It is hard to know where exactly you would expect to find an Elizabethan shipwreck, but it would not be in a quarry 300 metres inland.
Archaeologists are scouring the history books for clues to solve the conundrum of how a 16th-century ship came to be found by quarrymen near Dungeness, Kent.
“It’s quite a big mystery because it was absolutely not expected,” Andrea Hamel, a marine archaeologist at Wessex Archaeology, said. “Just finding it was quite exciting, but the date of it is really exciting because there aren’t many ships we know of in the UK from the 1500s.”
The ship bears comparison with the Mary Rose, although it is smaller (about 20 metres long) and the find has been documented in the new series of the BBC’s Digging For Britain.
The story began when a team from Cemex, a building materials company, was dredging for aggregates in a gravel quarry and stumbled on 147 timbers, mostly from a section of the ship’s hull.
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“The coastline has changed considerably since the 16th century, so that would have been the original coastline,” Hamel explained, but the absence of other artefacts suggested that the ship had reached the shore or perhaps run aground.
Its name is not known, nor why it ended up there.
Analysis showed that the wood was cut in Kent between 1560 and 1580. “If we can get a detailed date range, we may be able to go through the archives and find possible ships that could be comparable,” Hamel said.
The team carefully disassembled the hull section, scanned the pieces and made a 3D model. The original was reburied near where it was found.