Our final visit of the day was to the Oakes family who run a sustainable scallop farm on Skye, Sconser Scallops. We met David and Alison and their son Ben who is also a scallop diver in their home and gave a short presentation about the SAMPHIRE project.

David has over 30 years of experience exploring the seafloor around Skye and has often worked with the Clan Donald Museum to preserve artefacts he has discovered. All of the Oakes family had an extensive knowledge of the area and we left with several exciting archaeological discoveries which we hope to investigate further this year.

The town of Kyleakin lies opposite Kyle of Lochalsh. It is named after King Haakon IV of Norway whose fleet was moored here before the Battle of Largs in 1263, and whose subsequent defeat contributed to the end of Norwegian hegemony. We stopped briefly in this picturesque place and were able to catch the local fishermen in the photo below as they returned with their catch of shellfish and they gave us a few names of local divers to contact. The castle  in the background of this image is the 15th century Caisteal Maol.

After Camuscross we travelled to Kyle of Lochalsh, a town with a rich maritime history and is dotted with relics such as this sea mine. We walked down to the harbour where we spoke to the harbourmaster and some local fishermen and they were able to provide us with some great new leads and some photographs of local wrecks which are no longer visible.

We then had a chat with local diver Sam Walton who works on fishfarms in the area about the possibilities of joining our dive team for some of the site investigations in June.

Our first stop this morning was at Camuscross to visit Graeme MacKenzie, a local man who discovered an anchor in his own croft while digging a drain. Here Graeme demonstrates the location and orientation of the anchor when he first noticed it. Interestingly the anchor was standing upright and it looks like the head of the anchor was embedded in gravel deposits below the peat. This might suggest that the peat had formed over the anchor after it was put in position and this might help us to date it.

Following on from our visit to the Clan Donald Centre we got in touch with local historian Charlie Barrington who is a keen yachtsman and gives lectures on local maritime history. Charlie and his wife gave us a warm welcome to their home and pored over Admiralty charts over tea and biscuits! Charlie gave us some fascinating tales of the medieval history of the Sound and marked a number of possible wreck sites on the charts for us to chase up.

Our second stop of the day was at the Clan Donald Heritage Museum where we met curator Maggie McDonald and surveyed some of the maritime artefacts which have been donated to the museum recently including some anchors found on the shore nearby and some objects found by local divers, including ships pins from a local unrecorded shipwreck. Maggie was able to provide us with contact details for the divers and for local historians with detailed knowledge of the maritime history of the Sound of Sleat, which we will be following up later.

As our hours on the mainland drew to a close we seized one last chance to gather information by dropping into the Mallaig Harbour Office as we waited on the ferry to Skye. Harbour Master James McLean gave us a warm welcome and immediately began to give us new information on uncharted wrecks in the area.

This morning our first call was to the Arisaig Land Sea and Island Centre where we met the curators and gave an informal talk on our project before dropping off some flyers and other material including some of our last copies of the Society of Antiquaries Telling Scotland’s Story for the local school. The centre holds some fascinating maritime material including a cannonball found in Loch nam Uamh.

For more info on the centre see www.arisaigcentre.co.uk

Our first talk for SAMPHIRE 2014 was at the Mallaig Heritage Centre. The centre is a fascinating collection of local historical items and information, with a very large proportion dedicated to maritime history, such as the large steam boiler and hand-operated capstan on display outside the entrance to the museum. We gave an hour long talk to a group of locals and ended up leaving around an hour later after a great discussion and swapping of much information. A huge thanks to Malcolm Poole for helping us to organise this talk.

Following our visit to SAMS the team walked around Oban dropping flyers around the local shops about the project and our upcoming talk on Friday. Our last visit in Oban was to Puffin Dive Centre, one of the largest diving operations on the west coast. We spoke to the owners and left some more flyers for divers passing through the centre.