Ghostly myths of Bloody Acre
QUESTION There is a patch of land in Childwall, Liverpool, called Bloody Acre. How did it get this name?
Childwall is a suburb of liverpool that dates back to before the Norman Conquest.
The domesday Book records a single household there, that of the priest, holding one carucate of land (about 50 acres).
The so- called Bloody acre is a small piece of land in front of the 15th-century all Saints church. it was formerly part of Score lane Park, on the estate of the Marquess of Salisbury, much of which was built over in the 20th century.
The nature, location and recently the name of this piece of land has led to a certain mythology growing up around it.
There are claims that it was the site of a Civil war skirmish or possibly t he Childwall Riot between new landowners and adherents of the Church, following henry Viii’s dispossession of Church land. Cannonballs found during building at Score lane lent some credence to this.
There is also a healthy trade in ghost tales surrounding the area.
according to local ghost hunter Tom Slemen: ‘Tales abound of the ghosts, corpse candles (coloured orbs) and black goblins of the acre who occasionally invade our world to wreak havoc — as well as a black shadowy entity known as an angel of death, which rises up when a world war is imminent.’
There are claims a curse stops the council building on the area. Sadly, the truth seems more prosaic. The earliest reference to a Bloody acre seems to date from 1982. when the field is freshly cut, the grass in the summer months gives off a reddish tinge and this seems a far more likely source for the name.
John C. Curtis, Liverpool.
QUESTION Further to Britain’s most popular birds — robin, barn owl and blackbird — what is the average life span for these species and which British bird has the longest?
FURTHER to the earlier answer, while the oldest bird in Britain might be a Manx shearwater (50-plus years old) the oldest bird in the world is a laysan albatross called wisdom, tagged by scientists in 1956 as an adult and thought to be 64.
She mainly lives on the Midway atoll, a small u.S. territory in the North Pacific between honolulu and Tokyo. She has recorded more than three million miles flying around the coast of hawaii and beyond.
The grey and white bird could have raised as many as 35 chicks, the latest hatching in 2014.
Pam Shepherd, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland.