Bidston Hill was bought for public use by Birkenhead Corporation in 1894 and is now managed by Wirral Council, one of the highest points on the entire Wirral peninsula and a site that carries genuine, unusual archaeological weight quite apart from any ghost story. Its exposed sandstone holds two remarkable carvings: a sun figure standing 4.5 feet tall, thought to have been cut by Norse-Irish settlers around 1000 AD and said to face directly toward the rising sun on Midsummer's Day, and a horse's head carved into the rock north of the hill's later Victorian observatory, accompanied by a Latin inscription, EQUINO, added at some later date. The hill went on to serve real, documented purposes across the centuries since, a maritime flag-signalling station from 1763 onward, and later a lighthouse and observatory whose One O'Clock Gun controlled Liverpool's official timekeeping right up until 1969.
Against that genuinely unusual physical and historical backdrop, Bidston Hill has attracted a long-standing local reputation for witchcraft, satanic ritual and even lycanthropy, summed up in the nickname some locals still use for it, the Hill of Witches. The most specific version of the story holds that a coven of witches was once discovered and hanged in the woods here, after local men decided to rid the area of witchcraft for good. No date, no names, and no primary historical source for any such event have ever been traced, which means this should be understood honestly as a folk memory rather than a documented execution.
It seems very likely that the genuine Norse-era carvings themselves, easily read by later generations of visitors as pagan or occult in character even though their actual origin was Christian-era Norse settlement rather than witchcraft, helped feed and reinforce the hill's witchcraft reputation over the centuries, regardless of whatever truth, if any, lies behind the specific coven story. Bidston Hill is recorded here as a rare case where real archaeology and pure folklore have grown so thoroughly intertwined that separating one from the other is no longer really possible.
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