In April 2022, the CEMEX team unexpectedly discovered the remains of a rare Elizabethan ship while dredging a quarry at Dungeness Point in Kent (UK).
Discovered about 300 meters from the shore, the ship baffled a team of workers who contacted archaeologists.
The story of this rare Elizabethan ship was featured on BBC2’s Looking for Britain at 8:00 pm on 1 January 2023.
Very few 16th-century ships built in England have survived to this day, making this a rare discovery.
The end of the 16th century was a period of great expansion of trade, with the English Channel serving as the main route on the Atlantic coast of Europe. Although the ship has not yet been identified, it represents an era in which English ships and ports played an important role in this busy traffic.
More than 100 logs were removed from the ship’s hull. Using a dendrochronological analysis funded by Historic England, the logs are dated between 1558 and 1580. The ship was made of pedunculate oak.
The ship belongs to the transition period in the shipbuilding of Northern Europe. When ships are considered to have moved from traditional clinker construction (as on Viking ships) to framed ships, where the inner frame is built first and then flush plating is added to the frames to create a smooth outer hull.
Andrea Hamel, maritime archaeologist at Wessex Archeology, commented: “The discovery of a late 16th-century ship preserved in quarry deposits was an unexpected but very welcome find. A ship can tell us so much about a period when we have little surviving evidence of shipbuilding, but it was a period of great change in shipbuilding and navigation.”
Even though it was discovered 300 meters from the sea at the site where the quarry is today, experts believe that the site was once on the coastline, and that the ship either wrecked on a pebbly headland or was washed up in end of service life. Its discovery represents an opportunity to understand the development of ports and shipping along this stretch of the Kent coast.