Close to Inishdoorus, in a part of the lake where few historic vessels have been found, lies the buried Bertagh Rock Logboat. We first saw traces in 2016, and have now been able to properly determine the nature of the wreck.
It appears to be a fairly sizeable vessel, approximately 6.9m long (23ft) with stones carefully placed along its length, and a collection of stones, including a large flat circular stone at the stern.
The vessel is heavily eroded, the sides have eroded down to almost nothing, leaving just enough for the destructive zebra mussels to cling to and the stones inside almost fully exposed.
She lies with her bow pointing precisely to the rising sun at the summer solstice, as do many of the other logboat wrecks in the lake.
While I am quite certain that not every vessel that was built around the lake in pre-history was built as large as possible, size however has been used as a useful rough guide to age.
Large straight Oak trees were consumed over time, necessitating the use of smaller less suitable trees. A guide (very amateur !) for this vessel would be late bronze age - early iron age by comparison with similar vessels found in the lake.
This would have been quite a maneuverable handy size vessel, and appears to have had quite a sizeable beam (width), possibly as much a 1.2m from sonar measurements.
The Lough Corrib Chart Book
Bertagh Rock Boat - Bow
It certainly isnt much to look at, but it is yet another intriguing peice of the jigsaw of the ancient history of the lake and this part of Ireland that we know so little of.
