She was a child of Scotland. Built by Blackwood and Gordon on the River Clyde and launched on 25 April 1860, the Earl of Arran was the kind of trim wooden paddle steamer the Clyde turned out by the dozen in those years - long, narrow-funnelled, with great box paddles on each beam and a side-lever engine thudding away below decks. The Ardrossan Steamboat Company ran her on the busy short hop between Ardrossan on the Ayrshire coast and the holiday island of Arran, ferrying tourists and crofters across the Firth of Clyde. She did that work for eight seasons, was advertised for sale in 1868, and sat laid up for a year or two while she waited for a new owner.

In early 1870 the West Cornwall Steam Ship Company bought her and brought her south to Penzance. There she took up a more varied existence: towing fishing fleets, running summer pleasure cruises along the Cornish coast, and salvaging derelicts. In one such job in 1871 she towed a drifting unidentified ship - believed to be American - into Penzance with four hundred casks of paraffin oil still in her holds. In the spring of 1872, working with another West Cornwall steamer, the Little Western, she recovered property from the wreck of the Delaware, which had broken up on Mincarlo in the Western Rocks of Scilly the previous December. Soon she was placed on the regular run between Penzance and St Mary's, the Scilly link that became her last route.

On 16 July 1872 the Earl of Arran was steaming through the Eastern Isles when she struck Irishman's Ledge on the seaward side of Nornour, a tiny uninhabited island in a shallow tangle of rocks. The damage was catastrophic and almost instant. Water poured in, the engine room filling in five minutes and the saloon in ten. Captain Deason did not lose his head. He launched the boats, organised the passengers, and over the next hour or two ferried all hundred of them, along with the Royal Mail, onto Nornour. Nobody drowned. The next day the Little Western collected them from the rocks and carried them back to Penzance. The Earl of Arran herself drifted onto a flat called Nornour Brow, grounded there, and slowly broke apart.

The Board of Trade inquiry that followed laid blame on a familiar pattern of small economies. Captain Deason had relied on the navigational advice of one Stephen Woodcock, a local who knew the islands but had no pilot's licence to act in that role. The ship was said to have cost the company £3,000 and was insured for only £1,000 - meaning the loss bit deep. The wreck was never retrieved. Today her boilers and lower hull plates lie at the foot of Nornour Brow, slowly working into the seabed, visited mostly by snorkellers and by the seals that haul out on Nornour's pink granite beaches. The same beaches, by an odd coincidence, hide a Romano-British shrine, dug up in the 1960s and now in the Isles of Scilly Museum on St Mary's. Few wrecks on the islands sit alongside such ancient company.