After our great success working with the SAMS dive team in the Firth of Lorn the SAMPHIRE team set off on their own on the MV Kylebhan, a converted trawler skippered by Oban resident Jim Kilcullen. Our goal on this trip is to chase up leads shared with us by local people on unrecorded shipwrecks and maritime heritage all around Skye and the Firth of Lorn. Our first day was spent steaming from Oban to the Isle of Eigg, with an overnight in Tobermory where we had a chance to set foot on Mull, an island with an incredibly rich maritime history.

This view along the engine of the newly discovered flying boat shows the incredible level of preservation.

Our first two days of SAMPHIRE fieldwork have started with a major discovery. Just last week the Dalriada dive club reported a new flying boat site in the Firth of Lorn, a second Sunderland, to add to the recently discovered Catalina and Sunderland, bringing the total to three. The new wreck site appears to be the best preserved of all, with propellers and wings still in place. A wing has also been discovered, but strangely, despite the fact that one of the Sunderland’s wings is missing, this appears to be from a fourth flying boat. Taken together this collection of flying boats is truly of national significance. We are particularly grateful to John Beaton and Jeff Darby of the Dalriada Dive Club for sharing their discoveries and photographs with marine heritage professionals. We have also been helped by Shane Wasik of Basking Shark Scotland who has provided footage of the first two sites.

SAMS diver and archaeologist Elaine Azzopardi inspects the broken wing of a flying boat in the Firth of Lorn during yesterday’s diving surveys.

For the last two days Wessex archaeologist and SAMPHIRE team member Drew Roberts has been working with the dive team from the Dusntaffnage-based Scottish Institute of Marine Science to record the flying boats and try to understand and identify them. We will be posting further updates as more data comes in.

SAMS hydrographers have been re-analysing the INIS Hydro multibeam data and made a number of new discoveries.

While Drew was undertaking the dive surveys, John McCarthy, SAMPHIRE project manager, has been working with the hydrographers in the SAMS base at Dunstaffnage to record some new archaeological sites which are being found as a result of a new analysis of the dataset. This has led to around ten new features which are thought to be wrecks being identified in the last week. We will be diving some of these sites later in the week and also sharing the data with local dive clubs at Dalriada and Lochaline Dive Centre to find out what these intriguing sites are.

The SAMPHIRE team are mobilising this morning to begin our circumnavigation of Skye, starting from Oban and returning on the 14th of July, with dive investigations every day so keep an eye of the blog for exciting discoveries!

Figure Caption: A Flinders University Maritime Archaeology Student records the Clyde-built Leven Lass during the 2014 fieldschool in Victoria, Australia. Another fieldschool is scheduled for February 2015.

As this summer’s SAMPHIRE campaign heads toward the sea for the 2014 marine surveys, the WA C&M team will be joined by local volunteers, archaeology students and its new project partners from the Flinders University Maritime Archaeology Program. So, how did our Scottish-based team partner with a group from Adelaide, South Australia? The answer is quite simple: SAMPHIRE’s Original Principal Investigator and Project Manager left last year to become Lecturer in Maritime Archaeology at Australia’s leading University for Maritime Archaeology.

This year Dr Jonathan Benjamin is delighted to return to Scotland for project SAMPHIRE as formal project partner and Co-I. Jonathan is joined by Flinders MA student Chelsea Colwell-Pasch, who is researching Scottish Maritime Archaeology for her MA thesis. The international cooperation allows an excellent opportunity for professional, academic, volunteer and student involvement. Plus, maritime archaeology is an international discipline with trans-boundary elements and the obvious aspects of transport and travel throughout time.

Chelsea’s thesis topic will incorporate a multiphasic vessel biography on the Scottish-built historic shipwreck Leven Lass, a brig built in Dumbarton, by Denny & Rankine at Denny’s Shipyard number two, in 1839. A brig is a two-masted sailing ship with square rigging on both masts; they were commonly used as couriers on coastal routes.  Leven Lass had routes between Limerick and Glasgow and then between North America (Canada and West Indies) and Glasgow. It was then sold on 16 September 1852, by Paton and Grant, and sailed from Scotland to Melbourne, Australia on 1 October 1852 by Captain Sholto Gardener Jamieson (1818-1882), arriving in 1853 (Glasgow Herald 17 September 1852:8; Lythgoe 2014; Wilson 2012). Leven Lass spent the majority of its time in Southeast Australia as a post carrier between Adelaide, Melbourne, Hobart and Sydney and was considered “a remarkably fast sailer” (Glasgow Herald 17 September 1852:8).

The Shipwreck Leven Lass was identified by a previous Flinders Masters student (D. Wilson) who worked on the wreck during the 2012 Flinders fieldschool at Phillip Island, Victoria (in partnership with Heritage Victoria). Leven Lass was chosen as Chelsea’s thesis topic after the 2014 Flinders University Maritime Archaeology fieldschool this past January (see Chelsea’s post on the Flinders University Student Blog).  During the 2014 fieldschool in Victoria, more data were collected and Chelsea will now investigate the vessel’s ‘life cycle’ or career, from design inception to archaeological investigation, and its broader implications for shipwreck studies, Scottish maritime diaspora and nineteenth century post-colonial Australian seafaring. Her research trip has taken Chelsea from Adelaide to Edinburgh (and on to Oban and the Islands), and she has visited the Glasgow University Archives, RCAHMS, the Scottish Maritime Museum and met with various heritage professionals in Scotland.

