Spare Time

Although the Vikings had to work very hard in the marshy farmland, there would have been some time for pastimes.  Although Tranmere is a Viking place-name, it was some 1000 years before the football team was formed so some other form of entertainment had to be found.

The Vikings would have hunted (then considered more acceptable) and there is a hunting scene on the stone cross at Neston.

They would also have raced horses and there are at least two field names in Wirral which derive from this activity - a Heskeths in Irby (from the old Norse hesta skeið = horse race track) and another Heskeths in Thornton Hough.

Another form of entertainment was rock climbing.  The Vikings would climb projecting rocks known as klints (klintir) such as at the Wallasey Breck (brekka = slop on a hillside).  The most famous on Wirral is Thor's stone at Thurstaston which is a huge projecting rock of sandstone.
 
The most powerful of the Viking gods was Thor and according to Wirral folklore Thors stone is the head of Thors huge hammer. It is impossible to say if this legend goes back to Viking times. Some say the rock has been formed by the excavation of sandstone for houses in the area, although this is not proven. The rock could well have been there in Viking times.  Would the Norsemen have seen the rock on their arrival and started the legend?  It is impossible to know, but it is not imaginable.

Certainly by the time of the Victorians, peoples imaginations were running wild.  A famous Merseyside antiquarian Sir James Picton (who gave his name to the Picton Library in Liverpool) said "this record of Danish heathendom..the gigantic rock alter..was used by the Vikings for sacrifices".

We have already noted that the Vikings were probably at least partially Christianised on their arrival so this is unlikely.  Picton also made another mistake calling it a record of Danish heathendom.  He was not the only one to make this mistake and in fact many Wirral writers still talk about Danes.  
There were some Danes in Wirral, the place name Denhall near Burton suggests this but the majority of the Vikings were probably Norsemen - Norwegians.

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