Guns & Ammo (17th century style)

Guest blog by our Scottish student volunteer Bob Mackintosh:

At the start of this week the SAMPHIRE team visited the site of the Mingary Castle protected wreck (now a Historic Marine Protected Area) on Saturday for a ‘shakedown dive’, to refamiliarise ourselves with our equipment and the conditions in the Sound of Mull. The wreck site was discovered in 1999 and consists of five 17th century cannon and other small finds.

 

During the dive a previously unrecorded cannonball was found next to one of the cannon, but heavy kelp made determining exactly which cannon difficult. Because of this we decided to do a second dive to confirm the exact location of the ordnance so we could accurately update the protected site’s record. Not bad for a shakedown dive!