The SAMPHIRE team left Ayr yesterday morning and headed south. The first stop was the small port town of Dunure.  Dunure’s harbour dates to 1811 and still houses a small local fishing fleet.  We were able to talk to some local residents that were around harbour about known wrecks in the area and we learned about the loss of the Valkyrien, a barque that ran aground north of Dunure harbour in 1883. Several of the local fishermen of Dunure were involved in rescuing the crew of the Valkyrien and the wreck is commemorated with a plaque near the harbour.

The next stop after Dunure was Maidens. Here we headed to the pier and met Jim the local Harbour Master who was happy to discuss local wrecks and also to refer us to locals with knowledge of the area. Jim introduced us to Ian Templeton, a retired fisherman and history enthusiast. Ian started fishing when he was 21, ring trawling for herring from the Isle of Man to the Outer Hebrides and then shifting to creel fishing later in life. Overall he spent more than 35 years fishing in western Scotland.

Ian has an in-depth knowledge of the local marine environment and shared several sites with us. He also gave a great account of the changing maritime landscape and spoke at length about the developments in the maritime industry and culture. After our meeting with Mr. Templeton he thanked us and said “It is nice to know that people are still interested in these things”  which is always nice to hear!

We then moved on to the foreshore area of the village to document the remains of an old fishing vessel. The Royal Commission of Historic and Ancient Monuments has several records for reported losses of early 20^th century vessels in this area but no confirmed wrecks.

Yesterday the SAMPHIRE team travelled to Great Cumbrae, one of the inhabited islands in the Firth of Clyde. The main town on Great Cumbrae is the port of Millport. Millport has a distinguished history of marine science, dating back to 1897 when Sir John Murray, considered the father of modern oceanography by many, established the Millport Marine Biological Station. Today, the station is still in operation though under different auspices. It has recently been reborn as the Field Studies Council Millport Field Station, and is still dedicated to promoting and teaching marine research and marine sciences. Dr. Philip Cowrie of FSC Millport gave us a warm welcome and discussed several shipwreck sites in the region that are known to the research staff.

Following our visit to Millport we stopped into C&C Marine Services Dive Centre in the Largs Marina where we addedx more potential sites to our list. The final stop of the day was at the North Ayrshire Heritage Centre in Saltcoats. Today we’ll be heading south from Ayr to Stranraer.

In Irvine the SAMPHIRE team visited the fantastic Scottish Maritime Museum to discuss the SAMPHIRE project and see if any of the staff or volunteers could give us leads on unrecorded maritime heritage in the area. This was the first time that the team had visited the Scottish Maritime Museum and we were blown away by the number of exhibits and resources that the museum has, including several ship and boat restoration projects. Of particular interest was an old chartroom from an unidentified steamship that had been used as a gardener’s cottage in Aberdeenshire until 1999! The staff of the museum were able to give us several contact details for locals with knowledge of wrecks and maritime history in the area. We will definitely be visiting again the near future!

Today the SAMPHIRE team left Inverkip and had a very busy day working our way south through Largs, Ardrossan, Irvine, Troon and ending in Ayr. Along the way the team visited various different establishments including the Vikingrar! in Largs, the Scottish Maritime Museum in Irvine and the marinas in Ardrossan and Troon. The team received a warm welcome everywhere they went and have picked up several new leads for new maritime archaeological sites.  Finding the right people to talk to in each location is part of the investigative process for Project SAMPHIRE and the hunt continues!

Our 2015 SAMPHIRE community engagement fieldwork officially kicked off yesterday with the team leaving Edinburgh and heading west toward the Clyde, one of our key study areas this year. The team’s first stop was at the Riverside Museum in Glasgow. The Riverside Museum houses a large collection of transportation related materials including plenty of boat and ship models and the preserved remains of prehistoric log boats! The team spoke to the museum staff and left them with SAMPHIRE pamphlets and discussed potential outreach opportunities before hitting the road again.

Traveling west along the Clyde the team dropped in to Port Glasgow and Greenock on the way to Inverkip. Both towns were instrumental in the development of steam technology and iron shipbuilding. The final stop of the day was in Inverkip where they spoke to locals at the Inverkip Marina about the maritime heritage of the area. Tomorrow the team will travel south to Ayrshire, stay tuned!

