The “exceptionally rare” Pin Wreck off Dorset has been highlighted by Historic England (HE) among unusual heritage sites granted protection in 2025 – and is the only shipwreck.
The 19th-century Admiralty steam-powered mooring lighter, which lies 27m deep off St Albans Head, was one of 199 sites added to the National Heritage List for England over the course of the year. It was included as a Scheduled Monument in March.
Identified last year as Yard Craft or YC8, the vessel was built in 1866. It was lost on 11 September, 1903 while heading from Portsmouth to Portland to lay moorings, and is the only known example of its type.
Mooring lighters were built to lay and recover the heavy moorings and anchors required to maintain port operations, and would be towed to locations by a tug. Forty-seven such vessels operated across 20 naval dockyards in late Victorian times, though only four were steam-powered.
The Pin Wreck site features the barge’s iron knees (angled brackets) and copper / yellow-metal hull sheathing, a steam-driven capstan and donkey boiler at the stern, mooring buoys, anchor and chain.
The site became known to divers as the Pin Wreck because the seabed was strewn with the hundreds of copper bolts that had once held the hull timbers together.
HE recommended the site to the government for protection following archaeological surveys carried out by Bournemouth University Maritime Archaeology. In October 2024 Divernet reported that its dive-team, which had been investigating the wreck for the past five years, had solved the mystery of its identity.
They had found a contemporary Shipping Gazette report of 30 men being rescued following the sinking, and later a record of the loss of YC8’s haulage gear.
Years before, the lighter is thought to have been involved in the aftermath of what had been one of Britain’s worst peacetime naval disasters at the time, helping to salvage the corvette HMS Eurydice off the Isle of Wight in 1878.
Calling last year for YC8 to be designated a protected site, the archaeological divers’ team-leader Prof Dave Parham had described it as “a rare example of a type of service vessel which was essential for maintaining the operations of Britain’s ports in the 19th century… the materials the vessel is made from suggest a high-quality build, possibly linked to a Royal dockyard.”
