Significance

Some of the abandoned vessels are of national importance and should be investigated, recorded and protected. A list of the significant vessels in the waterway can be found here .

Previous Work

The hulks in the Tamar waterway have been photographed and noted by a number of people, but this work by The SHIPS Project is the first comprehensive study of all of the vessels. More information about the previous work on this subject can be found here .

Fates

Many of the hulks recorded 40 years ago by pioneers Martin Langley, Edwina Small and John Cotton are no longer visible, so their records are all the information we have about these ships:

- Many have been destroyed by erosion and biological activity prevalent on the foreshore where the ship structure is sometimes wet and sometimes dry, battered by waves and eroded by windblown sediments.

- Some of the vessels were simply broken up and their timbers taken away.

- Abandoned wooden vessels have always been a resource providing timber or machinery for building or repairing other ships, for incorporating into buildings on land or for firewood. The Brixham trawler Antelope was partly destroyed by local residents in search of free firewood as Langley complained in a letter to a newspaper, and the trawler Hooe Lake 1 appears to have been abandoned to be a source of firewood.

- Some of the hulks have been deliberately removed or flattened, such as the trawler Wendew, Tamar barge Pearl and ferry Cornubia in Hooe Lake that were flattened by an excavator under the direction of Plymouth City Council who were 'tidying up' Hooe Lake.

- Some of the hulks have disappeared under landfill. For example, whatever remained of the unidentified small steamer at Cattedown is now buried under the land reclamation of the Cockle Bank which is now Neptune Park, and in Hooe Lake the remains of the schooner Dolphin, an unidentified steamship and the Tamar barge Bertie are buried under landfill deposited as part of a housing development that borders the lake.

This is a diminishing resource as it is unlikely that any historically interesting vessels will ever be abandoned on the foreshore in the future. So what remains we can see today is the last remains we will ever see, and the last vestige of a very old maritime tradition of ship disposal, shipbreaking and recycling.

The list of contributors to this study of Plymouth shipwrecks, hulks and aircraft crash sites can be found here.

Last updated 24 April 2024