FINDING great pubs around Merseyside isn’t like delving into some bottomless pit.

There’s a fear that at some stage there won’t be any more new ones to choose from and this column, to paraphrase Rutger Hauer’s Roy the Replicant in sci-fi classic Blade Runner, “will be lost like tears in rain. Time to die.�

But, wahey! There’s still life in the old dog yet – as was reaffirmed this week during a trip to Eastham, on the Wirral bank of the Mersey.

The only previous visit to this place was as a teenager on a drizzle-drenched, cold winter’s day to visit Cousin Rob, then a radio officer working on a merchant ship berthed in the nearby Manchester Ship Canal.

Everywhere was dockside bleak as bleak can be.

But somehow Yours Truly had managed to avoid Eastham village itself which, by contrast, is a beautiful little place with a history stretching back to Saxon times.

Its links to Liverpool are also steeped in antiquity.

A ferry service that acted as a connection to the Chester road existed from the Middle Ages, the earliest being run by monks from the Abbey of St Werburgh. Paddle steamers replaced the sailboats in the 19th century, but traffic started to decline in the 1840s with the opening of a rail link between Chester and Birkenhead Woodside ferry.

The last ferry sailed in 1929 but, though the landing stages may have disappeared, what’s been left behind are two hostelries, the Eastham Ferry Hotel and the nearby Tap, flourishing to this day despite the end to the flow of passengers.

The Pub Column opted for a snifter in the latter.

Bikers swarm the Tap like hungry bees, especially at weekends, because of the stunning views it affords across the Mersey estuary. In 1854, the American author, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was based at his country’s consulate in the ’Pool, visited Eastham and declared it “the finest old English village I have ever seen�.

You can understand what the old boy was talking about, especially walking along the front to the pub when there’s a weirdly ruddy full moon rising in a cloudless twilight sky and across the river, the Liver Buildings are glimmering in the distance one way and the runway lights at Speke in the other.

Once inside, there was a lively crew of regulars being served by sparky relief manager Mark Lane.

He declared that, if the weather was good this weekend, they’ll probably be cleaned out of its three real ales, as they were when the annual bikers charity egg run mobbed the place recently.

They also served up over 300 cups of tea and coffee from the big boiler of hot water constantly bubbling behind the bar,

But, of course, this is not just a pub for the metal steed brigade, although its historic connection is with transport. According to Mark, while the relatively well-to-do ferry passengers would frequent the posher Hotel nearby, the artisan classes of ferrymen, coach drivers etc would knock back the ale in the “Tap House�.

Pride of place in today’s pub goes to the original bridge bell salvaged from the 1938 incarnation of HMS Liverpool, which served in the Med during World War II.

But the real pride of place lies with the position of the pub itself and its magnificent vistas.

The aforementioned Replicant Roy also once memorably said: “I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.�

Yeah, mate, but you didn’t see the Mersey from the Tap.

I rest my case.

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