The Donegal Paddling Curragh

The Donegal paddling curragh -- also known as the Owey Island, and Rosses paddling curragh -- is one of the odder indigenous boat survivals in western Europe. 

Donegal, of course, is a county in the west of Ireland. Owey Island is off its northwest coast, and The Rosses a district toward the southwest. Rossmen and Owey Islanders compete for the distinction as the originators of the type. 

Launching a Donegal paddling curragh built by Andy McGonagle for Peter Badge, 1992 (click any image to enlarge)

At first glimpse, the Donegal paddling curragh appears to be a tiny example of curragh, per se -- that is, a heavy type of skin-on-frame, "boat-shaped" boat formerly in common alongshore use in Ireland and popularized in modern times by Tim Severin's reproduction of one for his Brendan Voyage. 

But as Peter Badge observes in Coracles of the World, the boat is only partly a curragh in the above sense, and partly a coracle. (The issue is complicated by the Irish often calling coracles currachs, as in the Boyne currach, which is clearly a coracle.) Its size -- about 8' LOA -- puts it in the realm of the coracle, as does the fact that it can be, and sometimes is, carried on the back of one man (although its size and apparent weight would make that a far more difficult task than carrying, for example, a Boyne currach or one of the coracles of the River Severn in England and Wales). The last quality that makes it more coracle-like than curragh-like is that it is normally propelled by a single paddler kneeling in the bows with a single T-grip paddle, as shown in the image below.

Paddling Donegal paddling curraghs over the bow.

On the other hand, oars pivoting on single tholepins and a sitting thwart -- features of "true" curraghs -- were added to the design around the middle of the twentieth century, although even boats so fitted continued to be paddled as well. It is, perhaps, fruitless to argue whether the Donegal curragh is a curragh or a coracle. It bears characteristics of both: it is what it is.

Until the nineteenth century, the framework was basket-like, made of woven withies like the Boyne currach, but by the 1930, sawn oak laths were used. In the next photo, the frames appear to be fairly heavy (one suspects they were steam-bent). The frames are neatly mortised and wedged into the gunwales around both sides. 

Donegal paddling curragh, set up for rowing. Note kneeling "pad" of hay in the bow, toe brace behind the pad, sawn frames and stringers moritsed into gunwales, and pieced gunwale construction.

The framing of the transom is not clear from the photo, but the tops of either stringers or vertical transom frames are to be seen mortised into the member that runs across the top of the transom. This itself is probably mortised into the gunwales, which extend a very short distance aft of that transverse member.

The forward structure of the gunwales is unusual. The main gunwales appear to end where the sides begin to curve inward. A little aft of that point, curving sections of gunwale overlap the forward ends of the straight sections and make most of the rest of the curve toward the stem. Another gunwale component overlaps the second piece on both sides, forming a kind of breasthook that ties the sides together.

Donegal paddling curraghs were originally covered with hides, but more recently with two layers of canvas or other stout fabric, with a layer of brown paper in between, and waterproofed with tar or pitch. 

Quoting James Hornel, Badges gives typical dimensions as follows: LOA: 8'4" (504cm); beam: 3'7" (109cm); depth 1'8" (51cm).

Whereas most coracles are inland craft, the Donegal curragh was and is used in both inland and nearshore coastal waters. Common uses formerly included, according to Badge, "fishing (particularly for Pollock), cutting seaweed, transporting animals to and from the mainland and shopping!, but that their current use was as inland ferries and for pleasure trips." They would travel as much as two miles offshore in conditions reportedly up to Force 8, but this seems like an exaggeration for such a small, paddle-propelled boat.

The paddler kneeled on a bundle of hay or straw, and braced his toes against a short cross-member fastened in the bottom especially for that purpose. (This can be seen in the third photo.) The recommended posture was a bolt-upright kneeling one -- not sitting back on one's haunches -- with the knees spread apart but with no other contact with the boat's interior. In contrast to typical coracle paddling technique, which is straight over the bow, the Donegal curragh boatman paddled over one side, then switched sides as soon as the boat began to veer in the opposite direction.

