High on a city hill is the Anglican Cathedral of Liverpool, in brown square-shouldered loneliness like a double-crossed gothic gangster, wondering where its world went. Climb to the top of that tall tower and look down. See all the little dramas of love and lust, riot and poverty, played out by those tiny figures in the streets, chasing their insect destinies.

Up here we can see for miles. Buffeted by winds from the Irish Sea we try to make sense of Liverpool. Well, we try. What are those? Giant steel turbines rotate idly out west in Liverpool Bay. Grey distance, Ireland behind. Beyond that, next stop Pier 92, West 52nd Street. On the skyline a vast spread of bruised blue Welsh mountains. But nearer, two silver strips of river, the Dee and the Mersey, defining that weird peninsula the Wirral, mystically known as ‘across the water’. We see pony-owning villages and dying publand proletowns.

Back over here, at the water's edge two Liver birds perch above a tangle of city streets built for warehouses and whorehouses and counting houses, and everything needful for an enormous seaport. Docks are difficult, nature-defying beasts and they were invented here. In fact the modern Mersey manhandles more cargo then ever, only it's no longer men who handle it, just cranes and tin boxes. But there are those Panama-busting ships out in the squally estuary with their midget escorts the pilots and the tugs. Curving in their wake are little white ferries to Birkenhead, and bigger ones to Dublin and the Isle of Man.

Turning to look inland we see some vaguely green horizon. Travellers from this eastern region speak of a land called Lancashire. They describe the mighty city of Manchester. Perhaps they are right. Liverpudlians are not so sure.

Whatever. The River Mersey we'll file away in our minds, and those downtown streets we'll soon revisit. Now, look down below. Right down at Gambier Terrace, regal as a queen and full of secrets. At her feet, the vertiginous cliff-face of St James's Cemetery, a mossy necropolis in the void of a former quarry, dug in the sandstone spine that separates Liverpool from England.