Irvine Waterfront

Irvine on the Clyde coast is home to the Scottish Maritime Museum.

There are two parts, one is the waterfront where a collection of heritage boats are preserved in and out of the water.

There is also The Linthouse Building, an indoor museum in what was the Stephens & Linthouse Shipyard's huge engineering workshop rebuilt at Irvine. It houses a selection of artifacts, ships models, engineering models, patterns and huge machine tools. 

The museum succeeds in conveying the reality of working in a Victorian shipyard. The work was tough and often dangerous where men man-handled heavy metal plates with bare hands while operating steam hammers, plate cutters and riveters. 

A big problem for the Museum Trust is the absence of heating, so on a cold winter day, like today the cold penetrates and adds to the feeling of misery that many of the shipyard workers must have felt.        

I have added an extra photo- a news report of the sinking of the Comet in 1825. "....Seventy Human Being were in a single moment precipitated into Enternity!!!"