History
St Hilary’s Church may date back to the earliest days of Christianity in Britain. There are just eight churches in Britain named after the Bishop of Poitiers, St. Hilary, who contributed to the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, and it is thought that they were founded by St Germanus, who was invited from France as a missionary by the 5th century English church. The tower is all that remains of a later church, which was built in 1530 but destroyed by fire in 1857: by the time someone had raced to Birkenhead to alert the fire brigade, and they had harnessed the horses to the fire tenders and galloped back to Wallasey, little remained of the church apart from a charred shell and the tower.
Until about the 15th century, the village was generally known as Kirkby in Walley. This derives from the Norse words meaning "village with a church", and Walea, the Anglo-Saxon name for Wallasey as recorded in the Domesday Book. The village of West Kirby (or Kirkby) was so named to differentiate it from this Kirkby.
Read more about this topic: Wallasey Village
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