The subject of our first Wreck of the Week is the Royal George (1782), a very good example of wreckage which is widely dispersed not only on the seabed, but in a terrestrial context. Our database records are placed online and you can follow the vessel’s full story by expanding each link. 

It seems that there were plenty of salvageable timbers . . .This image from the Historic England Archives shows a billiard table at Windsor made from timbers salved from the Royal George, taken, appropriately, by the architectural photography firm Bedford Lemere and Co., who took photographs of both terrestrial and ship architecture. I saw the Burghley House table not long ago on a trip to Stamford.

In the Historic England library at Swindon there is a book about the history of the wreck and the 1840s operations, which is bound in thin slivers of timber from the wreck – a very nice seaside souvenir and a popular one, judging by the number of editions it went through.