Introduction by Mike McCartney Wirral's Cultural Ambassador

Video introduction by Mike McCartney.

Video Transcript

“Hello I’m Mike McCartney, Wirral’s Cultural Ambassador. I’ve lived in Merseyside all my life and in Wirral since 1964. My children all went to school in Wirral.

The whole of Merseyside has a longstanding fascinating relationship with the sea, and none more so than our Wirral. One of the most significant peoples to come here by sea were the Norsemen, popularly known as The Vikings. They came here to Wirral, not to raid and plunder, as we are often led to believe, but to settle, fish and farm. Well, at least first of all, but of course they could fight when they had to.

These Viking people, although long since gone, are the ancestors of many of the people who live here in Wirral and Merseyside today. So its important we understand what they were like, where they came from, and why they came here.

So, this wonderful web resource the Wirral Learning Grid Team have put together will explore all these things. They are very important historical questions – Who were the Vikings? Why did they leave their homelands? Where did they go when they left Norway?

Why did they come here? (In fact we’ll find that many of them came to Wirral after being forced out of Ireland where they’d tried to settle first.) What did they do when they got here? We will learn about their lifestyles and their skills – including boatbuilding.

This longboat is only a model, but they were by far the most skilled boatbuilders of their time.

We’ll learn how they governed themselves from Thingwall – maybe the site of the first Viking parliament to be held on English soil - and also how they fought as warriors. And there are even some Viking games we can play!

So these industrious Wirral Vikings weren’t just a bunch of brutes, but were highly skilled people with advanced ways of governing themselves, including having their own parliament at Thingwall. They played a very important part in the history of Wirral.

Now you can use this great website to find out all about the Vikings in Wirral and how important they were to our history and to Wirral today.