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Historic Marine Protected Areas

Publisher
Scottish Government SpatialData.gov.scot
Updated
30 September 2026
Topic
Not set
Licence
Not set

Summary

Historic Marine Protected Areas ‘Historic MPAs’ are designated under Section 67 of the Marine Scotland Act 2010 to protect marine historic assets (e.g historic shipwrecks) of national importance within Scottish territorial waters.

The Scottish Government is committed to clean, healthy, safe, productive, biologically diverse marine and coastal environments, managed to meet the long-term needs of people and nature. This includes protecting and, where appropriate, enhancing our most important historic wrecks and other marine heritage sites in such a way that they can be valued and understood. One way Scottish Ministers can achieve this is by designating nationally important marine historic assets in Scottish territorial waters as Historic Marine Protected Areas under the Marine (Scotland) Act 2010.

The data shows the boundaries of all Historic Marine Protected Areas in Scotland. You should refer to the Historic Marine Protected Area site documentation for exact locations of individual boundary points and supplementary information.

Data links

Link Format Preview Updated
WFS service for Historic Marine Protected Areas – 30/9/2026
WMS service for Historic Marine Protected Areas – 30/9/2026
ESRI Shapefile Download ZIP – 30/9/2026

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Additional information

Source Metadata
XML, HTML
Date added
29 September 2026
Harvest GUID
106c9bc8-a597-4ca4-8f12-437918c87639
Extent (Latitude)
61.4646° to 54.533°
Extent (Longitude)
-7.7571° to -0.532°
Spatial reference system
urn:ogc:def:crs:EPSG::27700
Dataset reference date (creation)
2013-03-18
Dataset reference date (revision)
2016-10-28
Frequency of update
asNeeded
Access constraints
If this data is reproduced it must be attributed with the following: Contains Historic Environment Scotland and Ordnance Survey data © Historic Environment Scotland - Scottish Charity No. SC045925 © Crown copyright and database right [year] This data is licensed under the UK Open Government Licence http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/
Responsible party
Historic Environment Scotland (pointOfContact, distributor)
ISO 19139 resource type
dataset
Metadata language
eng