Erme Ingot

No vessel, sailor, owner, starting point or destination has been identified. The evidence is 44 worn, roughly cast tin ingots, from a piece weighing 0.256 kilograms to one of 12.95 kilograms. Their different weights and forms may represent metal made by several groups and brought together for trade. A boat might have been carrying tin from Dartmoor down the River Erme or taking it away along the coast, but that is a useful possibility rather than a proven voyage. The metal cannot securely date the group: suggested dates run from the Bronze Age to the early eighteenth century.

No one knows how the tin reached the seabed. Its tight concentration on the sheltered side of a reef is consistent with cargo lost from a vessel, but no hull or ship fitting was found with it. The ingots may mark a wreck, a spill during loading or transport, or another single loss at sea. West Mary's Rocks rise close to the surface at low water and could endanger a boat, yet there is no evidence that a vessel struck them. The proper account therefore stops at the observed cargo scatter and does not invent a storm, grounding or sinking.

There is no evidence for deaths or survivors. No human remains, personal belongings, crew names or written loss report have been found, and the lack of a known ship means that even the number of people present cannot be estimated. A small working boat might have carried the tin, but the cargo could also have been lost without a vessel sinking. The only named people belong to the rediscovery: members of the South West Maritime Archaeology Group found, mapped and properly reported the ingots in 1992 while surveying the nearby Erme Estuary wreck site.

The group mapped and recovered all 44 known ingots before mobile sand covered the area. No further object was seen during visits from 1993 to 1996 or during a metal-detector survey in 2005, although buried material may still survive. The site lies in roughly six to ten metres of water on mobile coarse sand beside rock. Wood found nearby was dated to about 4200 BC, before known British metalworking, so it comes from a drowned forest and is not ship timber. The ingots were given to Exeter's Royal Albert Memorial Museum in 2002. The seabed remains protected and investigation needs permission.

Tin shaped the economy and outside connections of Devon and Cornwall for thousands of years, yet its early movement by water is hard to see. If this is cargo from a boat, the Erme ingots offer rare direct evidence of local metal being gathered and moved for trade. Their uncertain date prevents a grand claim of a Bronze Age shipwreck, but that uncertainty gives future metal study and seabed work a clear question to solve. The site also records good local practice: volunteer finders mapped and reported the pieces, making protection and museum care possible instead of separating valuable metal from its story.