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Updated: May 24, 2025
Many of the inhabitants gain a portion of their living by this means, but so rude is their tackle, and so fragile and liable to be upset are their primitive boats or coracles, made of wicker-work, over which sailcloth is stretched, that they can only venture to sea in fine weather; and thus with food almost in sight, the people starve, because they have no one to teach them to build boats more adapted to this rocky coast than those used by their ancestors many centuries ago.
They feared it, for they had no chance on it, as their vessels were often merely hides stretched on wattles, resembling enlarged coracles. Yet with such rude ships as they had, they reached Orkney, Shetland, the Faroes and Iceland as hermits or missionaries. In Norse times they never had the mastery of the sea, and the Pictish navy is a myth of earlier days.
Except in shape, it was very similar to the coracles still in use, as I have read, on the Wye and other rivers in England. The canoe was carried into the fort; Alick intending, should the owner appear at any time, to return it, and to pay him for its use. I now inquired how Martin and his sister Letty came to be at the fort. They had, I found, arrived a few days after we left it for Fort Ross.
And all the river down to Staines is dotted with small craft and boats and tiny coracles which last are growing out of favour now, and are used only by the poorer folk.
So, I should fancy, of ships that is, galleys, not private "coracles," the earliest British boats. Consequently there wasn't any need for a law as to personal property. What little there was could be easily defended. But with land it was different.
We talked of school, and the gay days in wood and field, of our childish wanderings on the shore, making sand-keps and stone houses, herding the crabs of God so little that bairns dare not be killing them, of venturings to sea many ells out in the fishermen's coracles, of journeys into the brave deep woods that lie far and wide round Inneraora, seeking the branch for the Beltane fire; of nutting in the hazels of the glens, and feasts upon the berry on the brae.
"Better a shoemaker's bill," said Mrs Gilmour, "than a doctor's, sure, me dear Dugald." "Aye, by Jove!" put in the Captain with a chuckle. "There's nothing like leather, you know." "By the way, talking of that, though I don't mean to say it's made like the old Britons' coracles," observed Mrs Gilmour silly, "when is that yacht of yours going to be ready, Captain?"
The bridge rafts for one of the crossings could not be got up to the river bank because the men were continually slipping in the mud under the heavy load, and the attacking battalion at this spot was ferried over in coracles. On another route a section carrying a raft lost one of its number, who was afterwards found sunk in mud up to his outstretched arms.
It had gone and with it Kosa's kraal; the site was a pool, the huts had vanished, all of them, and some of the roofs lay upon the sides of the koppie, looking like overturned coracles. Only the church and the graveyard remained, for those stood on slightly higher ground by the banks of the river.
Sir W. Wilde describes several boats from the marshes and peat-bogs of Ireland, many of which have handles cut in the wood at the ends, by the help of which they could easily be dragged along overland. Sir W. Wilde adds that the Irish also used CURRAGHS, or CORACLES, which were mere wicker frames covered with the skins of oxen.
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