Monday morning will see the SAMPHIRE team leave Edinburgh take to the road again for the Community Engagement phase of the 2015 season. This year the team will be focusing on southwest Scotland, working from the Clyde, south to the Border, contacting divers, fishermen, and community members with knowledge of the seafloor along the way.  Our community engagement team for 2015 will be Andrew Roberts and Abby Mynett, both experienced maritime archaeologists based in Scotland. Watch this space for regular updates to our blog and @WAScotland Twitter feed all of next week!

Exciting stuff – we have just taken delivery of the printed SAMPHIRE reports covering our work and discoveries from the 2014 investigations. We have over 100 bound reports which we will be posting out to all the folk who were involved in the project last year.

On Wednesday night Andrew Roberts from the SAMPHIRE team travelled to Perth to meet the Perth BSAC Dive Club (https://perth-bsac.co.uk/) to discuss our upcoming maritime archaeology investigations on the west coast. Perth BASC is one of the most active clubs in this part of Scotland and nearly 20 members attended the presentation, held in the Moncrieff Arms in downtown Perth. As always, the presentation emphasized the role of local divers and community members in Project SAMPHIRE and encouraged divers to become involved in the upcoming field season.

The presentation was well received with several attendees submitting sites and providing new possible site locations to the team.  Several members expressed interest in participating in future fieldwork as well. This was a great opportunity to talk directly to active divers and encourage interest and participation in the project. We look forward to continued cooperation with the Perth Sub Aqua Club in the upcoming field season.

We have just finalised our digital report for the SAMPHIRE Project in 2014 and it is chock-full of over 50 exciting new maritime archaeological discoveries. We have been visiting coastal communities in the Highlands and Argyll, diving from a local converted trawler and spreading the word through local talks and conferences in Scotland and Europe. This year’s focus for research has been on the area around Skye and the Firth of Lorn and the majority of the new sites are in that area. We have everything from newly discovered and identified shipwrecks and Mesolithic flints to stone anchors and WWII flying boats, all part of Scotland’s rich maritime archaeological heritage.

Thanks to the valuable knowledge held within local communities we can now start to locate and understand these sites, in most cases for the very first time. We have made lots of new friends in these communities, particularly with divers, fishermen and others whose lives and work centre on the sea. We’ve been able to invite student volunteers and local community members to participate in diving investigations and to make new wreck discoveries and we’ve even recorded evidence of Scotland’s prehistoric past. The project continues to gain momentum and this year we have benefitted from a series of new partnerships with fantastic organisations including Flinders University and the Scottish Association of Marine Science.

You can see and download the new report at https://blogs.wessexarch.co.uk/samphire/downloads/ and also grab a copy of the report for 2013 and other resources.

This weekend has been a hectic one for the SAMPHIRE team. We have been at two conferences at opposite ends of the country, spreading the word about SAMPHIRE and encouraging members of local communities, amateur marine archaeologists and recreational divers to get involved in the stewardship of Scotland’s marine heritage.

Andrew Roberts and Peta Knott manning the WA Coastal & Marine stall and sharing some of the results of the SAMPHIRE project

Andrew Roberts from the SAMPHIRE team attended the Nautical Archaeology Society Annual Conference at the Museum of London this weekend to promote Project SAMPHIRE.  The conference was an interesting mixture of professional and avocational archaeologists and illustrated the valuable contribution that the public makes to archaeological projects. Several exciting projects were presented by colelagues in other organisations and other avocational groups including the Embo Zulu wreck study in Scotland by SCHARP and  NoSAS. This project was conducted with cooperation between local community members and professional archaeologists. There was also a fantastic talk by Dr Colin Martin, looking back at all of the amazing maritime archaeology he has undertaken in his career, much of it in Scotland, and how archiving work is being undertaken to preserve these discoveries and make them accessible to the Scottish public. The conference was a great venue to promote Project SAMPHIRE, engage with archaeologists and enthusiasts, and learn more about ongoing collaborations between communities and archaeologists.

The poster for the Scottish Dive Conference talk, created by Stirling Sub-Aqua Club who organised the event.

On the same day, John McCarthy attended the annual Scottish Dive Conference. He gave an hour long talk on the project to a room packed with Scottish divers with around 50 people in attendance and standing room only. There was a lot of enthusiasm for the project and many flyers and site reporting sheets were taken at the end of the talk. There were also lots of other great talk, including a fantastic presentation by well-known Scottish diver and wreck research Rod McDonald.

.