This is the bonus for the Domesday Boltelai lab series. The cache itself is within 300m of the map icon.
The first surprise I had researching this series was where Bootle village actually is - it's nowhere near where I think of as Bootle (around New Strand area). The second surprise was easily finding enough stuff to drone on about just in the little rectangle of roads that once was the village of Bootle.
Sherriff’s map, prepared in 1768, shows the village of Bootle consisting of 26 buildings centred on the area where present day Litherland Road meets Merton Road (near the Jawbone pub lab). The arrival of the Leeds Liverpool canal in the 1770s, railways in the 1840s and Sandon, Huskisson and Canada docks in the 1850s saw Bootle become a hive of industry and, whilst never becoming part of Liverpool itself, was soon swallowed up into the expanding city's urban sprawl.
The 1801 census records 537 in Bootle-cum-Linacre (Linacre was another village a mile north of Bootle); one hundred years later the population had risen to 58,556 resulting in a Charter being granted by Queen Victoria in 1868 making the town a borough independant of Liverpool. The creation of the Borough of Bootle-cum-Linacre provided a new administrative centre for the town and in 1882 the Town Hall and Public Offices were opened.
Unsurprisingly Bootle saw a lot of attention in WWII and was the most bombed borough in the country. In the 1940 blitz 90% of the houses in the town were damaged with 458 civilian deaths from enemy action. Bombs the Luftwaffe used here came under three main categories: Parachute Mine, Incendiary and High Explosive. These were often referred to as PM, IB and HE respectively, sometimes accompanied by the letters UX beforehand to indicate that it had failed to explode. They varied in size from tiny 1kg incendiary bombs all the way up to the 1800kg monster that the Germans nicknamed “Satan”.
Generally speaking the larger the device, the more damage it was likely to inflict, however much also depended on the circumstances and location where it went off. For example incendiary bombs were often very easy to deal with if they fell in a well populated area and were not accompanied by any high explosive devices. Local people had received training or pamphlets on how to deal with these and often did so without trouble until the Germans started to include an explosive charge in the device. If incendiaries landed in a less well populated area like an industrial estate however, the effects could be devastating.
Parachute Mines were another example of a device that inflicted damage out of proportion with its size. Although still large, the standard types used by the Luftwaffe were 500kg and 1000kg. These mines were designed to descend on a parachute and explode above ground 25 seconds after impact. The resulting blast and shock wave could easily demolish half a street if they came down in a residential area. Virtually all of the major incidents during the blitz on Merseyside were caused by parachute mines (including the one that killed my grandfather in Edge Hill - see MERDAH 25 - GC91PVM).