The Bury went down in 1889 on the southeast side of Skokholm Island in Pembrokeshire. To find it just jump in to about 10 metres of water in front of the correct gully in the cliff. The gully faces to the east and the cliff runs north-south.The Bury went down in 1889 on the southeast side of Skokholm Island in Pembrokeshire. To find it just jump in to about 10 metres of water in front of the correct gully in the cliff. The gully faces to the east and the cliff runs north-south.
I landed on some plates resting against the north side of the gully and followed them downhill, along the edge of the wreck past generally splattered wreckage to a more intact section of stern. Here the 4 bladed steel propeller remains in place, rising impressively above the general level of wreckage. The rudder has fallen flat against the seabed below.
Beneath the keel the wreckage lies across rocks leaving a small swim-through under the wreck.
From the stern the propshaft can be followed forwards. The protecting tunnel is gone, though steel hoops remain. Maybe it was made of wood.
The propshaft eventually disappears beneath a jumble of collapsed plates. Following the general line forward, to the other side of the collapsed plates is obviously the area of the engine room. The engine is gone, but some bits of engine bearings remain.
The boiler is very small and unusual. It is almost as if the firebox was at one end and the actual water boiler part at the other end. There is no sign of the typical fireboxes stretching along inside the water boiler that is the pretty much standard boiler design.
Further forward, all that remains are well broken scraps covered in a dense layer of kelp.
Back in deeper water, well, just deeper than 10 metres aft of the boiler, the other notable piece of wreckage is a cargo winch resting upright but rotated to lie along the line of the wreck.
From the stern a trail of bits of girder and hull plate leads into the next gully south. There is no sudden revelation of a major section of wreckage, just a section of the crankshaft from the engine.
If you have seen enough of the Bury by now, further north at a similar depth lies scattered debris from the wooden schooner Alice Williams, though being wooden this debris does not amount to much.
Further to the south there is a swim through in the rocks, then the terrain becomes a bit less kelpy and more colourful as you get out towards the currents that sweep along the south of the island. Other wrecks are reported to lie splattered in the shallows under the cliffs here, though I have not dived them.