Archaeologist Ben Robinson explores Parkgate, a village on the estuary of the River Dee in Cheshire. Today, the village is landlocked, cut off from the Dee and the Irish Sea due to the estuary’s shifting silt. But 250 years ago, it was a bustling harbour, and as Ben finds out from Dr Gillian O’Brian, a gateway for thousands of Irish immigrants from the 1620s onwards.

Local resident Anthony Annakin-Smith, who has been researching Parkgate’s past, explains to Ben it was the estuary’s ever-shifting silt that first established the village as an important trading port in the 18th century. Up to then, the Port of Chester had handled most of the trade along the Dee, but by the 1600s, its harbour was starting to silt up, allowing Parkgate to expand.

By the middle of the 18th century, the village also developed into a tourist hotspot almost by accident, due to the latest health fad prescribed by doctors - sea bathing! This new trend caught on quickly, and local women, called dippers, were soon employed to dispense the treatment of dunking visitors under the sea water, as Ben discovers from historian Dr Kathryn Ferry. Show less