Many thanks to Vaughan Williams for these great photos of a shipwreck out on the sands on Hoylake beach. Vaughan says:
The recent storm has uncovered a long buried wreck on the beach off Hoylake. It is on the low water mark directly opposite the Hoylake Community Centre and was a large wooden ship around 90 feet long. I wonder if anybody can identify it.
So, can anyone provide any more information? I don’t think it sounds like the wreck of the WWII Greek freighter mentioned in this very long blog post that I stumbled upon last month (opens in new window – you might want to use “find” and look for ‘hoylake wreck’). And here’s another of Vaughan’s photo for you:
The Greek freighter wreck you refer to is commonly known as the Greek or factually the SS Nestos, this link provides some further info http://www.wrecksite.eu/wreck.aspx?67306 This freshly uncovered wreck is more than a mile to the east of the SS Nestos so further digging required!
Update: The coordinates of this newly uncovered wreck have been logged in our (Hoylake Lifeboat) GPS for sometime as it is close to one of our launching sites and we want to avoid it, however we haven’t seen this much of it before, normally only the tops of a couple of frames. With the help of Dave Dodd we have tried to research the history of this vessel using the lifeboats service records, three possibilities were discovered that sank in this approximate area;
>October 12th 1858 a Schooner “Red Rover” of Barrow
>September 16th 1873 no name
>January 31st 1910 a Ketch “Alexandra”
What we know is that in this approximate position over the last 100 years more than 30 feet of sand has been deposited, so we guess that this excludes the earliest two casualties, we also know that the East Hoyle Banks seaward edge is slowly “moving” towards the promenade another reason why it might have been exposed. Our records state that the Alexandra was 85 tons net which would be right for a wooden built vessel of this type, but the records also say that she ran aground opposite Beach Road in heavy fog, and that the lifeboat crew helped to discharge her cargo of 30 tons of coal over the next 3 days before her crew were finally rescued by the lifeboat. We don’t know if she had moved from the original position or whether that position was correct due to the fog.
So basically we don’t know which vessel it is! But like you we would be interested in any other theories.
Great updates Ian – really interesting! Thanks.