THE wooden paddle steamer Falcon was sailing from Glasgow to Londonderry on January 5, 1867 when it struck a rock and sank with only three of the 63 people on board surviving.

The wreck has since lain in the waters off the Mull of Kintyre, unreported until recognised in a unique marine archaeological survey just concluded.

It is just one of the many significant discoveries made by maritime archaeologists working with communities throughout the length of Scotland’s west coast duringover the last three years. They have been piecing together episodes of human history, with what has been left beneath the waves.

More than 100 new sites have been revealed and recorded; 30 shipwrecks located on the seabed from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, and 10 on beaches.

Highlights have included previously unreported Second World War flying boats in the Firth of Lorn in the waters to the west of Oban;: an American built Consolidated PBY Catalina; and two British built Short Sunderlands . A fourth aircraft has yet to be identified.

Then there is site of the David MacBrayne (CalMac forebear) ferry Sheila, wrecked just south of Loch Torridon without loss of life in the early hours of New Year’s Day, 1927. The Mafeking, a salvage vessel lost in attempts to recover the Sheila, also lies there.

In the Sound of Eriskay another unidentified wreck has been located in the surveylocated.: “Objects on the site included a large wooden rudder with copper gudgeons, numerous ship timbers with copper pins and a large shaft with a wheel on the end.”

The SS Cathcartpark, a British cargo steamer, is also on the list. In 1912, she was on passage from Runcorn to Wick with a cargo of salt, when she ran aground on the Torran Rocks to the south of the Sound of Iona –  a notorious navigational hazard, which featured in Robert Louis Stevenson’s celebrated novel,  ‘Kidnapped.’

All these maritime losses are now being remembered thanks to the £100,000 project, SAMPHIRE (Scottish Atlantic Maritime Past: Heritage, Investigation, Research & Education) funded by The Crown Estate.

It worked by ‘crowd-sourcing’ information about possible marine archaeological sites through face-to-face meetings with harbour masters, scallop divers, recreational divers, fishermen and other local residents of townsresidents towns and villages.

The locations identified were recorded before the most promising were visited by voluntaryeer and professional archaeological divers.

The discovery of the remains of a vessel in the intertidal zone of Loch Fyne near Ardno, underlined the importance of local intelligence.

The site was first reported to the SAMPHIRE Project by Dr Clare Ellis of Argyll Archaeology and more information was given by Dot Chalmers of the Here We Are Centre, a local community organisation.

The project report records: “According to Dot, the wreck is said to have ‘belonged to Duncan MacCallum, a great uncle of a resident in Cairndow, he stayed in Holly Bush cottage at St Catherine’s. Duncan had a coal business and ran the Post Office at St Catherine’s, he used the sailing boat to go to Glasgow to collect coal and provisions.“

SAMPHIRE project leader John McCarthy of WA Coastal & Marine said: “This project has given us an opportunity to demonstrate just how much knowledge of shipwrecks and other submerged archaeological sites the Scottish public has and how much we can learn just by talking to people.

“So much remains to be found and the most interesting may never be found if we just rely on sonar data.  The sea was the highway in the past and we know that there were thousands of vessels over the centuries sunk round the coast of Scotland so there is a lot more work to be done.”