Wick memorial to lost seafarers 'will be our Angel of the North'
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Wick's memorial to lost seafarers will be comparable to the Angel of the North, according to the chairman of the voluntary group leading the project.
The Seafarers Memorial Group raised more than £100,000 for the sculpture which will have its unveiling ceremony on the afternoon of Saturday, May 20.
Sculptor Alan Beattie Herriot was selected last year to create the monument, which will commemorate all seafarers lost at sea from or in the WK registration area – stretching from Talmine in the west across to Stroma and down as far as Golspie.
Standing five metres high at Wick's Braehead, looking across the harbour and bay, the bronze figure will symbolise how the sea "gives with one hand and takes away with the other".
The statue will stand on top of a stainless-steel base plinth surrounded by five lecterns and two bench seats. Two lights will illuminate it.
Group chairman Willie Watt, who is busy preparing the site, praised the support given by the local business community.
“We've got a few helping hands but we're trying to keep the costs down as low as we can because the cash has been raised by local people and companies and so forth," he said during a break from digger work.
“And we've got control on schedule. We're only six weeks away, so we're on a tight timeline. We've got a lot hanging on May 20.”
Mr Watt added: “I can't praise the local business community highly enough. Everything we are doing here is done with their support, and costs are minimal.
“The council is helping us with the ducting and the cabling to put the lights in, and all parties are coming together.
“The community feels quite strongly about this monument and once it's up it will be pretty impressive. It will be our kind of Angel of the North.”
He said the effort to prepare the site had been "pretty much full-time" since about Christmas.
“You've got the schools, you've got the lecterns, you've got the steel work, you've got the concrete work, you've got the power cables... there are quite a lot of facets to the project," Mr Watt said.
“When it's all done it will be a monument, but there is quite a lot to get to that point.”
Wick High School pupils are producing three of the lectern designs. One is on the theme of Black Saturday – the 1848 disaster which claimed the lives of 37 fishermen from Caithness, the Western Isles and Orkney in Wick Bay – while the others are about safety at sea and the fishing industry.
“Then we've got a lectern showing all the harbours in the WK registration area and then a lectern that tells the story of how this monument came about in the first place," Mr Watt explained.
“On the backs of the seats, Norse Stone are going to engrave the names of all the harbours and I'm at 80 harbours at the moment.
“We're paying for a lot of the stuff but they're donating some of it. It's great – we're blessed with having a community like this around us.”
The statue itself is expected to be put in place a couple of days before the ceremony. It will be the first major monument in the town for 100 years, since the war memorial was unveiled in October 1923.
Representatives from Stornoway and Longhope harbours are among the guests being invited.
The Angel of the North is a sculpture by Antony Gormley located at Gateshead.
