The A178 is a journey to the end of the world, to the place where the North-East fades away into the sea and the sky, where land loses its form and gradually churns into water.

The houses peter out into sodden farmland, damp horses and shaggy cows stand amid the mist beneath crackling electricity pylons.

Just as the A178 reaches the edge of the world, tall steel structures loom out of the gloom. They grow into a fantasia of pipework, a miracle of meccano. Pipes, large and small, chase each other this way and that, up and over, down and round, before ending in a chimney and an emission of steam.

The A178 pushes on through towards where there is no land, just saltplains, sea and sky. Then the hulks of the ghost ships come into view.

These four wrecks have dominated the headlines since 2003 like the chimneys dominate the Teesside skyline. With their battleship grey fading, they look quite at home in Graythorp dock - an appropriate name, as Teesside is a symphony of grey.

Steel river. Steel sky. Steelworks.

Even the birds, the shrieking seagulls and the lone magpies, fit the scheme. The only colour is an occasional orange flare fired from a chimney, a vivid smudge against the steel clouds.

The ghost ships have been backed into the dock, their bows facing the A178. Caloosahatchee and Canisteo are on the left, clearly sister ships, with their matching black bottoms. They were launched in 1945 in Baltimore. Both are veterans of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and both are "oilers" - refuelling tankers ("Caloos", as her crew called her, sailed around the world carrying eight million gallons of fuel). Like all US oilers, they bear the Indian names for North American rivers.

Then there's Canopus, a squat, ugly thing, the only one of the four to exhibit her name (Canopus is the brightest star in the southern constellation of the Great Ship and takes her name from an ancient Egyptian sailor). Launched in 1965, she was a submarine repair vessel and former crew members in Oregon are so proud of her that last year they made a scale model of her - from her heyday, of course.

Finally, there's Compass Island, a dirty smear of rustbrown obscuring her battleship grey. She was built in 1953 to carry dry cargo and is named after an island off the coast of Maine.

Compared to the bulk of the others, from the A178 she looks like a slip of a ship. But then a fork-lift tractor passes in front of her, its head-high wheels utterly dwarfed.

Suddenly, there's another flash of colour. The bright yellow and blue of a police 4x4.

It pulls over. An officer gets out. Ever so polite, he asks what I'm up to as his colleague phones through my car number plate. I mention the ghost ships.

"They're awful," he says, "but at least they fit in with the landscape."

"And they'd only have been scrapped on a beach in India or Pakistan," says his colleague.

Satisfied, they complete a "stop or search record" and drive off in a riot of colour.

The ghost ships are scrap. Built 60 years ago; decommissioned ten years ago, sailed 4,500 miles across the Atlantic and for three years moored on the grey hinterland beside the A178 as arguments rage about how to actually scrap them.

In all the time and across all that distance, you'd have thought someone would have found a way.

I look at the "stop or search document". It is from the "Civil Nuclear Constabulary". The ghost ships' berth is beside Hartlepool Nuclear Power Station which requires protection from terrorists.

If we can't scrap maritime waste properly, do you think we've worked out what to do with nuclear leftovers?

Published: 11/03/2006