PROCEED DIRECTLY TO IMAGE GALLERIES >>>

!!! > WARNING : STRONG LANGUAGE < !!!

Well, here we are, after months of looking longingly at other peoples pictures of this magnificent ship – it was time for [S-P] to hit the road once more, and go visit the Duke of Lancaster ourselves. Situated on the banks of the River Dee in North Wales, the ship has been dry docked since 1979, with some questionable proposals for it’s intended use. From patchy information gathered on the net, it seems the boat was purchased from it’s last operators, British Rail / Sealink, for use as a Sunday Market! Effectively a steam-cruiser, the Duke ran between Heysham and Belfast between 1955 and 1979, although the boat was capable of much longer journeys. It’s highly unlikely the Duke will ever sail again, which seems a shame. God only knows what the current owners have planned for the ship (if anything), although as you’ll read shortly, they sure are protective over it!

We parked at the nearby car-park and walked along the severely overgrown public footpath that runs alongside the ship. It was quiet and still around the site and the tide was out, with the sands of the Dee estuary stretching on for miles from the banks. The boat looks surreal, planted in the mud and looming over the tiny harbour nearby – it’s as though some catastrophic tidal wave left the poor old Duke beached, and now he’s beginning to look a little sorry for himself. The photos we’d seen, despite giving a clear impression of the ships size, still didn’t prepare us for how awesome it looks first-hand. The view from the ground, looking up to the bow is almost dizzying.

I find ships fascinating. Whenever I cross to Europe by ferry – I’ll always end up spending pretty much the whole journey out on deck, whatever the weather, sucking in the atmosphere of being out on the waves without a single fragment of land visible. There’s something almost soulful about it. The journeys these incredible vessels make across the waves are frequently a battle against the elements, and it’s testament to some remarkable engineering that there aren’t more of these things sat at the bottom of the sea. It was even easier to appreciate the construction of such a large ship with it sitting completely above water.

We walked into the site without any hassle. Despite the huge security gate, which warned of prosecutions and such, the footpath went right around it! Ha! Meaning that we didn’t actually cross any visible or physical boundary to access the boat. It’s practically in the middle of nowhere anyway, and isn’t exactly accessible, so we weren’t too worried about being caught having a look around. We were even less worried once we quickly realised, to our disappointment of course, that we weren’t able to board the ship with even the most remote degree of safety. All but one of the gangways to the various doors along the ship had been severed, and the doors themselves either welded or secured with razorwire. I considered shimmying up the large iron chain to the rear of the boat that extended to the aft deck, but very quickly stubbed that out as a stupid and dangerous idea, it would have been definite hospitalisation or worse if I lost my grip and fell to the rocks, mud and scrap metal below! So it was that we settled for moseying around the boat and just taking a few snaps before heading off for St Georges asylum in Stafford.

Fortunately, we’d taken as much footage as we were able to by the time a white van appeared from nowhere, driven by… and this was all I could see at this early stage… an angry little man. “Erm, bro, looks like we’ve got company…” said I. UncleEggMan said nothing, he just stood staring at the van in disbelief as it barrelled down the trail towards us. We kinda knew it wasn’t just some casual visitor, and that we’d soon be asked to leave. I considered suggesting to ‘EggMan that we scarper, but it was obvious that the angry little man was playing out some ‘Starsky & Hutch’ fantasy, and our attempt to run away would have given him a serious hardon. Hilariously, he’d left a rearguard buddy by the gate, in case we decided to dart off that way. His angry little fantasy reached it’s inevitable crescendo when the van skittered to a locked-wheel halt, merely a couple of feet from us. The only element of this seventies cop-show homage that was missing, was him rolling across the ‘hood’ and shoving a Magnum up my nose. Nevertheless, it was quite alarming. Well done Starsky. You’re halfway there.

From the window of the white van glared a stocky likeness of the half-pint, high-pitched 1980’s pop legend that was (is?) Jimmy Somerville. This caused me to wonder what the angry little man intended to do: Either beat the crap out of us for being so indifferent to his angry little presence, or ask us if we wanted to dance to electropop and drink babycham. Now I have absolutely nothing against Jimmy Somerville, but I wasn’t keen on either eventuality and so instantly took a dim view of him and his “INGURLUND” ¾ length football-junkie tracksuit bottoms. As was expected, he soon opened his mouth and began to question our presence. At that point, a bunch of words fell out of his angry little face that I had trouble understanding – due to the fact that he sounded like a guy who has ten mothers and tends to wave at aeroplanes. He had an accent that transcended all borders, I almost felt sorry for him. He sounded like a bad actor. The crux of his tirade was that we weren’t supposed to be there, but this was expressed pretty much monosyllabically and punctuated by “f**k” and “s**t” far too much for my liking. I replied to his needlessly aggressive questioning “Yeah, erm… we were just taking a few photographs?” And this was his moment. He was loving the power. This is a man who no doubt races strangers around the supermarket for dibs on the bargains yo. A man who will block you in at the car-park, and wait there for a fight. The unpopular cousin from the retarded side of the family, that always starts fights at weddings. The guy that got turned away by the Army. You could almost see him rehearsing this in front of the bathroom mirror… “Well, if I came rewnd yar howse and sturted tekkin’ picktchaz, how would you leek it!!? Eh?!!” You could tell that he thought this was an intelligent question. He had successfully superimposed our present predicament upon my own domestic environment. How clever. A thousand gobby answers spun around in my head, such as… “why would you want to take pictures of my house you foolish little man?”… or looking up at the boat and asking him which one was his bedroom? But I simply answered… “not particularly”.

He then launched a loosely clenched fist in our general direction and yelled: “Now fokk awf “ Now I really had lost patience with his inability to understand that we had simply taken a few pictures and weren’t planning on re-floating and crewing the boat for some vigilante pirate mission across the estuary to Liverpool. We were just taking pictures, you mentalist. I succeeded in keeping my mouth shut, I just can’t understand people who are aggressive for the hell of it.

You can’t win ‘em all. This kind of thing is bound to happen once in a while. It’s hard not to feel a little deflated when it happens, especially if you’ve travelled a long way to get somewhere. But it’s all the poo trips that make the good trips better I guess. As a very serious word of warning though, I would strongly advise AGAINST anyone going anywhere near the Duke of Lancaster. It’s a waste of time (although I believe another UE outfit HAVE succeeded in getting aboard), but more importantly, Starsky Somerville is likely to get violently upset if he sees anyone else peering through his bedroom porthole.

P.S: Have a look at the miscellaneous section for an artists impression of Starsky Somerville.

PROCEED TO IMAGE GALLERIES >>>

GO BACK TO URBAN EXPLORATION <<<