Newport Ship Work set to start to restore the ‘Welsh Mary Rose’
Fancy an outing to visit an industrial estate in Newport? No? Well Eugene Byrne knows of one that contains a fabulous and unique piece of history. Well, several thousand pieces, actually.
IN 2002, construction work on the new Riverfront Arts Centre on the banks of the Usk in Newport had to be interrupted because an array of old timbers was discovered.
Some had already been damaged by the works, and at first it was thought that an old pier had been uncovered. Soon it became clear, though, that it was in fact the hull of a ship. Soon, the media was full of stories of “the Welsh Mary Rose”.
To begin with, some experts thought that the ship dated back to the 1600s, but it would eventually become clear that what had been uncovered dated back to the middle ages.
So, yes, Welsh Mary Rose, if you like, but unlike Henry VIII’s stricken warship that was raised from the waters of the Solent, the Newport one had to be painstakingly extracted from mud, and from the building piles and cofferdams which had already damaged her.
That was 21 years ago, and the media has long since moved on, aside from the occasional newspaper article or TV item. She’s been largely forgotten outside of her “home” city, where the locals are understandably proud of her.
But behind the scenes a great deal has been going on, and if all goes well then in the coming years the ship will be the star attraction of a new museum/heritage centre in Newport.
But you don’t have to wait that long. You can go and visit the project for yourself and meet some of the people working on it. It’s a curious and rather wonderful experience.
For one thing, it’s housed in a nondescript and generic unit in an industrial estate on the edge of Newport. There’s a sign pointing the way in, but otherwise nothing to suggest there’s anything remarkable about the place.
The other thing is that there are plenty of volunteers on hand to tell you all about the ship. The Friends of the Newport Ship are the backbone of the project, the people who do a lot of the hard graft and the fundraising.
They are lovely, enthusiastic people and if you turn up on a quiet day (as BT did) you do feel as though you have privileged access. It’s well worth the journey, not just because the ship’s story is amazing, but also because you get close up to something which will sooner or later become a very popular visitor attraction.
Over the last two decades the timbers have been cleaned, preserved and dried, a time-consuming and complex project. All manner of experts have examined the wood, not to mention microscopic traces of the food that was consumed by the crew, plus a number of finds, including an expensive leather shoe and a silver coin which was placed into a recess cut into the keel as a good luck charm.
American archaeologist Dr Toby Jones, who has worked on the ship for 20 years and is now full-time Curator of the Newport Medieval Ship project, says the plan is to put the timbers back together, and now they’re nearly ready to do it.
“From the start the project goals have always been reassembly and display and everything we have done are steps towards that. It’s been necessary to clean, then record and then preserve, and there have been lots of bottlenecks along the way. For example, freezedrying. It might take six months for a single load, but that’s finished now.”
The city of Newport is looking into where to put it, probably as the centre-piece of a new local museum and art gallery.
At the moment, what you see if you visit is a load of timbers stacked in climate-controlled spaces, plus a 3-D model and a number of other exhibits, models, finds and explanatory panels. Everything you need to make the leap of imagination that takes you from a load of old pieces of wood to some dramatic history.
The back-story is one of huge importance for Bristol, too, because it’s the biggest single tangible relic of our all-important medieval wine trade.
So at the risk of making the entire population of Newport very cross, it’s kind of Bristol’s ship too.
Toby Jones: “It’s not the most popular thing to say here, but the
ship doesn’t have a lot to do with Newport. Newport was not a trading port, but it was an ideal place to repair ships, which is exactly what they were doing here.”
At some point in the 1460s she put into Newport for repairs, but something went wrong: “It was all pre-planned, and a complex operation. They built this cradle, and then something happened and the ship fell over, the cradle collapsed … So they abandoned it. They salvaged what they could reach and left the rest.”
So what was left of the hull remained in place until it was uncovered once more in 2002. Since then, a great deal has been learned about her.
