THAT wonderful journal the Wirral View has brought us more good news!

We should congratulate the council for actively pursuing World Heritage Status for Birkenhead Park.

After all it is the first public, civic park in the world and opened in 1847. However its history reaches much further back.

Once it was Ufaldi’s Green, belonging to a prominent Norse landowner.

Much of Wirral has a rich Norse history also worthy of celebration and heritage status.

Most significantly, in 937 AD, King Aethelstan of Mercia defeated the Norse King Anlaf of Dublin and King Constantine II of the Scots at ‘Brunanburh’ as the Anglo Saxon Chronicle records.

This great battle determined the fate of England and Britain and forged a united nation.

The battle took place in the area between Storeton, through Clatterbridge, south, to Poulton Hall. As councillors are now aware recent major discoveries have confirmed the location of the site.

It has a significance greater than Hastings for Britain and northern Europe and also deserves, at the very least, National Heritage Status.

How remarkable then that this council has listed the whole battle area, so far still under farm land, for ‘release’ from the Green Belt, for housing development under the infamous Local Plan.

If this council was French no doubt they would concrete over the Somme and Paschendale and turn the field of Agincourt into a golf resort.

Professor D P Gregg, Spital.