Content and photos from Coracles of the World, by Peter Badge.

Lockley's Curragh

(click any image to enlarge)

A skilled naturalist and prolific writer, R.M. Lockley (1903-2000) wrote more than 50 books, many of them about the wildlife of the British Isles. While recovering from injuries suffered while on service during the Second World War, he discovered, on a secluded beach at the base of a cliff on a remote part of the Welsh coast, a breeding colony of harbor seals. A year later, with the war still underway, he sailed there in a curragh, beneath which, overturned, he camped for months while studying the seals' breeding habits.

The Seals and the Curragh is Lockley's account of that idyll. And though the curragh gets major billing in the title, it plays a minor role in the book, which concentrates more on the seals, on conservation, and on Lockley's charming relationship with Tessa, a 13-year-old girl, a refugee from London who lived in the home of a local Welsh farmer and who brought Lockley milk, helped him in his studies, and kept him company at his secluded campsite. This was a time when a man's intentions toward minors were assumed to be honorable (or, at least, those of men of a certain class), and Lockley's description of his innocent relationship with Tessa recalls what seems now a time of great naivete and purity (strange, that, during the most destructive war in history, describing a relationship between an injured soldier and a girl who had lost her mother to a German bomb and whose soldier father was presumed dead in Singapore).

So the curragh gets fairly short shrift, overshadowed by the seals, Tessa, and Lockley's progressive concern for the natural environmental. We are, however, treated to the following:

Giddy  -- that's how the Irish describe a curragh in one natural word of caution; but it gave you a marvellous feeling to watch a Dingle or Blasket man handle one. Like a fleet-toed dancer the curragh skimmed over the white breaking currents, a living bird of the waves, safe in the skilled hands of the men of the Irish south-west.

The Welsh fishermen had gasped at her long length of twenty-five feet and narrow beam of four feet with horror. Nor had these men of the grey coast appreciated the smiling eye and shark teeth which I had painted each side of the bow, in the Iberian fashion, to give life to the black tarred hull. It was the evil eye to them; they were afraid of that which they could not understand.

Lockley's extraordinarily painted curragh running before the wind. The lightweight boat appears to be on plane.

Aside from this, we learn only a little about the boat itself: The tarred skin over its wooden framework was of canvas. It had a small lugsail which, in the book's only photo of the boat, is turned athwartships with its peak lowered almost to horizontal, a virtual squaresail for when the boat runs before the wind. Two sets of reef points are visible, but no forestay, and one suspects the absence of shrouds and backstay. There was a sloping transom, but no keel or other underwater plane. It had tholepins (single or double is not clear) for rowing. And steering was by means of a paddle held over the starboard quarter. It was capable of being easily rowed, dragged ashore, and overturned, all by one man, and it could carry some number of sheep between the mainland and islands off the coast. Judging by Lockley's description of sailing through a storm while alongshore, it was extremely seaworthy.

Lockley and Tessa voyaging to a small island near the seal nursery to check on Lockley's sheep. Illustration by Lockley.

"The Boyne Currach" -- A Review

The Boyne Currach: From beneath the shadows of Newgrange, by Claidhgh (I understand it's pronounced "Clive") O' Gibne has received quite positive reviews. (Here's one, by Wade Tarzia.) I'm disappointed that I can't add to them. I find the book gravely flawed and seriously wanting.

The Boyne is a river in County Meath, Ireland, running generally toward the east and entering the Irish Sea north of Dublin. The river's common fishing boat was the currach, a small, nearly round leather-on-frame craft that in most of the British Isles is known as a coracle. (O' Gibne addresses the naming controversy.) The large landowners along the Boyne used to jealously guard their exclusive rights to fish the river, maintaining their own small fleets of currachs and hiring men to fish for salmon with seine nets. As O' Gibne tells it, in spite of privately-employed wardens and monitoring by the local police, poaching by private currach owners was widespread (but we'll make no puns -- none! -- about poached fish).

