According to the
Domesday Book of 1086, Grange (also called Great Caldy, or Caldy Grange) was one of the estates owned by Hugh Delamere, consisting of a single household. The land later passed into the hands of
Basingwerk Abbey, until the
dissolution of the Monasteries. In the seventeenth century it became the property of
William Glegg who also founded
Calday Grange Grammar School, and it remained the property of the Gleggs until 1785, when it was bought by John Leigh, a Liverpool solicitor and property speculator, who refounded the grammar school. He passed it on to his son John Shaw Leigh who later went on to buy
Luton Hoo. By the twentieth century the area was in the hands of the trustees of Madame de Falbe, his son John Gerard Leigh's widow, who had remarried to Christian de Falbe, the Danish ambassador. Grange was a township in West Kirby parish of the
Wirral Hundred, which became a civil parish in 1866 and included the hamlets of
Caldy Grange and
Newton Carr. The civil parish was part of
Wirral Rural District, then from 1933
Hoylake Urban District, within the county of
Cheshire. On 1 April 1974 the parish was abolished and the area became unparished, in
Merseyside. The population was recorded at 10 in 1801, 105 in 1851, 299 in 1901 and rising to 7,657 by 1951. ==Geography==