Denge Quarry Shipwreck Timbers: Recording and Assessment Stage

Wessex Archaeology

The Denge quarry shipwreck, also referred to as Dungeness wreck, was found and recovered in spring 2022 by staff at Cemex’s Denge quarry while excavating in the quarry lake for aggregate. The remains were recorded and re-deposited in the quarry by a team of archaeologists during a four-week period between July and August 2022. This phase of the project aimed to create a comprehensive record of all components that were recovered at the Cemex quarry.

The study of the timbers suggests that the ship could have been built in England as early as the mid-1530s with wood sourced from East and South-East England. However, the presence of timber from two different phases introduces some complexity to dating the ship, and it could either extend the earliest plausible construction date to post-1561 or imply that the ship underwent alterations at that time.

The ship's construction details show striking resemblance to the Gresham wreck (c. 1574),
indicating a similarity of approach to the challenges of the adoption of carvel construction. This might well imply a shared origin or adherence to a regional tradition of shipbuilding.

Due to the lack of detailed archaeological surveys of English-built ships from this foundational period for English shipbuilding, this work hopes to provide a valuable contribution to an otherwise limited corpus of archaeological data.