Making waves with our traditional boats

From Galway’s hookers and currachs, to the construction of traditional boats, Tommy Barker checks out two books that delve into their history

Glorious Galway Hookers, Currachs, Lake and River-Boats

Team authors Donal Lynch, Padraic de Bhaldraithe Catherine Buchanan and Donal MacPolin.Meitheal Mara and Galway County Council

www.copperreed.com €25,

www.oceantocity

Traditional Boats of Ireland. History, Folklore and Construction (reissued, first published 2008)

Edited by Críóstoir MacCarthaigh, assistant editor Donal MacPolin

Collins Press €50

AFTER the boat lovers’ bible, Traditional Boats of Ireland, was launched in 2008, the next publishing steps in this area were open either to schism, or to further evangelism.

With a title like Glorious Galway: Hookers, Currachs, Lake and River Boats, it’s fairly obvious the next coffee/galley table book tends to the latter, and in two languages too.

Just about every aspect of our past (and especially, for whatever reason, our modes of transport) is open to nostalgic remembrances, and every mode has its obsessive anoraks. When it comes to a love affair with old wooden boats of work-day uses and unadulterated pleasure, the anoraks might be better replaced with oilskins, but the passion is the same as it is for documenting the likes of horse-drawn carriages, cars, trains, trams and omnibuses. Actually, no, it isn’t really the same at all: It’s 10 times richer, if you are to believe this fledgling obsessive.

If you’re ambivalent or unconcerned, the Traditional Boats of Ireland classic publication from Collins Press should convert you.

Trains, trams, cars and even bikes are interesting primarily because of the evolution of engineering and design: Boats have more depth, historically and otherwise, because they are closer to people and communities, to the landscape and seascape. They go places, and come back with stories, provisions, fish, and sometimes romance.

Each compass point of the Irish coastline has its classic boat designs, as do its rivers and lakes, as one size and shape definitely doesn’t suit all conditions. Many are held up as icons of a vanishing Ireland, and Galway certainly has probably the biggest range, and certainly the most identifiable. They go from the heavyweight hookers (the Bád Mór) currently enjoying a bit of a romantic regatta racing renaissance, to the lightweight but emblematic lath and skin currachs — now as often seen in images upside down than right side up, and usually with six legs poking out from underneath it, like some sort of bug of the boating world.

Other regions have produced local publications on heritage boats — such as the Shannon Estuary’s Gandelow — and boats clearly serve to draw place and people together in rich and layered ways, combining biography, geography, economy, voyaging, tragedy and triumphs. Some boats have stayed with generations of families, and their stories are told in Glorious Galway, published by Meitheal Mara.

It’s a lovely read, scholarly but passionate, bilingual, lavishly illustrated with photographs old and new as well as lush watercolours by co-editor Donal MacPolin, it delves deep into an audit of surviving craft (over 500 are recorded in various states of health) of myriad types. Yet, isn’t too elitist to ignore clinker punts and cots, half-deck trawlers or nouveau arrivals such as the Shannon Cruiser beloved of Continental holidaymakers, racing currachs and the GRP (plastic) skinned currach — the latter in place of wood plank, or cotton, calico and tar.

Glorious Galway’s breadth of coverage, in its 184 pages between large format covers, includes historical influences like the Congest Districts Board who introduced new boat types like the Nobby and the Zulu from Scotland and England, and details the trade between shops on land and the Atlantic islands, with sailing hookers acting like delivery vans for turf and provisions, often exchanged for mackerel for export.

While Glorious Galway expands on a rich microcosm or seam, the re-publication by the Collins Press of The Traditional Boats of Ireland is bigger in just about every other way — and it includes Galway and the boats of the West in any case over much of its 658 pages.

Already a classic, and thankfully re-issued, it is an immense achievement of amateur and professional researches, with dozens of contributors, and a trove of images, from several centuries, as well as line drawings, boat plans, and glossaries.

It shares all of the same passion, and some of the contributors and illustrators, and design is again by Limerick-based Copper Reed Studio, as is the Galway book. In fact, not having to have facing pages of Irish/English translation as in the Galway title allows a far freer range to the layout. Traditional Boats of Ireland is a hefty tome, a real ballast of a book at nearly eight pounds weight. In fact, the sole criticism would have to be the weight — it’s hard to get comfortable with it, definitely not one to read in bed, or even sitting on a chair or deckchair.

This tome’s genesis was at the Classic Boat Regatta in Glandore in 1994, and after 14 years of diligence and some delving in mud-flats for boat skeletons, the book has emerged into its splendid format.

Every part of the coast, and inland waterway too, gets a look-in and exposition for craft and water-borne folklore, and considerable coverage is given to the west and south coasts in particular. Builders of modest punts, skeletal currachs and BIM ocean-going trawlers are recorded, as are famous shipwrights like the Tyrrells of Arklow, and the Bushes of Baltimore, And, take a bow the Hegarty family of Oldcourt boatyard, near Skibbereen regularly referenced, and active as ever, saving ancient boats, making new ones in old ways, passing on our heritage, and putting it all back where it belongs: on the water.