50th Anniversary of the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973

Part 1: The Cattewater Wreck, the very first wreck designated under the Act

This post forms the first blog in our two-part end-of-year Christmas Special 2023 focusing on the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973, whose 50th anniversary Historic England has celebrated this year.

For this special edition we are once more delighted to host Martin Read, licensee of the Cattewater Wreck, who also celebrated the 45th anniversary of the Act in 2018 with a post on Cattewater on this blog.

This time Martin writes about some new findings on the Cattewater Wreck and how our understanding of the site has developed since it was first discovered in the 1970s.

The Cattewater Wreck was discovered on the 20th June 1973 by the Anglo-Dutch dredger Holland XVII whilst deepening moorings for air-sea rescue craft based at RAF Mount Batten in Plymouth. Each bucket of the dredger was described in a letter that autumn by the ethnographist of working craft around Britain, Eric McKee, who recorded the process, as ‘smaller than a Mini Clubman’. [1]

This brought up timbers and fragments of ordnance that were identified as being Tudor in date. As a result, the wreck site was designated on the 5^th September 1973 under the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973 (Order No.1), becoming the first wreck given protection in the UK.

The site was surveyed and partly excavated between 1976-8. Recovered finds included parts of the ship structure and fittings, ordnance, vessels for cooking and eating/drinking, clothing, personal possessions, as well as environmental evidence, such as fish bones. The only known casualty was represented by a few bones from a dog. [2]

I have held a Government license to dive and to carry out surveys on the site since 2006. Students from the University of Plymouth (and others) have carried out various geophysical surveys (including sub-bottom profiler, side-scan sonar and magnetometer surveys), identifying the probable location of the wreck. Nearby anomalies might be detached parts of the wreck. A team of local divers have ground-truthed targets on the surface of the seabed and carried out metal-detector and probe surveys of the site.

The archive from the 1970s survey and excavation was deposited in The Box (previously Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery) Site Accession Number AR.1985.2, and in 2011 English Heritage funded a project to improve the long-term care and management of the archive to modern archival standards. [3] Material is still being added to the archive, with the Museum recently re-discovering a roll of plans and diagrams, which now need to be accessioned.

The project has made the archive far more accessible and easy to use. Finds from the archive have since been used to provide a better date for the site, with the leather shoes and ceramics indicating that the ship was wrecked after 1500, most likely in the early 16th century. [Why not explore the Cattewater Wreck Archive on the Archaeology Data Service?]

I thought I would look at one aspect of the research we have carried out on the finds. Amongst the samples recovered were a number of stones from the ship’s ballast. The original identification of their geology showed that most appeared to have been local Plymouth or Devon (limestone and granite), indicating that the ship had been reballasted locally. Others included chalk, flint and limestone originating from areas between Bristol/South Wales & London. As a result, the conclusion made was that the ship was a coastal trading vessel. However, no systematic methodology had been carried out to recover the ballast samples, making them potentially unrepresentative, and some of the identified geological origins were also problematic (including some from the Highlands of Scotland, which seemed unlikely).

Professor Malcolm Hart, Emeritus Professor of Micropaleontology, University of Plymouth, has looked at the remaining stone samples in the museum and been able to provide new identifications to some, as well as providing additional possible sources, such as Brittany and Ireland, which had strong trading connections with Plymouth.

One sample of local limestone (CW78 423.2) had been severely drilled by a piddock (Pholas, a marine mollusc), showing that it had been on the sea floor for a long time, possibly stored in a ballast pit or pile – something that was known to be common in later centuries, and may indicate some of the local ballasting practices at the time.

Plymouth has been an important maritime port and a meeting place for naval fleets since medieval times. Ships from the port carried out coastal and international trade in cargos such as salted fish, wine, cloth and tin. There were strong trading links with Ireland, Bordeaux, in south-west France, and with Iberia. Any of these sources might have provided stone for ballasting ships which could have been reused in Plymouth.

The original conclusion might be correct, with the ship being a coastal trading vessel operating between Bristol and London, with the new additions of Brittany and Ireland. However, other interpretations and conclusions are possible, and the ballast may be composed of what had been loaded by the local water bailiff in Plymouth, reflecting the trading relationships of the port, rather than of the ship. Or something between the two.

Explore the Protection of Wrecks Act further:

50 Years of Protecting Shipwrecks – Hefin Meara, Historic England

Landlocked and Looking Out, a PWA50 project – Michael Lobb, MSDS Marine

45 Years of the Protection of Wrecks Act (2018) – Martin Read, licensee of the Cattewater Wreck

Footnotes

[1] Eric McKee, letter to Valerie Fenwick, 7 October 1973, Cattewater Wreck Archive AR.1985.24, The Box, Plymouth; see McKee, E, 1983 Working Boats of Britain: their shape and purpose (London: Conway Maritime Press)

[2] Redknap, M. 1984 The Cattewater Wreck: the investigation of an armed vessel of the early 16th century National Maritime Museum Archaeology Series 8/British Archaeological Reports – British Series 131.

[3] Martin Read, Nigel Overton (2014) Cattewater Wreck Archive [data-set]. York: Archaeology Data Service [distributor] https://doi.org/10.5284/1024721