Mary Rose Museum Ground Investigation

£23m New Home for the Mary Rose

The Mary Rose is effectively the first true warship to be built for England and was famously raised from the Solent before a worldwide audience in 1982.  In a prestigious lottery funded project it is finally set to receive a state of the art museum to be constructed over the dry dock where the vessel is currently being preserved alongside HMS Victory.

The new museum, a wooden clad, oval building, will have three levels of galleries to enable visitors to get close to the 500 year old vessel.  It will include much improved educational facilities and its new displays will house many of the 19,000 artefacts found during other dives over the wreck site.

During construction the hull of the Mary Rose will continue to be sprayed with polyethylene glycol, a water-based wax preservative solution, until 2011 whilst the museum is built around her.  Once construction is complete the ship will be carefully dried so that she can be displayed fully and allow visitors to see both the outside and inside of the conserved hull.

Geotechnical Engineering were mobilised to site in August 2008 and used a range of investigative techniques which included, Pioneer boreholes, shallow and deep hand excavated trial pits, concrete cores and hand held window sampling.  The work was fully supervised by our own engineering geologists and was overseen by Southampton based consultants Gifford.

The active site conditions proved a challenging environment in which to operate as much of the site work was located within the confines of the secure dockyard alongside the existing museum which remained open to the general public, and had to remain clean and unobstructed at all times.

The Pioneer rig encountered some tricky conditions which had curtailed previous site investigations, with thick surface and subsurface concrete and variable made ground including bricks and limestone blocks over a historic wooden dock floor.  Superficial deposits beneath were typified by clays and fine running sands to a depth of twenty four metres.  The drilling crews performed admirably undertaking in-situ testing, sampling and coring, and the installation of double monitoring wells in each of the four boreholes drilled.

One of the next challenges to overcome was the hand excavation of two deep shored observation pits alongside the existing dry dock wall.  Limitations of space meant that assistance from machine excavation was not possible and all spoil would have to be stockpiled elsewhere.  Pits were hand excavated and shored up to five metres depth to allow safe entry by the Archaeologist.  Spoil was removed via an electronic winch. On completion pits were backfilled by hand and the surface was reinstated with concrete.

The fieldwork was completed on time to the complete satisfaction of the dockyard staff with no health & safety incidents.  Samples were returned to our Gloucester base where we undertook extensive soils and rock testing in our UKAS accredited laboratory and carried out detailed logging to BS5930.

Pioneer drilling on dockside next to HMS Victory

Working at the bottom of the Drydock