The Boyne Currach describes this local history. It also delves into the history and mythology of skin-on-frame craft in general; the history and folkways of the Boyne Valley; the ancient history of the Celts and Ireland; and the history of modern currach preservation efforts. There's a chapter (just one) on how to build a Boyne currach; another about the Boyne Currach Centre, which O' Gibne founded and maintains to perpetuate the craft of the craft; and a section about the Newgrange Currach Project, referring to an entirely different form of currach (the more familiar boat-shaped type, somewhat similar to Tim Severin's Brendan) which O' Gibne had under construction at the time of the book's publication.

Boyne currachs, 1848
(All images from The Boyne Currach. Click any image to enlarge)

This great variety of material is, in my opinion, one of the flaws of The Boyne Currach: it attempts too much in its 164 pages and loses coherence along the way. I would have liked more detail on the boatbuilding methods for both the types discussed. O' Gibne's description of the building process for the coracle-style currach is confusing and perfunctory (especially concerning leather tanning), and he merely glosses the construction of the larger boat-shaped vessel. There are, however, enough excellent photographs and (perhaps) enough usable illustrations so that one could build a coracle-style currach by referring to them and perhaps gleaning sufficient tidbits from the text to supplement them.

In this 1910 photo of a Boyne currach, the gentleman in the bowler hat is J.P. Holland, inventor of the first practical submarine. 

In addition to its historical photos and illustrations, The Boyne Currach contains sketches by O' Gibne. These, though, are often mere decorations, and even among those that attempt to be informative, many are full of distracting, nouveau-Celtic imagery and other New-Agey psychedelia and therefore lacking in clarity.

Purportedly showing to how twist willow rods to make the rope that supports the seat in a currach.

When it comes to the history of currach folk on the Boyne, O' Gibne is indiscriminate, mixing history and anecdotes about fishing and poaching with irrelevancies about milking cows and riding bicycles. These decades-old bits of gossip may be of interest to local residents who recognize their neighbors' great-grandparents in them, but they're of little value to readers whose primary interest is the boats themselves.

Most significantly, The Boyne Currach needed an editor. The language is often idiomatic or just plain unclear, the organization disjointed, too many of the how-to explanations are sketchy, and the content frequently drifts off-topic. I find this inexcusable in a book that was peer-reviewed, as its publisher, Four Courts Press, claims all its books are.

I understand that this is harsh, and I take no pleasure in slamming what was a sincere and worthy effort. O' Gibne's research concerning the historical use of the Boyne currach is worthwhile to historians and students of folkways. His dedication to learning traditional currach-building skills and perfecting his own is commendable, and the boats he builds are lovely in the way that simple tools and antique technologies can be. That he has taken his love for the currach and turned it into a vibrant cultural-and-boating organization (The Boyne Currach Centre) is admirable. Thanks to O' Gibne, there are now many boaters campaigning their home-built currachs on the Boyne and elsewhere, and that's just flat-out wonderful.

The Boyne Currach is not entirely lacking in value. As noted, it contains much that will be of use to historians, and its historical photos and illustrations are quite revealing of the currach's construction and use. It is, however, difficult to read and lacking in the clarity and detail that could have made it much more useful to boatbuilders and boat history enthusiasts.

NOTE: I know The Boyne Currach is well-liked by some of my readers. I welcome opposing viewpoints in the Comments.

The Newgrange Currach

Reliable reader Wade Tarzia has added a useful comment to an earlier post about coracles, with a review of the 2012 book, The Boyne Currach by Claidhbh O Gibne. (Please don't ask me to pronounce the author's first name.) The comment worth a read, or you can see Wade's complete review on his blog.

The Boyne currach, a historical type, is being championed by an organization that seems to refer to itself alternately as the Newgrange Currach and the Boyne Currach Heritage Group. They're active in researching the type, building replicas, and campaigning them on the water in surprisingly adventurous and attractive ways, as shown in the slideshow above.

(By the way, in addition to what I would call a currach -- i.e., a "boat-shaped" hide-covered, open-framework boat -- Newgrange Currach is also building what I would call coracles -- i.e., boats that are round in plan -- and apparently calling them currachs too. Not having yet read the book, I'm not clear if there's a technical difference between their round currachs and true coracles, or simply an overlap of terminology.)

