Buildings
Bidston Windmill replaced a wooden mill that was destroyed by fire in 1791, and was used to grind wheat until about 1875. However it is believed that there has been a windmill on this site since 1596. After falling into disuse it was bought and restored from 1894. It is open on the second Saturday of each month from April to September, between 10:00 a.m. and 12:00 noon.
Bidston Observatory was built in 1866 using local sandstone excavated from the site. One of its functions was to determine the exact time. Up to 18 July 1969, at exactly 1:00 p.m. each day, the 'One O'Clock Gun' overlooking the River Mersey near Morpeth Dock, Birkenhead, would be fired electrically from the Observatory. In 1929 the work of the observatory was merged with the University of Liverpool Tidal Institute, being taken over in 1969 by the Natural Environment Research Council. The Research Council relocated the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory to the University of Liverpool campus in 2004.
There has been a lighthouse on the hill since 1771. The present lighthouse was built in 1873 and was operational until 1913. Together with the Leasowe Lighthouse, it enabled the ships to avoid the sandbanks in the channel to Liverpool. It is now privately owned.
Read more about this topic: Bidston Hill
Famous quotes containing the word buildings:
“Now, since our condition accommodates things to itself, and transforms them according to itself, we no longer know things in their reality; for nothing comes to us that is not altered and falsified by our Senses. When the compass, the square, and the rule are untrue, all the calculations drawn from them, all the buildings erected by their measure, are of necessity also defective and out of plumb. The uncertainty of our senses renders uncertain everything that they produce.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter’s at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also,—faint copies of an invisible archetype.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)