their house in Field Lane. They were listening to the sounds of the canal barges passing in the night. The clip clop of the horses. The activity was probably made more interesting by the proximity of the winding hole where barges could turn around.

Little would they have known that in the previous century their ancestors who were farmers from Scarisbrick would have led their own barges laden with farm produce through a very rural Litherland on their way to Liverpool. Passing the site that was to be home to those Field Lane houses at a later date. They returned the same way, now carrying manure from the many horses in Liverpool, and also of the human variety from the middens of Liverpool. The horse version was more expensive and known as ‘good muck’.

The fields of Scarisbrick regularly yield clay pipes and the like when plowed to this day, because these were discarded in the middens along with the manure…