Inshore Craft

Traditional Working Vessels of the British Isles

Basil Greenhill, Julian Mannering

• Publisher: Seaforth Publishing
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781473822603
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Marine Transportation
• Index: Technology & Engineering

This comprehensive reference work describes and illustrates some 200 types of inshore craft that once fished and traded, under oar and sail, around the coasts of the British Isles. The types are arranged by coastal area and each is described in terms of its shape and design, fitness for location and purpose, build, evolution and geographical distribution. Details of dimensions, rig, building materials, seamanship and the survival of examples are given where known, while hundreds of line drawings and photographs show the vessels in their original forms.A team of twelve experts describe all these boat types and, in addition, there are introductions to the main geographic areas outlining the physical environments, fisheries and other uses of the sea that have influenced boat design; maps of all the areas show ports and physical features.At the beginning of the last century sail and oar dominated fisheries and local trade: one hundred years later those craft have all but vanished. This book brings alive for maritime historians and enthusiasts, traditional boat sailors, modelmakers, and all those with an interest in local history, the vast array of craft that were once such a significant feature of our inshore seas.Inshore Craft is a spectacular achievement—Wooden Boat Magazine

The Coasts of Devon and Cornwall

THE COASTS of the southwestern peninsula of Britain are characterised by tidal estuaries which stretch relatively far inland. Those on the south coasts of Devon and Cornwall – the Exe, the Teign, the Dart, the Kingsbridge River, the Kingston River, the Yealm, the Tamar, the Looe River, the Fowey, the Fal and the Helford River – are in varying degrees deep on the tidal flood, with soft mud banks and each has several tidal creeks which provide waterways to inland villages. In contrast, the relatively few estuaries of the north coast – the Gannel, the Camel, the Torridge and the Taw and the Parrett – although each provided with their tidal creeks, are, on the whole, shallower than those of the south with sandy or mud beds and shores.

This is a coast exposed to the North Atlantic, to the southwest gales of autumn and winter, which can be savage, and to the Atlantic swell, the ‘ground sea’, as it was known to local seamen. Boats and vessels using Boscastle, for example, had frequently to withstand very bad pounding when the ground sea rolled in. By contrast, nearby Porth Gaverne did not have the same problem. The boats and vessels of this coast had to be heavily built to withstand launching from the beaches and lying in exposed drying harbours, especially on the northwest coast where the absence of harbours meant a much smaller fishing industry, north of Padstow, than in the south. The main fisheries varied over the years with herring, mackerel and at some periods pilchard, being taken in great quantities. There was the ‘cracks in the rocks’ fishery for crab, lobster and shrimp, while the Fal and the Helford River had the specialist oyster fishery. The beds of the latter had their own carrier boat to take the crop to Plymouth, the fast sailing Rob Roy, built on the lines of a Bristol Channel pilot cutter but ketch rigged.

Pilot cutters were built at Porthleven in Cornwall as well as in greater numbers at Crockerne, Pill, Cardiff, Barry and Swansea, while the pilot gig is especially associated with Cornwall. The gigs serviced the local harbours of both the north and south coasts and of the Scillies while the cutters and schooners from the Bristol Channel ports serviced the deep sea vessels making their landfall on the southwestern peninsula and bound for the big ports – Swansea, Cardiff, Barry, Bristol, Sharpness and Gloucester.

Cadgwith Cove, a typical Cornish cove, photographed around 1899. The boats hauled up above the tide line are mostly crabbers. Chocks and skegs lying on the beach indicate that a number of boats are still at sea, while at the head of the rough paved slip a big seine boat is poised for launching. (NMM, neg no G2958)

The Fal estuary, Carrick Roads, is one of the world’s great natural harbours where for many years before radio, vessels from all over the world called to await orders as to where in Britain or Europe to discharge their cargoes, which may have changed hands several times on the commodity markets during passage. To service them the quay punts and many other boats provided a living for local watermen.

The largest fishing vessels of southwest Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the smack and ketch rigged beam trawlers of Brixham and Plymouth. These vessels sailed far up the North Sea and around the land to the Welsh fishing grounds. Based in relatively sheltered harbours with plenty of water on the flood, though drying on the ebb, they could be of substantial size and powerful enough to drag the beam trawls over the banks. Particularly after the development of the railways in the nineteenth century, which opened up wide markets, the local industries became prosperous enough to finance larger and larger vessels. These were among the most spectacular and finest of British sailing fishing vessels.

