HMS Walney (M104): The Minehunter Nobody Would Buy

Built at Woolston

HMS Walney was ordered from Vosper Thornycroft on 27 July 1987 and laid down at their Woolston shipyard in Southampton in May 1990, launched on 25 November 1991 and commissioned on 20 February 1993, a Sandown-class minehunter built for the precise, painstaking work of clearing mines and unexploded ordnance from British and allied waters.

A Wartime Bomb in the Mersey

On 15 May 2006, Walney and HMS Atherstone discovered a 1,000-pound unexploded Second World War bomb while conducting a survey of the River Mersey, a striking reminder that more than sixty years after the war's end, its ordnance could still be quietly lurking beneath British waterways, waiting for exactly the kind of specialist ship Walney was built to be.

Decommissioned at Clyde

HMS Walney was decommissioned on 15 October 2010 at HMNB Clyde, after which she was moved to Portsmouth Naval Base and formally listed for sale in 2014, part of the broader drawdown of the Sandown class as the Royal Navy's mine countermeasures fleet was restructured.

An Auction With No Bidders

In a properly unusual postscript, Walney failed to attract a single bid when auctioned off for scrapping, leaving her final fate uncertain and the ship still sitting at Portsmouth Naval Base as of the most recent reporting, a quietly strange end for a vessel that had once helped make British waters safer from the ordnance of a war fought long before she was built.