At last, the sun shone after weeks of rain. While the distant Welsh hills were draped in snow, here on the Wirral it was dry and bright. Storeton Wood is a secondary woodland of oak, beech and silver birch, and formerly a quarry. Below, a cuprous layer of leaf has protected the soil from the recent assault of raindrops. Fallen limbs were a feast of fungi; in places, creamy white Storeton sandstone peeked through like discarded vertebrae. Great spotted woodpeckers drummed.
Standing by the remnant of George Stephenson’s quarry track, I envisaged the 1838 scene: workmen busy extracting sandstone, sudden shouts of discovery and confusion, handprints in the rock. They thought they were the signs of people perished in Noah’s flood. Victorian scientists later confirmed that they were footprints of a crocodile-like creature named Chirotherium storetonense (Chirotherium meaning “hand beast”) dating from Triassic times, 240m summers ago.
Chirotherium – the hand beast. Photograph: Jennifer Jones
Back then, the creature’s world may have been a lake in a hot, Europe-wide desert, the muddy edges preserving its impressions. Eventually, slabs featuring the footprints were dispatched to several museums, and the Liverpool Natural History Society (sadly now defunct) offered 20 shillings to be distributed “among the workmen of the quarry” for their find. The quarry, long infilled by spoil from the construction of the first Mersey tunnel, is now invisible, but deep time caught up with the millennium when a replica Chirotherium was engraved on the wall surrounding the wood, to celebrate the discovery.
I went in search of the replica, negotiating hummocky ground and fallen tree trunks, pausing to marvel at the fungi, and beginning to fear my quest would be futile. Suddenly, there was Chirotherium, bright on the wall, far clearer than I had imagined. A delightful discovery, and its dimensions – scaled down from a 2.5-metre-long beast, with a long tail counterbalancing its movement – left me imagining the original creature.
An archive of fossilised footprints sequestered since the Triassic; childhood memories of marvelling at Stephenson’s Sankey viaduct faced with Storeton sandstone; the human need to mark the millennium engraved in the very sandstone from which the fossils emerged. A sunny trip to Storeton Wood had turned into a journey through time itself.
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