A stone frigate is a ship that has never gone to sea. The Royal Navy borrowed the phrase from the Tudors, who moored hulks at dockyards and ran them as floating barracks, and the modern Navy uses it for shore bases that hold a captain's pennant the same way a warship does. HMS Sherwood sits in Chilwell, Nottinghamshire, roughly as far from the open ocean as you can get on the British mainland. Its reservists have served in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Gibraltar, on the deck of a Queen Elizabeth-class carrier - all of them volunteers who keep day jobs in the East Midlands and put on a uniform on weekends.
The first HMS Sherwood was not built in Britain. She was the USS Rodgers, an American four-stack destroyer of the kind Franklin Roosevelt traded to a desperate Britain in September 1940 - the destroyers-for-bases deal that gave the Royal Navy fifty elderly ships in exchange for Caribbean and Atlantic base rights. Rodgers became Sherwood. She convoyed merchantmen through the Atlantic. She joined the hunt for the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer after that ship savaged convoy HX 84 in November 1940, and she sailed in the wider sweep that closed in on the battleship Bismarck in May 1941. After the war she was scrapped, in 1945, before her crew had time to grow nostalgic. The name went onto the shelf for thirty-nine years, waiting.
The first naval reserve unit in Nottingham was a signals unit established in 1949 in the city centre. It moved to Carrington Street in 1961, settled into the rhythm of a Cold War reserve - drill nights, summer training, the slow accumulation of trade skills - and was formally commissioned as HMS Sherwood in 1984 at premises on Chalfont Drive in Beechdale. The name was deliberate: Sherwood Forest sits north of the city, and the local Army reserve unit carries the historic title of the Sherwood Foresters. In 2014 the Royal Navy reservists moved again, this time to Foresters House at Chetwynd Barracks in Chilwell, where they share a perimeter with that same Army Reserve unit - 350 (Sherwood Foresters) Field Squadron - and a Royal Marines Reserve detachment formed at Sherwood in 2007. Three services, one set of gates.
The reserves did not stay at home. Members of HMS Sherwood mobilised for Operation Telic in Iraq (2003-2011) and Operation Herrick in Afghanistan (2002-2014). Reservists served with British Forces Gibraltar and supported the London 2012 Olympic Games. In 2021 sailors from Sherwood deployed on Carrier Strike Group 21, HMS Queen Elizabeth's first global cruise, which took the carrier from Portsmouth through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal to the Indo-Pacific and back. Others served closer to home on Operation Rescript, the military's COVID-19 support to the NHS. The mix is characteristic of modern reserve service: long deployments alongside the regulars, quieter weekends on military aid to the civil power.
On 2 June 2018, HMS Sherwood was awarded the freedom of the city of Nottingham, becoming only the seventh Royal Naval Reserve unit to receive that honour. The freedom is an old civic gesture, ceremonial now rather than legal, that allows a military unit to march through the city with bayonets fixed, drums beating, and colours flying. The Sherwood parade did all three. For a reserve unit named after both an English forest and an American destroyer, hundreds of miles from any sea, the gesture amounted to recognition that service is not measured in distance from saltwater.
Chetwynd Barracks is scheduled to close in 2026, with the Ministry of Defence planning to release the majority of the site for development - some four thousand homes are projected for the land. Foresters House, where HMS Sherwood is based, is being retained, so the unit itself will not be displaced. The wider base around it, however, will transform. The unit's history suggests it will adapt. From a signals office in 1949 to Carrington Street to Beechdale to Chetwynd, the address has changed three times in seventy years; the name and the role have not. Stone frigates do not sail, but they do relocate.
HMS Sherwood is at 52.91°N, 1.26°W in Chilwell, southwest of Nottingham, inside the perimeter of Chetwynd Barracks. From cruise the barracks appear as a regular grid of brick buildings between the A52 and the River Erewash floodplain. East Midlands Airport (EGNX) is 7 nm southwest, Nottingham Airport (EGBN) is 6 nm east. Recommended viewing altitude 2,000-3,000 ft AGL. The barracks site is large enough to identify from the air; the river and the M1 motorway just west of the site are useful landmarks.