HMS Stirling Castle

HMS Stirling Castle was a 70-gun third-rate ship of the line of the English Royal Navy, built at Deptford in 1679. She underwent a rebuild at Chatham Dockyard in 1699. She was wrecked on the Goodwin Sands off Deal on 27 November 1703. The Stirling Castle was part of Samuel Pepys' 1677 plan for "Thirty Ships", the first systematic expansion of the Royal Navy replacing ships lost in the Dutch Raid on the Medway. Later she was one of 16 third rates to be rebuilt between 1697 and 1706, like the Northumberland and Restoration which would be lost on the Goodwin Sands in the same storm. Alterations at Chatham in 1699 increased her tonnage, and she was refitted in 1701. She is of particular interest to historians as a relic from a time of many changes in naval architecture, representing the birth of the ship of the line before the 1706 Establishment formalised rules for the dimensions of RN ships. She was wrecked on the Goodwin Sands in the Great Storm of 1703. Unlike her two wrecked sister...