Geograph - photograph every grid square

The beach had to be prepared to take the ship so that it would sit at an even keel. Two concrete barges were towed from Birkenhead Docks and scuttled where the ship would come to rest. They were partially visible when I last visited in the late 1980s. One of the barges was a standard WW2 barge, but the other is an historic vessel, the Elmarine, built between the Sankey Canal and the Mersey at Fiddlers Ferry, near Warrington during WW1. She was the prototype for a number of very large barges of 1,000 tons built for the Admiralty in 1917 and 1918. One series of these were built as the Elmarine, in pre-cast concrete sections. Two, the Cretecamp and the Cretecove were built at Fiddlers Ferry.