Clinker boat building with Damian Goodburn

This was less of a traditional Time Team 'cameo', and more the attempted creation of a partial 3D model to show us what a section of the Grace Dieu would have looked like, to help us see the complex design more easily, and to demonstrate just how time-consuming it was. From the small section that Damian and Alex Farnell (of the Centre for Maritime Archaeology at Southampton) made, we could see just how massive the ship must have been. The very fact that they couldn't finish the small section in the time available demonstrated what a very labour-intensive way this was to build a ship.
Local blacksmith Colin Philips made the nails, and even though I had given him the measurements and commissioned them myself, I was still astonished when I saw just how enormous they were. Each nail weighed more than one and half pounds and was four times the size of the nails normally used in shipbuilding during this period, so it was hardly surprising that Damian was struggling to bend them over by hand!