Gun Rocks – Reports

Download the Gun Rocks report here

Tyneside 114 has had an involvement with Gun Rocks since the late 1960s. During the last 45 years a number of reports have been written. This page provides links to those reports, so that you can down load and read them at your leisure.

The four reports written to date are listed below .

  • Gun Rocks Project 1970
  • Gun Rocks Project II 2010
  • Gun Rocks Wessex Archaeology Report 2013
  • Gun Rocks Cannon Site 2015 – Winner of the BSAC Wreck Award

Please read on for a time line summary of the history of our involvement with Gun Rocks. Click on the front cover of each report to access the download link.

Gun Rocks 1970

Tyneside 114’s association with the cannon on Gun Rocks began back in 1970 thanks to the curiousity of the Diving Officer of the time, Mr. W.R. Smith (known as Bill). He had been reading a book by a well-known historian which gave an interesting account of the battles and the epic voyage by the defeated Spanish Armada around Britain and Ireland.

During this time, he also read with interest an article about the finding of a cannon on the Farne Islands. This was the start of the Gun Rocks project. During the project in the 1970s, a cannon was raised, a TV programme made and a huge amount of diver participation was involved in the surveying of the cannon site. All of the findings were recorded in the Gun Rocks Project, Interim Report 1970, written by Bill Smith.

Gun Rocks Project II

In 2010 Andy Hunt, the Diving Officer of Tyneside 114 at the time, started a Gun Rocks Project II to celebrate the 40thanniversary of the initial project. The aims of this project were:

  • To re-survey the Gun Rocks cannon site and compare the results with the original survey;
  • To conduct a detailed marine life survey of the site and provide data through the Seasearch recording system;
  • Produce a report of the project work suitable for submission as a BSAC or Nautical Archaeological Society (NAS) conference paper.

One of the secondary aims was to identify the name of the wreck.

Wessex Archaeology and Historic England

Following the Gun Rocks Project II, in 2013 Wessex Archaeology (WA) was commissioned by Historic England (previously English Heritage) to undertake an “Undesignated Site Assessment” of the wreck on the Gun Rocks site. The work was undertaken as part of the “Heritage at Risk – Designated Wrecks at Risk”.

The fieldwork was part of a staged investigation of a number of wreck sites in the Farne Islands, beginning in March 2013. The Gun Rocks site was dived between the 28th August and 5th September 2013 and included 14 dives, undertaken by both WA divers and Tyneside 114 divers.

A report was subsequently produced by WA, which has an interesting conclusion as to the reason for the wreck and its potential origins.

 

 

Gun Rocks Cannon Site – BSAC wreck award winner 2015

This report was written in order to summarise all of the works which has taken pace on Gun Rocks to date. It includes the following chapters:

  • Gun Rocks (where is it and what is it like to dive there?)
  • Project History – 1970
  • The Intervening Years
  • Gun Rocks Project II – The Site Revisited 2010
  • The Wessex Archaeology Report
  • Publicity and Events
  • The Future of Tyneside 114 And Gun Rock

 

 

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