About

Serena Cant is currently Assistant Maritime Designation Adviser at Historic England, having spent nearly 20 years as a Maritime Data Officer, specialising in researching and recording shipwreck sites and documented wreck events which may be potential matches for wreck finds. Over that time she has curated over 37,000 wreck records from prehistoric logboats to wrecks of the 20th century in English waters, a rich heritage which encompasses a wealth of histories: the ebb and flow of trade patterns, the fortunes of war, and the historic vagaries of the ever-changeable British weather. All these records are made publicly available via Pastscape.

She has written extensively on various aspects of this rich shipwreck heritage with the aim of making it accessible to a wider audience and is the author of England’s Shipwreck Heritage: from logboats to U-boats (2013).

Hefin Meara joined as Data Team Maritime Officer in 2015, having previously worked for English Heritage on the Britain from Above project, and from October 2015 is part of the editorial team.

This blog started life as an internal bulletin alerting Serena’s colleagues to interesting historical features of shipwrecks, but has continued to gain an increasingly wide audience, so it has been taken forward as a blog to reach a wider audience still.

Each story focuses on either a documented wreck event or a particular wreck site from somewhere around the many miles of the English coastline, including sites which have been afforded statutory protection under the Protection of Wrecks Act.

All the ships mentioned will be available for you to view on PastScape: simply click on the links and expand “More Information and Sources” to follow each story in more detail. Where the wreck site is designated under the Protection of Wrecks Act, it will also be available to view on the National Heritage List for England.

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