We all thought the coracle (curach) had died out as a traditional working boat in Scotland in the 18th Century with the cessation of timber floating on the River Spey. The oldest surviving coracle in the world, an original Spey Curach from that time is proudly displayed at Elgin Museum. However this was not the last coracle to be used in Scotland – and that didn’t happen until the latter 20th Century! The travelling people traditionally earned their livings in many ways, one of the most lucrative of which was pearl fishing. The practice is now banned due to the impact of inexperienced amateurs on the stocks of freshwater mussels in Scotland’s rivers. However up until 1981 pearls of an astonishing variety and beauty – different in each river – were fished by travelling people who knew which mussels to open due to their appearance, thus sparing ones they knew wouldn’t have pearls in. One of the ways they accessed them in deeper water was a kind of coracle. It was crude in the extreme, and very different to what most would now recognise as a coracle – but a coracle it certainly was. Formed of four planks nailed together rather like the sides of a drawer, with some sticks across the bottom and wrapped in a tarpaulin. The fisher would lie prone on this craft and drift while looking through a glass-bottomed bucket for mussels, which he would harvest using a cleft piece of hazel. There is footage on Youtube of this being done in the 1960s if you search for “pearl fishing Bill Abernethy”. Some years ago I interviewed one of the last of the Highland travellers, Essie Stewart, in Gaelic about these boats, which Essie used herself for pearl fishing in Sutherland up until the 1970s. She told me they would carry them on their heads for miles across the moors to get to good pools.
We all thought the coracle (curach) had died out as a traditional working boat in Scotland in the 18th Century with the cessation of timber floating on the River Spey.