Thurstaston

Thurstaston is a village and former civil parish, now in the unparished area of Wirral, in the Wirral district, in Merseyside, England, on the Wirral Peninsula. It is part of the West Kirby and Thurstaston Ward and the parliamentary constituency of Wirral West. The village lies on the A540 road between Heswall and Caldy, although it extends some distance down Station Road to the Wirral Way and the River Dee estuary. At the time of the 2001 census, the village itself had only 160 inhabitants, although the national census included Caldy and parts of Irby, bringing the total population to 15,548. Thurstaston means "village of a man called Thorsteinn/Þorsteinn", from the Old Norse personal name Thorsteinn/Þorsteinn and Old English tún "farm, village". A record of the name as Torstestiune in 1048 proves this origin. The village was mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Turstanetone. Historically and popularly, the name was wrongly thought to refer to "Thor's Stone", a sandstone outcrop on Thurstaston Common. A Viking settlement called Straumby once existed in Tinker's Dale, near the modern-day Thurstaston Visitor Centre. The village is centred on the church of St Bartholomew, and Thurstaston Hall, of which parts date from 1350, although most of the current building dates from between 1680 and 1835. A ghostly "white lady" is said to haunt the Hall. The earliest mention of a Church occurs around 1125 but other evidence suggests that one may have existed in Saxon times. The Norman church endured for many hundreds of years but was eventually taken down in 1820 and a second edifice, a plain stone building, was completed in 1824. In 1871, the executors of Joseph Hegan of Dawpool set apart £4,500 for a new church to be erected in his memory. This was designed in late-13th-century mid-gothic style by John Loughborough Pearson, also the architect of Truro Cathedral, and was built entirely of local sandstone. It was consecrated in 1886.