They also (naturally) maintain a Facebook page.

Different Coats for Different Boats

The skins with which skin-on-frame boats are covered differ considerably from place to place, and even from boat type to boat type within a geographic area.


The angyapik (umiaks) of St. Lawrence Island, Alaska, just south of the Bering Strait, are covered with the hides of female walruses. Removed from the carcasses after the spring hunt, the hides are stored until the hunting season ends in June or July. Any flesh or blubber that still adheres is then scraped off, then the hide is folded up into another old skin and left in a warm place for several days or weeks. This "sours" the skin so that the hair can be scraped off easily.

St. Lawrence Island woman splitting a framed walrus hide stretched on a vertical frame. In her right hand she holds a honing stone, with which she frequently touches up the blade of her ulu knife. (Click any image to enlarge)

The edges of the skin are split 1"-2" (2.5-5cm) deep, then holes are punched into the blubber side and the skin is hung and stretched  on a vertical frame. The skin is then split from the top down with an ulu-type knife, great care being given to maintaining equal thickness on both sides. The two halves are not separated completely: they are left attached all along the bottom edge, so that the hide can be "unfolded" to cover very nearly twice its original surface area. It is then stretched and laced onto a larger, horizontal frame and left to dry for two to four weeks, after which is is soaked for up to a week in fresh water just before it is laid over the upturned hull with the blubber and hair side facing inward. The blubber-side half of the split hide goes bow-first, it being considered better able to resist abrasion from floating ice than the hair-side half. Women, by the way, do all the hide preparation and sewing. 

The walrus hide has been split but the two halves remain attached. (See the raised line along the center, just to the right of the center timber.)  It will dry on this stretching frame for several weeks.

Some 200 miles north, on King Island, in the Bearing Strait, the walrus hide is split completely, but only the hair side is used to cover boats. This means that twice as many hides are required. (A typical St. Lawrence Island angyapik requires at least two full hides, and often part of a third for patches to raise the sides amidships.) On Diomede Island, close by King Island, the two halves of the hide are separated completely, but both parts are often used, with the blubber-side half placed toward the bow, as on St. Lawrence. (In contrast, kayaks of the region are skinned with seal or sea lion hides, not walrus.)

Fully-skinned angyapik of St. Lawrence Island, Alaska. Two full skins are sewn together amidships in a straight seam. Also visible are ridges halfway between the center and the ends, where each split hide remains attached. Note the large side panel, required to make up the full width of the hull. 

To sew the hides together, women use thread made from  whale or caribou sinew. For the main hull seams, they use a blind waterproof stitch in which the thread does not completely penetrate either of the pieces. With the two pieces overlapped by 1"-2", the needle is inserted into the side-edge of one piece then down into the underlying piece, where it takes a U-turn within the thickness of the hide before emerging just outboard of the top piece's outer edge. The same procedure is followed on the opposite side, for a double row of waterproof stitches with no holes through the hide.


Half a world and perhaps 1,000 years away is the leather-covered curragh used by early Irish Christian missionaries, as reproduced by Tim Severin in The Brendan Voyage . While it's impossible to know the real details of the boat used by St. Brendan (c.489 - c. 570 or 583), Severin conducted careful and persuasive research in attempting to recreate the type of boat that might have been used to cross the Atlantic long before the Vikings. What he concluded as the most likely covering was ox hides tanned in oak bark solution and dressed with raw sheep's-wool grease (i.e., lanolin). As these 6th-century boats were made in and for the use of monasteries, I feel we can safely assume they were built entirely by men.

Ox hides being installed on Tim Severin's curragh Brendan.

Severin bought his hides from one of only two or three traditional tanners remaining in the UK in the mid 1970s. He observed the process by which hides were first soaked in a lime  solution, then stripped of their hair with hand scrapers. They were then soaked for weeks in an oak-bark solution. After drying, they were dipped into a hot bath of wool grease, then laid out flat one atop another with more hot grease poured between each one. After soaking thus for weeks, the hides had taken up 30-37% grease which, I think, means that the weight of the hide increased by that amount.


