ARTEFACTS dating back 800 years have been recovered off the oldest shipwreck in England.

The Mortar Wreckage gets its name from the shipment of mortar bowls that were being transported before the ship sunk off Poole Bay. 

Now, several gravestones made of Purbeck stone have been lifted from the wreckage, waiting to be shown in Poole Museum next year.

The recovered items are believed to date back to the 1200s.

Artefacts recovered from the shipwreck.

Tom Cousins, maritime archaeologist at Bournemouth University was a part of the team that has been carrying out the excavation work, he said: “We got the wreckage protected in 2022, and now we’ve got the funding to get the slabs up.

“They're conserved and ready for the new opening of the Poole Museum.

“We had to spend two years sitting on our hands for the government to get around to protecting it.

“The weather was too bad to get out and do work, I’m just relieved that it is done, and nothing is broken and it’s all in one piece.

“It has been quite a stressful two weeks because the weather has been against us, but we managed to get it done in time before the weather got too bad."

One of the founders of the wreck, Trevor Small, was a skipper who spotted the wreck on his GPS system while sailing along the coast.

Tom also said how the discovery of the wreckage is helping to educate his students.

He added: “We're training our undergraduates in diving as part of a standard undergrad degree.

“In a few years’ time, we should have a lot of our graduates who can then come onto the professional team.

“I'm hoping over the next three years we're going to be having a student project, taking students to basically get experience in archaeology and being part of a team.

“And I’m also hoping that we can completely excavate and record the site and potentially recover everything, but it all depends on funding and whether Poole Museum will be willing to take it all."

The team will return to inspect the wreckage in a few weeks' time.

Tom added: “We've got to do a dive on this site in a few weeks just to make sure everything's okay.”