There are two principle kinds of skin boat; the round coracle type shaped like a floating bowl (Jenkins, 1974) shown in Figure 2.7 and the curragh, a long narrow structure. This boat form is still in use along the coast of Donegal and in County Kerry (De Courcy, 1992, 10). Figure 2.8 illustrates the stages of a curragh’s construction. It is likely that the skin boat was an important means of transport in Bronze Age Europe. There are fragments of evidence for the use of skin boats in Britain and Ireland through Prehistory. Unlike dugouts, skin boats with their short-lived covering and light flimsy skeletons do not survive to provide archaeological evidence (Clark, 1952, 283). The evidence, which has been, obtained takes an indirect form. For example, the eighth millennium B.C. site of Star Carr in Yorkshire, uncovered a paddle. This suggests that water travel had become normal among the hunters of this lakeside settlement (Clark, 1956, 16). However it is impossible to ascertain what craft the paddle was used for as no boat remains were retrieved from the site. There was however, extensive evidence for tree-felling. Two birch trunks with their lower ends hacked into the shape of pencil-like points indicates that the people from Star Carr possessed stone axes capable of felling trees. The finds retrieved from Star Carr show that skins were used in large numbers. They had therefore the potential ability to make and use skin boats. Dugouts would have been used for lakes, slow-running rivers or even short coastal journeys. But such a boat type would not have been appropriate for open-sea voyages especially in the cold conditions, which lasted for a time after the passing of the last glaciation (Mitchell, 1979, 26). Archaeologists have proposed that skin boats could have been used in these times (Clark, Piggott, 1970).
A significant area featuring in this argument is the one, which stretches from Ireland to the west coast of Norway by way of Scotland. The sea that surrounded the settlement areas here did not provide shelter unlike that in the Mediterranean or English Channel. These were the cold and unreliable waters of the Irish Sea, the Minch and the Atlantic. Dryness at sea and sea worthiness were crucial factors in the evolutionary story of the skin boat. One of the most obvious pieces of evidence for this was where the boats were uses. The west coast of Ireland, with its curragh tradition and the west coast of Norway are both open to the worst sea conditions. Craft that can stand up to these conditions had to be totally seaworthy. Hornell (1938, 13) pointed out that curragh’s from the Aran Islands and Co. Kerry,
“Regularly weather storms that spell disaster to plank-built boats of considerably greater size. The fishermen of the Connemara mainland and the offshore islands possess besides their curraghs a number of plank-built boats. A terrible storm almost lost the whole fleet with many lives while the only curragh out that night came safely back. The local people then fell back on the curragh alone as the safest craft for inshore fishing.”
When considering the Mesolithic Larnian peoples who lived on the coast of Ireland it appears likely that they used skin boats rather than dugouts. (Johnstone, 1980) This suggestion is not based entirely on sea-going conditions, as previously discussed, archaeological finds of the bones of deep-water fish have been proposed as evidence. Cod-bones are particularly significant because although cod have a complicated migratory cycle, they are not regularly present near inshore. (Pollock, per com) Such evidence would lead to the assertion that the occupants of such sites in the post-glacial period must have undertaken deep-water fishing from boats rather than from the shore.
In conclusion, the ample existence of skin working tools in the form of scrapers, the rough sea conditions and the large number of deep-sea fish bones on post glacial sites in an area where there existed a tradition of skin boats, to me suggests that the easily made skin boat was more likely to have been the dominant boat-type at this period in Prehistory. When considering the skin boat in a modern form, the Eskimo culture shows it in one of its finest forms. The Eskimo people were highly dependant on what they could win from the sea. Their environment was very hostile, lacking in timber but rich in skins, with driftwood and the whalebone also available. They developed one of the most specialised boat types – the Kayak, which was constructed by making a light wooden framework and sewing sealskins over it. (Johnstone, 1980, Greenhill, 1976)
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