“_On the Estuaries of the Dee and Mersey._
“In one or other of these must always continue to be the great port of the north-west of England, the preservation and improvement of which has become the more important since this last century has added so much to the progress of manufacturing and commercial enterprise, and to that extension of inland navigation, which has rendered Liverpool not only the great mart of the north-west of Britain and of all Ireland, but nearly of the whole western world.
“The chief feature of these estuaries is the extensive range of sandbanks in their front, through which an intricate ship-navigation has to be carried. These channels have been always subject to variations, and are now only safely navigated by a careful system of pilotage.
“In the progress of our investigations, and feeling the great importance of the measures we are about to recommend, we have carefully inquired into the various changes which have taken place on these banks, as far as can be collected from history or inferred from observation, in order to be enabled to judge what is likely to take place as to their future permanent condition.
“In the time of the Romans the Ribble seems to have been the chief port of this district, and Ribchester is said to have been a city as great as any out of Rome; the port was Poulton below Preston, at the Neb of the Naze, so vastly inferior at the present time to various situations on the Mersey and the Dee that it is impossible not to admit that some extraordinary change has taken place in their physical condition since that period. Tradition says that the port of the Ribble was destroyed by an earthquake, and also that there were tremendous inundations in Cheshire and Lancashire about the termination of the Roman sway in Britain; and various phenomena we have seen seem to point to some such catastrophe.
“It is well known that in the Saxon times the river Dee was an important navigation, and that Chester was then and for many ages after the great port of the west, and for the connection with Ireland, whilst the Mersey was little known, and Liverpool only a fishing village.
“But in after times the port of Chester was so much obstructed by sandbanks in the upper portions that the city became inaccessible to vessels of large draught, and though serious efforts were made to remedy this evil, and have even partly accomplished it, yet the trade of the country was gradually transferred to Liverpool on the Mersey, which had become a place of considerable importance at the time of the Revolution, and had been created an independent port: before, it was only a creek of Chester.