The one walk on this site with genuine hills. Camp Hill is an Iron Age fort if you squint, and the woods behind it are the quietest place inside the city boundary. Short on distance, honest about the climbing — you’ll do the height gain of a small mountain in instalments of a hundred metres at a time, which is somehow worse.
Start in Woolton Village, which still behaves like the sandstone quarry town it was before Liverpool swallowed it. The lane up to Camp Hill starts politely and then stops being polite. At the top there’s a view over the Mersey basin towards the Runcorn bridges that nobody expects from this side of the city, and the earthworks of the camp itself — read the information board, then decide how much of it you believe.
Drop down the far side into Woolton Woods proper. This is real woodland, not park-with-trees: oak and beech old enough to mean it, and in late April a bluebell show that would draw coach parties if it were anywhere else. It isn’t anywhere else, so you’ll mostly have it to yourself and the dog walkers who guard the knowledge jealously.
The path through the camp field is the one that floods — after a wet week it’s a stream doing an impression of a path, and there’s no dignified way through. That’s the reason for the difficulty rating on a four-kilometre walk, and we stand by it.
Finish back through the village past St Peter’s church hall — where Lennon met McCartney, since you were going to ask — and choose from a better pub selection than a suburb this size has any right to. The Elephant does food. Gardeners Arms if you want quiet.