The Utrecht Ship

In the basement of this museum lies a ship of almost eighteen metres that you smell before you see it. That is the creosote oil it was preserved with, and the smell has been hanging there for ninety years. To get the thing inside, a hole had to be cut in the cellar wall.

Workmen digging at the Van Hoornekade in the north of the city found it in December 1930, and everyone immediately thought of the Romans. In those same years the Roman fort on Dom Square was being excavated and the city could think of little else.

The ship has grown younger twice since then. A carbon dating first made it an eighth-century vessel, and only the study of the tree rings showed that the wood was felled around the year one thousand. Its hull is a single hollowed oak of more than seventeen metres.

So it carried freight down the Rhine in the centuries when Utrecht lived off the water, and because it was the first of its kind ever found, the whole ship type now carries the name of this city.

We now walk to the Oudegracht, because the water that ship lived on was dug by the people of Utrecht themselves.