The inshore grounds of southwest Britain were rich with many varieties of fish and for a thousand years or more such local communities as there were utilised them as a source of food. It is to be remembered that until well into the twentieth century each of these small places was largely self-dependent, with its own fish dealers, boat builders, net and sailmakers, blacksmiths, and indeed, shoemakers, butchers, tailors, carpenters, carriers, and so forth. Socially also the communities tended to be self perpetuating, suspicious even of relatively near neighbours. In these circumstances, given that coastal conditions varied greatly and that many of the boat launching and landing places were little more than cracks in the rock with their own patterns in the very local behaviour of the sea in different conditions, it is not surprising that a multiplicity of boat types grew up all around the coast as different from one another as the deep keeled boats built for oyster dredging in the waters of Carrick Roads and the clinker built, round bottomed luggers which were beached on the shingle at Beer and Sidmouth in south Devon. Nor is it surprising that these types continued to differ from one another until the introduction of marine motors, shortly before World War I, began the long, slow process of the development of a degree of uniformity which even at the end of the twentieth century has only been partly achieved despite the very widespread introduction of plastics into the building of even the smallest and simplest fishing boats. There appears to have been little influence from the standardised small craft built for the navy and most boats were built of locally available timber in which the region was rich.

The great tidal range of the inner Bristol Channel and the soft mud of its rivers produced the specialised flatners while the wild weather and the very limited coastal shelter produced the small but strong and seaworthy Sennen Cove boats, types utterly remote from one another. There was really no predominant type widespread, like the cobles of the northeast coast, which were the result of fairly uniform geographical and weather conditions over a long stretch of coastline. A fair measure of uniformity could be achieved in the boats of one fishing place – such as the Mounts Bay or St Ives luggers but even these, the products of different conditions of sea and land, differed from one another as the drawings of the Lizzie, and the Ebenezer in this section of this book clearly show

Before the development of motor transport, which was a phenomenon the beginning of which followed immediately on World War I with the massive disposal of surplus army transport at low prices, goods could be carried far inland on the waterways, and the products of the river valleys carried to the ports on the coasts far more quickly and economically by sailing barge than by any other means. One or two men could move a dozen wagon loads or more on one tide which would have taken many days to move by land. I have used the term ‘sailing barge’, but in fact, of course, the prime mover in these barge trades was the tide; sailing, like poling, kedging, rowing with sweeps and towing from the boat, was essentially auxiliary propulsion. This barge work was a highly skilled branch of the craft of the watermen, no less skilled in its way than the skill of the men who manned the smacks and ketches which traded on the local coasts. The work which often involved loading and discharging the barges was extremely arduous. Unlike the men of the smacks and ketches, however, the bargemen were often able to sleep at home, especially after the pedal cycle became available.

The exception to these sailing limitations was provided by the ‘outside’ barges of the Tamar and Fal which worked between those ports and the shipping places in between them and to the beaches on the east side of the Lizard. Their men lived in both worlds. They had the skills and hazards of the men of the trading smacks and at the same time the very special skills of the bargemen in working tidal waters.

Exceptional in this section of this book are the Bideford polacca brigantines. These vessels operated essentially local trades, like the Tamar barges, feeding the lime kilns of the Taw and Torridge with limestone and small coal, but some sailed more widely in the home trade, in foreign trade, and even across the north Atlantic. They are included because they were local craft with a rig unique to one small area of the southwest, essentially the river Torridge, where almost all were built.

Beer luggers pulled up on the beach under the lee of Beer Head with nets hung out to dry. The lugger on the extreme left of the group is double ended but most of the others have the more usual transom stern. Most of the craft here have had motors installed. (NMM, neg no G3313)

Lines plans and constructional details of the Beer lugger Little Jim E159. Built by Lavers of Exmouth in 1916, she was 23ft overall, 8ft 6in on the beam, with a depth of 4ft 2in. The strong iron bumkin extended the fore lug tack. (NMM, Oke, Coastal Craft Collection)

Devon and Dorset Beach Boats

BEER LUGGER

Strong, clinker built, lug rigged, open sailing boat, with good carrying capacity, full lines and stout bilges for beaching on the shingle ridges, which was used for general fishing all year round, and pleasure sailing and mackerel whiffing in the summer. These boats were very similar to those found at Hastings and Eastbourne, and at Polperro up to the 1870s. As well as fishing some were also used as market boats and local general carriers. All the boats on this stretch of coast were essentially similar, and came under the Port of Exeter. Between 1869 and 1884, though some seventy-nine boats were registered at Exeter as working from Beer, there were probably less than thirty boats in use at any one time. Although one of the smaller fishing stations within the port, the Beer luggers and their crews enjoyed an enduring reputation for sea keeping and seamanship.

The sail plan of Little Jim.The late aba...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction and Acknowledgments
• Boats and Boatmen and their Study
• Scotland
• The English North Sea Coast
• The Wash and Thames Estuary
• The South Coast
• The Coasts of Devon and Cornwall
• Wales
• The Northwest Coast
• Ireland
• General Sources