Solent Marine Heritage Assets
Defining, investigating, monitoring and reporting: 2008 - 2011
This project will enable the HWTMA to work together with English Heritage provide locally based targeting of investigation, monitoring and reporting on a range of marine heritage assets in the Solent and Sea Wight area.
The project will support:
- Work on Solent Designated Historic Wreck Sites
- Investigation and monitoring on non-designated wreck sites
- Investigation and monitoring of non-wreck sites
The project will take a regional approach to protected wreck sites within the Solent region to help support the work of licensees and increase capacity to respond to management issues and challenges. This project will allow for the monitoring of these sites to help feed into management requirements, and this will include the assessment of the level of risk which the sites face. The protected wreck sites included in the project in 2009 were the Needles, Yarmouth Roads and HMS Invincible. On the site pages brief summaries of the monitoring dives can be seen and the site reports are available to download. These can also be found in our downloads section.
In addition to the protected wreck sites there are also a wealth of other wreck sites in the Solent and Sea Wight areas. There are a number of sites which the HWTMA have had reported to them (often by local sports divers) which require inspection, or that have been dived on to gather basic data but require further work. Such sites will be targeted and we will use data already gathered by the HWTMA and support further data gathering and reporting to aid long-term management. In 2010 two un-designated wreck sites were investigated, the Fenna and HMS Velox.
Images from the 2009 protected wreck site monitoring dives
Needles protected wreck site Yarmouth Roads protected wreck site
HMS Invincible protected wreck site