The 36'-LOA Brendan required 47 hides to cover. They were sewed with hand-twisted flax cord made of 14 individual threads and rubbed through a mixture of black wax, wool grease and beeswax. Although the needles pierced straight through the seams, the thread's grease coating, and the high grease content of the hides themselves effectively sealed the needle holes against water. On the trip across the Atlantic, seepage through the hull was never a problem.

The finished Brendan.

The differences in materials between the umiaks of Alaska and the curraghs of Ireland imposed significant differences in usage. Because the umiak skins are neither tanned nor dressed, their waterproof performance is extremely limited. They must be removed from the sea every day and allowed to dry, or they will become quickly waterlogged. This will promote rot but, long before that happens, the skins would become too weak to maintain any integrity, and they would simply fall to pieces. This being the case, the umiak/angyapik is strictly a coasting vessel. Although trips lasting several weeks might be undertaken, the crew must land each evening to dry the boat's cover.


The curragh's leather cover, on the other hand, resisted both waterlogging and rot over a period of months at sea, at least in cold waters. (The Brendan voyage took the "stepping stone" route from the British Isles to the Faroes, and thence to Iceland and Newfoundland. Severin speculated that it might not have performed so well had a more southerly route been taken.) The leather-covered curragh, then, was a true ocean-going craft, capable of extended voyages and not requiring drying-out time.


Acknowledgments:
Angyakpiks/umiaks: Information and photos from The Skin Boats of Saint Lawrence Island, Alaska , by Stephen R. Braund
Curraghs: Information and photos from The Brendan Voyage , by Tim Severin
This post was inspired by a communication from Carlos Pedro Vairo, director of the Museo Maritimo de Ushuaia, Argentina, and author of The Yamana Canoe: The Marine Tradition of the Aborigines of Tierra Del Fuego .

First Post on Indigenous Boast -- er, Boats

This blog is about antique watercraft outside of the Western, plank-on-frame tradition. Eventually, I hope to address dugouts, pirogues, bark canoes, reed/grass boats, skin-on-frame boats (including kayaks, coracles, curraghs, etc.), skin-without-frame boats (inflated yak skins, anyone?), dragon boats, Polynesian and Hawaiian canoes and their relatives (e.g., outrigger canoes, proas, double canoes/catamarans), and boats of various Asian styles (junks, sampans, and the like), and every other type that I can find, hopefully with the help of interested contributors.

The title, Indigenous Boats, is admittedly obscure and will no doubt prove to be inaccurate. A dragon boat built and raced in Boston, for instance, can hardly be considered indigenous to the Charles River. But dragon boats were/are indigenous to someplace (China), and no other qualifier seems right. Aboriginal Boats? Hardly. The Chinese who developed the dragon boat were long past the aboriginal stage, and the term is so closely connected to the Australian aborigines that it would cause great confusion. (By the way, what is the boatbuilding tradition of Australia prior to Western contact?) For roughly similar reasons, "primitive boats" wouldn't do it, since many of the craft I hope to discuss are pretty sophisticated in design, construction, and/or overall complexity, and "primitive" is a value-laden term that would certainly upset some readers -- no matter that a coracle, for example, is indeed a primitive contraption, and no matter how appealing and charming it may be, and regardless of the fact that coracles were used for serious (that is, not leisure) purposes as late as the early 20th century. Beyond indigenous, aboriginal, and primitive, no other candidates come to mind, so Indigenous Boats it is.

I plan to cover aspects of design and construction, history and culture, boathandling, seamanship, navigation, archaeology, and especially current uses of these craft. I'm actively seeking input -- articles, comments, book recommendations or reviews (or books for review), photos, video clips, links, comments -- if you're interested in this topic (or any aspect of it), please let me know, send me some stuff, and let's work together to make this an interesting, wide-ranging resource for a wide-ranging selection of boat types.

Thanks,
Bob