In June 2002, construction workers building Newport's new Riverfront Arts Centre on the west bank of the River Usk dug into the riverbank and hit timber. Articulated timber. A lot of it. The archaeologists called in to investigate found a substantial portion of a late medieval seagoing vessel - perhaps 116 feet long when complete, with an estimated carrying capacity of 161 tons burden. Vessels of this size were called "great ships" by contemporaries and were used for the long-distance trade between Britain, the Bay of Biscay, and southern Iberia. The construction work had damaged parts of the find, but the bulk of it had survived. Local people, recognising what they had on their doorstep, campaigned for full preservation. The Friends of the Newport Ship was founded. An estimated 3.5 million pounds was eventually raised by the Welsh Assembly Government and Newport City Council. The ship was lifted, timber by timber, and moved to a dedicated industrial unit that the local council now describes as the biggest wood conservation centre in the UK.

Dendrochronology - tree-ring dating - identified the original construction timber as having been felled around 1449 in the Basque Country of northern Spain. A later oxygen-isotope study refined the felling date to the winter of 1457/8. Since shipwrights of the period used green timber, the ship was probably built immediately after. The Basque region had a famous shipbuilding industry at the time, producing the great ships that carried the Bristol-Lisbon trade. Members of the Albaola Society, based at Pasaia near San Sebastián, studied the structural details and concluded the vessel was likely built by Basque shipwrights - either in northern Spain or south-western France. The build technique was clinker - each plank overlapping the one below, secured with iron nails driven through and clinched flat against iron rove plates on the inside. Gaps were caulked with tar and animal hair, identified as horse, cow, sheep, and goat. The keel was beech. The rest was oak. Nobody knows why, though a shortage of suitable oak at the time is one suggestion.

Around 1468, the ship was carefully floated into a side channel of the Usk on a very high tide, then settled onto a pre-erected cradle of oak and elm logs - the tree-ring dating of those cradle timbers places the event in the spring of 1468. The ship was undergoing a major refit. British-grown timber from after 1465 was being shaped and inserted into the structure. Then the cradle collapsed. The ship heeled over onto its starboard side. The incoming tide flooded it with silt and water. Efforts were made to drain it, to pump it out, to right it. They failed. Salvage crews moved in, hacking at the upper works with axes, removing reusable lapstrake planking, framing, and internal timbers, taking off anchors, guns, and rigging - the iron, especially, was valuable. What they left was the lower part of the hull, the keel, the frames, and a hold by then full of discarded timber. The Usk mud closed over it. The oxygen-poor silt meant no wood-boring creatures could attack the timbers.

Several hundred objects came out of the wreck. Portuguese coins. Iberian micaceous red-ware ceramics, soot-stained, almost certainly the crew's cooking pots. Merino sheep wool in the caulking. Walnuts, almonds, hazelnuts, pomegranates, grapes, figs, olives - the foodstuffs of the Mediterranean and Iberia, carried back as both cargo and ship's stores. Cod, hake, ling, tusk, herring, blackspot bream, conger, flatfish, Atlantic salmon - over a thousand fish and animal bones from the bilges. Oysters, whelks, mussels, cockles. Human fleas and dog fleas. A wood-boring beetle never previously recorded in Britain. Domesticated cattle, goats, sheep, pigs, chickens. Rat bones. A stone cannonball. A damaged hour glass. Thirteen single shoes, one of them very expensive. And, set in the keel join, the petit blanc minted in Crémieu - a coin so specific in its dating window that it pins the ship's birth almost to a month.

The first stage of conservation, completed in April 2008, was simply to clean the timbers and record them. Each piece was scanned with a FaroArm portable coordinate measuring machine and modelled in RHINO software, producing rotatable three-dimensional images accurate to submillimetre precision - making the Newport Ship one of the first marine archaeology projects to pioneer the technique. Some timbers needed treatment with triammonium citrate first to remove iron residues from the nail holes. Then each piece went into a polyethylene glycol bath for years, the PEG slowly replacing the water in the cell walls so the wood would not shrink and crack when dried. By September 2016 the PEG treatment was complete; the timbers then went into freeze-drying to remove residual water. As of 2019, sixty percent had been freeze-dried, with all the timbers due back by 2021. The eventual goal is reassembly - a 15th-century Basque-built Portuguese-trading vessel, lost while being repaired, rebuilt for a 21st-century audience to walk around.

Circumstantial evidence ties the ship to Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick - the man known to history as Warwick the Kingmaker. A letter dated 22 November 1469, from Warwick to Thomas Throkmorton, his receiver of Glamorgan and Morgannwg, authorised various payments for "the making of the ship at Newport". This could be construed as repairs to the badly damaged vessel found in the side channel. The simpler explanation, accepted by many researchers, is that this was probably an Iberian-built ship that put into Newport for repairs while trading with Bristol - then the second port of the realm. Newport in the 15th and 16th centuries did host very large vessels supporting Bristol's long-distance trade, including the one that became the Newport Medieval Ship. Whoever owned it, whoever crewed it, whatever its name had been - and we may never know that name - it remains one of the most complete medieval ships ever recovered. The Mary Rose, found at Portsmouth, is later. The Bremen Cog is older but a different type. The Newport Medieval Ship is its own thing: a 15th-century working vessel, almost entire, returning slowly to view.