She was built in northern Spain in the early 1450s, probably in or near San Sebastian. The oak has been dated and identified as having come from somewhere in that region.
The finds in among the timbers, including fruit seeds and the bones of a wide variety of fish, suggest that for much or all of her working life her crew was Portuguese.
Other finds including a stone cannon ball and a fragment of a soldier’s helmet decoration, suggest that at least some of the time there may have been men-at-arms among the crew to protect her from pirate attacks. She was working the seas in dramatic and violent times.
She displaced almost 400 tons when fully loaded. This makes her four times the size of Bristol’s replica of Cabot’s Matthew. She would have been known to the English as a “great ship” because of her size. This was one of the biggest vessels in European waters at the time, the medieval equivalent of a huge modern container ship.
We have some indication of what she carried – anything from bales of wool to barrels of fish. Almost 100 pieces of what would once have been wooden casks were found, and these could have contained oil, grain and salted meat as well as fish.
But one of the most important exports from Spain to England at this time would have been wine. In the Middle Ages, Bristol’s economy basically centred on the manufacture and export of woollen cloth and the import of wine. There is every reason to suppose that the ship visited Bristol, and possibly more than once.
A video made for the project, which uses similar animation techniques to modern computer games, suggests that rather than making the journey along the winding, tidal river into Bristol, she might have anchored at Hung Road near Pill, where cargo would have been offloaded onto small boats to be taken into the docks.
Her final journey took her across the Bristol Channel. Newport was not a significant port at the time, but a small town of a few hundred souls, but there was a small inlet – a “pill” – which was ideally suited to ship repairs. Luckily for us, and unluckily for them, things did not go well for our ship.
If you are very interested in English medieval history, the context of the ship’s arrival is fascinating, though complicated. Think of the back-story as being like Game of Thrones, only with fewer dragons.
First, the ship was built at around the time the Hundred Years’ War between England and France ended.
“What is super-important in all this is the loss of Gascony in 1453,” says Jones.
“That was England’s last toe-hold in France, where they access to the wine. But they lost that, they lost their claw into France, but they still had an insatiable demand for wine,
and so they had to go elsewhere.”
Bristol’s merchants looked to Spain and Portugal for alternative sources of supply. And the Newport ship was built at precisely the time that the Bristol market was opening up to Spain and Portugal.
With the end of the Hundred Years’ War, the violence once wrought on France by the English nobility simply came home in the form of the Wars of the Roses, a sequence of struggles between aristocratic factions for the crown.
A letter from the time suggests that by then the ship might have become the property of Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, aka Warwick the Kingmaker, the most powerful baron in the land, whose support, or lack of it, could make or break kings.
“Warwick was a total pirate,” says
Jones. “It’s an interesting time politically, but unbelievably complicated. I can’t even try to make sense of what’s happening.”
Now we await decisions (and funding) for the ship to find her permanent home.
“The ship is iconic. It’s huge – 25 metres long – much bigger than the Matthew, and of course it’s not a replica. It’s the real deal. It’s authentic.
“It will probably take a team of archaeologists and conservators about three years to rebuild it, but the public could watch while that’s going on.”
As with the SS Great Britain in Bristol, Jones is convinced that the ship would become a major tourist attraction
“Imagine a big, bright new museum, and the huge medieval ship on display in a hall. It would be like having a dinosaur skeleton, it’s that level of uniqueness.
“It’s hard to visualise it at the moment, but it’s this huge medieval ship, it has beautiful curvature, an absolute work of art, and it really will be a fantastic attraction for Newport.”
“You have the world’s 15th century ship here, except it’s like flatpack furniture without the instructions. It’s our job to put it together.” » The Newport Medieval Ship Project is at Unit 20, Estuary Road, Queensway Meadows Industrial Estate, Newport NP19 4SP. It is open 10.30am-4pm on Fridays and Saturdays from now until the autumn. Admission is free but donations are welcome.
For further information and details of special events see www. newportship.org