The world's oldest clipper ship is to make its final trip from Scotland to the Australian city it is named after.
The City of Adelaide was built in 1864 to take migrants from Europe to Australia and was later a hospital ship, a training ship, and finally a clubhouse moored in the River Clyde in Glasgow.
When in Scotland it was flooded and has been stored on a slipway in Irvine, North Ayrshire, since 1992 where it was preserved by the Scottish Maritime Museum.
Management at the museum could not afford to refurbish the vessel and had applied to demolish it to save some of the parts of the ship, but the group Clipper Ship City of Adelaide applied to relocate it and the clipper is to be part of a South Australian maritime heritage park.
The ship was regarded as unrecoverable due to the silted river and protected wetland areas around it, but engineers in Australia created a steel cradle to allow the ship to be rolled across a temporary bridge over the river onto a low-draft barge. It will sail to London in September.
It will be moored beside its sister ship the Cutty Sark before being lifted on to a huge cargo ship to travel to Australia, where it is due to arrive by April next year.
Clipper Ship City of Adelaide director Peter Christopher said: "Recognising the opportunity of saving the world-heritage ship, Scottish Culture Minster Fiona Hyslop took the positive decision to call a study into any options for saving the ship. The Australian team's strategy stood out and offered the additional advantage of enhancing Scottish and Australian cultural ties in the process."
He added: "I can almost picture the spectacle as the clipper is transported up the River Thames to Greenwich, bringing together the two last original 19th century clipper ships."
The cradle made to lift the ship out of its berth in Irvine cost about £700,000 to build, with around one-third coming from public donations in Australia.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article