Graving dock.

Oil on panel -=20 x 25 cm.

Graving dock or dry dock – Peterhead.

In 1855 this red granite graving dock was built to meet the needs of the large Greenland whaling boats of Peterhead. By 1820 Petherhead and Hull were the foremost whaling ports in Britain. Designed by Thomas Stevenson, it was designed for steam driven pumps to empty the dock but instead two atmospheric pumps were installed each powered by six horses. It could be emptied in less than eight hours. It is still used today, although with the harbours ship lift in operation less frequently.

2 Replies to “Graving dock.”

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: