Wallasey Racecourse: The Wirral’s Forgotten Racetrack #Liverpool
If you think of Merseyside and horse racing, the obvious place that will occur to most people is Aintree Racecourse, the home of the Grand National. Some people might know a little bit more about racing on Merseyside and point to Haydock Park Racecourse.
What the vast majority will know very little about, however, is Wallasey Racecourse, if for no other reason than the fact that it has now been defunct for a long time.
Just because it isn’t around anymore doesn’t mean that it’s not worth mentioning, though, especially on a site such as this one, looking at the history of the city and Merseyside area.
Centuries Old
Wallasey Racecourse doesn’t exist any more, but it actually stood in place on the Wirral for hundreds of years. In fact, the first time that the town, which stands on the River Mersey, witnessed horse racing was in 1590. If you’re wondering about where on earth it was located, the space taken up by the racecourse began in what is now Wallasey village, stretching right down to the sandy front of Leasowe.
The sport was incredibly popular, to such an extent that the Fifth Earl of Derby, Fernandino, chose to build a grandstand for visitors to use in 1593, stopping those without the right to see from watching.
The grandstand was shaped as an octagon, offering a viewing tower that had windows on all eight sides, thus providing excellent views of the entirety of the racecourse and the surrounding areas to those that were allowed to enter it. What is now Sandiways Road was home to stables, which is why the road back then was known as Jockey Road.
Just because it was not one of the areas most famous courses doesn’t mean that care and attention wasn’t given over to it, seeing Wallasey Racecourse named ‘one of the finest grounds of its length in England’ towards the end of the 17th century.
A Short-Lived Location
When you describe something as ‘short-lived’, it is obviously important to bear in mind that such a statement is relative. There are some courses still in existence in the likes of Epsom that were built around the same time as Wallasey Racecourse and are still in use today.
The location that we’re talking about, though, opened for the first time in 1590 and hosted its final race on Tuesday, the fifth of April 1785. There are some races that are older than that, let alone the physical courses that are used to host them. In spite of this, the racecourse had its fair share of discussion-worthy moments.
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In the September of 1682, for example, a keen racing enthusiast in the form of the Duke of Monmouth visited Wallasey to attend the races. His actual name was James Scott and he was the illegitimate son of Charles II with his mistress, Lucy Walter. Although the course had opened nearly 100 years earlier, it actually took until nearly 100 years after for the landed gentry to meet at the course and plan a ‘super race’.
It was the Earl of Derby, Lord Gower, Lord Molyneux and the Duke of Devonshire, the Duke of Ancaster and the Duke of Bridgewater who created the Wallasey Stakes.
The Home of Numerous Races
If you wanted to go to watch some racing at Wallasey Racecourse, you could subscribe to pay an annual subscription of 20 guineas for ten years. The Wallasey Stakes was for five-year-old horses, carrying ten stone in weight over the four miles of the course.
In 1727, Bailey’s Racing Register offered the first detailed results from the Wallasey Racecourse meeting. It noted that a horse named Spot, which belonged to Sir R Grosvenor, was the winner of the Wallasey Stakes, which was transferred to Newmarket in 1733 before later shifting to Epsom and being renamed as The Derby.
Leasowe Castle, on the north coast of The Wirral, is thought to have been built by Ferdinando, 5th Earl of Derby of
@KnowsleyHall in the late 16th century. It was a centre of local sports from its inception, especially horse racing, and it was used as one of the first grandstands
pic.twitter.com/5fGVeFvutT
— Hiking Historian (@HikingHistorian)
November 9, 2019
In the wake of its closure, it was turned into the likes of housing and shops, whilst what is Wallasey Grove Road station is close to where the racing would have come to an end. It is an important part of the history of both the Wirral and horse racing in general.
The post Wallasey Racecourse: The Wirral’s Forgotten Racetrack first appeared on Scouse Not English.
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