As researchers of maritime archaeology, the SAMPHIRE project team would like to hear from the public. If you have knowledge about historic ship-building, wrecks, or material that you have discovered (particularly as it relates to Scottish coasts or diaspora), please do not hesitate to contact the SAMPHIRE team!

As part our investigations into the Camuscross anchor we have undertaken a 3D photogrammetric survey and have used the resulting model to produce measured orthographic renders of the anchor. We have also made the model of the anchor available through an online interactive web viewer. To see it click on the image below.

Not working? In order to view this 3D interactive model you will require an up to date browser and for WebGL to be installed/enabled – see https://p3d.in/faq/systemspecs for more detail. At present WebGL is not well supported in Internet Explorer but it is in Google Chrome.

Dr Daniel Atkinson records the dimensions of the Camuscross anchor, on loan to the SAMPHIRE team from the Clan Donald Museum in Skye. This unusual anchor was found in peat by Graeme MacKenzie, a local crofter and the SAMPHIRE team have visited the findspot on Skye to record it in more detail and see what we could tell from the deposits it was found in. It is heavily corroded but its unusual features and the fact it was found below a formation of peat suggest it may be of great antiquity. The anchor is currently undergoing conservation with the Scottish Conservation Studio, who kindly arranged for its transport to our offices for detailed recording. The anchor was found in 2009 and was the subject of much discussion in the media about its age. Although there is no evidence of it being a Viking era anchor we hope to narrow down its age through further analysis and comparison with similar finds.

The SAMPHIRE team ran a stall at Lochaline Dive Centre all day yesterday meeting various dive groups passing through as well as locals from the wider area. We’ve been passing out flyers and giving short talks on the project as well as showing videos of some of the marine archaeological projects we’ve been involved with. Lochaline Dive Centre is run by Mark and Annabel Lawrence, both of whom have spent many years working as marine archaeologists and who have done a great deal of work recording the wrecks in the local area and running field schools with the Nautical Archaeology Society. We are delighted to have them as project partners and will be returning to the centre to work with local divers they know to investigate some of the new sites we have had reported. This will include some volunteering from technical divers who will be helping us to verify the location and nature of wrecks at between 50 and 100 metres depth.

John McCarthy speaking to Buxton Dive Club.

Some of the local residents came down to pass on some of their expertise on local wrecks. Highlights included visits from Oban Times columnist and former National Geographic photographer Iain Thornber who came to tell us about an ships engine he had spotted on a drying rock and soon afterwards Alastair Scoular, local resident and former WWII air corps cadet who came to pass on some of his knowledge on flying boats, helping us to analyse some of the data we have on the flying boats in the Firth of Lorn.

Local resident and flying boat expert Alastair Scouler looking at the details of a sidescan survey of a flying boat and helping SAMPHIRE archaeologist Andrew Roberts to interpret the data.

This event marks the end of the Community Outreach element of the 2014 SAMPHIRE programme for the year. We will now head back to the office and crunch through all the info on local wrecks we’ve been given and start to gear up for the diving in July.

We investigated two wooden wrecks that were rumoured to be in the west end of Loch Tarbert.  Both wrecks were visible from the road and we were able to photograph and document them from the beach.  Neither wreck appears in CANMORE but  after some brief web research we were able to tentatively identify one of them as the Kriesker BA.207, a trawler originally built in France in 1958 that was based in Falmouth for many years before coming up to Scotland.  The vessel is rumoured to have drifted free from its mooring at West Tarbert  and run aground in the early 1980s.  There is more research to be done to tell the story but the results are already exciting!

The village of Tarbert has an ancient maritime history and it’s Gaelic name means ‘ to carry across’, this being a narrow place between two sea lochs, where boats could be portaged across the peninsula. It was also a seat of Robert the Bruce with an imposing castle above the town.

We met up with a number of fishermen down at the harbour including two local scallop divers, Ewan and Bob, who were just returning from a successful trip. They were able to tell us about some interesting local sites including a possible torpedo! They were also very keen to hear about our upcoming diving phase and we hope they will be able to join us.

Yesterday the SAMPHIRE team headed south from Oban into southern Argyll, stopping first at Lochgilphead. There we met two local fishermen, father and son Archie Gilp Sr. and Archie Gilp Jr. whose surnames demonstrate their local roots! Between them they have worked on the Argyll fisheries for many decades and now run a  tackle shop in Lochgilphead. They demonstrated a wealth of knowledge about local wrecks and were able to add several new sites to our maps. They also gave us a lot of helpful suggestions for local contacts and gave us directions to two intertidal wrecks at West Tarbert.

Today we returned to the Dunstaffnage Marine Laboratory at the Scottish Association of Marine Science (SAMS) to give a talk to the staff and to local people. We were fortunate to be joined by the local BSAC sub-aqua club Dalriada Divers who turned up in force. Dalriada Divers gave us some great detail on wreck sites last year and helped us clear up the mysteries of the Chuaig Bay wrecks. We gave an hour long talk on the SAMPHIRE project and followed up with some discussion with the divers on wreck sites in the area.

After the talk we had a quick visit to the Ocean Explorer Centre to test the amazing interactive hydrographic exhibit before heading down to Oban Harbour to talk to some of the divers returning from recreational diving in the area.