Loaghtan Books

  Everywhere else has ferries, but the Isle of Man has boats.  A rose by any other name... As many of you know, our new boat Manxman  promised a lot but is turning out to be a bit rubbish (stop giggling at the back there ladies).  The boat's owner, the Isle of Man Steam Packet Co., is the oldest shipping company in the world.  With its home port in Douglas it has almost a monopoly of things carried to and from the island.  Almost but not quite. W.S. Mezeron is a shipping company based in Ramsey, the Isle of Man's biggest town now that the capital Douglas has been elevated to a city.  Most of Mezeron's work is done by  Silver River , seen above unloading at Ramsey.  Mezeron mainly handles container freight but, judging by the brand-new transit van on its deck, is quite happy to carry other items for paying customers.  Or perhaps it wasn't a brand-new van, just a frustrated passenger defecting from the Steam Packet as Manxman fails, once again, to cross half of the Irish

We've just published our new book Strandings & Sinkings:  shipwrecks in Manx waters  and, with spectacular timing, a fishing boat sank 4 miles off Laxey the same day. June Rose , PL4, lost power, communications and was taking in water.  Despite being towed by another fishing boat and pumped out by pumps provided by the Douglas lifeboat, June Rose foundered, although her two-man crew were taken safely aboard the lifeboat.  That's one which won't be in the book! The picture above is of CEG Orbit , a ship which  does appear in Strandings & Sinkings , although illustrated in the book by a picture taken from the beach rather than the cliff.  Left to her own devises while crossing Ramsey Bay,  CEG Orbit decided to rest on the beach at Cranstal instead of rounding Point of Ayre.  Red faces all round. CEG Orbit was refloated, but many ships which came to grief around the Manx coast were not so lucky.

Welcome to our new website! We hadn't intended to have a new website, but technology had other ideas so we moved away from the one which had served us faithfully for twelve years (thank you Nick), and developed a new one (thank you Phil). Some things about the old one we're sad to lose - it had more pictures for a start - but the new one has a working shop, which is fairly essential if we're trying to sell our books, and should be future proofed so we won't have to go through all this carry-on again.  (It took nearly five days to proof read the twelve years of 'stuff' we'd transferred.  FIVE DAYS!) However!  The website may have changed but we haven't, or at least not much.  We're still here, still writing, photographing and publishing and still hoping readers - you - like what we do. Do visit us again!