The language of the sea

PETER URPETH reports on the latest developments in the ongoing Sail Loft Project in Stornoway

FOR MANY, the boat-making traditions of the Scottish Islands and coastal communities represent nothing less than a complete art form, passed from generation to generation by the work of hands; experience of the moods and modes of the sea and a simple love of a complex craft.

Sad it is then that so few of these hand-made vessels survive and sadder still that so few people retain not only first-hand experience of their making but first-hand experience of the beauty and sophistication of their sailing and of the performance of these vessels in the water, where their strength, pace, stability and versatility are fully realised.

Above all else that is realised today in sailing the traditional boats of our own coastal waters is the sense that when these vessels were working craft sailing them was an intensely communal act, almost an act ‘of’ community, in contrast to the way that today’s boats are increasingly a theatre for almost mediaeval, individual sufferance.

Some in-roads into this deficit of experience have been made with pioneering construction and renovation projects such as that which saw the building of the Sgoth Niseach, ‘An Sulaire’, and many with a love of these craft will welcome the inclusion in Stornoway’s ambitious and imaginative Sail Loft project of a scheme to renovate two more local heros – the vessels ‘Jubilee’ and ‘Broad Bay’, both of which worked the coastline, bays and inshore waters of the islands, and both of which in their own way represent the scarce survivng fragments of a way of life and craft.

When complete, both vessels will play their part in the performance elements of the Sail Loft project and will be the subject, and in the case of the ‘Jubilee’ the stage, for the first performance of a new pipe tune commission for Back-born-and-based Gaelic singer and piper, Anna Murray. The new piece will be written to celebrate the relaunch of the vessels as part of the Hebridean Celtic Festival and the linked Sail Hebrides festival in July, and both vessels will also then be part of a new, on-going sail training initiative.

‘Jubilee’, confirms Ian Stephen, the Sail Loft project’s principle commissioned artist, producer and director, was built at Port of Ness in 1935. She is the last of the original Sgoth Niseach, North Lewis line-fishing vesels. In the 1970s she was restored to her original form and rig in a project led by John Murdo Macleod, the son of her original builder. Since then she has been in community ownership. A large proportion of her planking, some framing and other structural parts, ironwork, mast and yard are all being renewed. Mark Thackl of Ullapool Boatbuilders is doing the work, due for completion by June of this year.

“Ian’s work draws on the first-hand knowledge of, and comfort with the craft that was before him but brings to it the sensibilities and judgement of the Academy: the archetypal post-modern folk artist.”

Weather-permitting, ‘Jubilee’s’ closest relation, the Sgoth Oighe Niseach, will be crossing from Raasay to join ‘Jubilee’ and their larger sister, the 33ft ‘An Sulaire’. The sight of these three examples of Lewis maritime heritage sailing together on 15 July should make an unforgettable sight.

‘Broad Bay’ is an 18ft open vessel of the Orkney ‘yole’ type. She was built in Deerness in 1912 but much of her working life has been spent on Lewis and Harris. Her career as a commercial fishing boat, working under sail, included working the then-rich inshore grounds of Broad Bay, small-line fishing for haddock, flatfish and other whitefish species.

Many of the smaller Lewis working boats were imported from Orkney and the form of these shows they are a close cousin of the larger Lewis built boats, the Sgoth Niseach, such as ‘Jubilee’. Her history is being documented as part of the Sail Loft project.

Local craftsman Iain Louis Macleod, is undertaking what Ian Stephen refers to as a ‘radical restoration’. The vessel has been kept intact by many generations of repairs but the brief is to return her to full seaworthy condition to be used by Loch Erisort Boat Club. Only her keel and parts of the stem and sternposts will be original. The plank-shapes are being carefully reproduced, one by one, so the renewal will be faithful to the historic boat. Iain Louis also hopes to have her ready for the Hebridean Celtic/Sail Hebrides Festival.

For Ian Stephen the inclusion in the Sail Loft commission of the two vessels combines two major strands of his own work, as for the one-time coast guard and award-winning poet the gap between craft, art and life is as shallow as the waters at the mouth of the Port of Ness and as obscure a conception as the mouth of the much newer harbour at Brevig.

Over the years, Ian’s work – whether poetry, photography, sculpture or performance – could be said to have run a line between craft and art that is in its way the gift of his Hebridean upbringing, a land where the basic, onorous tasks of daily survival placed greater importance on the value of function and form in techniqué than ideals and concepts and which found its nadir in the craft of boats and the craft of peak stacks.

But such a proposition is, of course, a distortion quickened by sentiment. Ian’s work draws on the first-hand knowledge of, and comfort with the craft that was before him but brings to it the sensibilities and judgement of the Academy: the archetypal post-modern folk artist.

Interpretation aside, Stephen’s poems dip and yaw and billow as though the words themselves were exposed to the salt work of the sea and the sea rhythms of a freshening gale. Language, like knots, it seems, can be tightened by seawater and then, isn’t poetry language with all the reefs out?

In one poem, ‘Broad Bay’, part of the collection ‘Providence’ (published by The Windfall Press), where the poet previously focused on the vessel, it is not just art and craft that are indivisibly spliced but the fabric of men and boats, their surfaces and their beings:

These primed patches express
metallic pink, blotched blues,
rounding at their edges.

These clinker boards are crossed
by retaining courlene
orange lines
to Goat Island.

Timbers are of differing soundness.
Bitumen seeps to dry bilges.
Planed grain shows.

Wind tan on exposed skins.
Traces of compounds
may or may not
preserve us.

And true to the sensitivities of the artist, the inclusion of the renovations ties the Sail Loft, that most maritime of buildings now undergoing restoration and conversion for much-needed new housing in Stornway, back to the sea, back to its watery past in celebration.

Ultimately, hidden in the binding of traditional boats and poems is the fact that both are vessels. Anyone who has been beguiled by the closeness of the water when sailing these craft, by the wind-full sail and the hard graft of sheets and oars will know, too, that both boats and poems bring forth a new and invigorating world of words.

© Peter Urpeth, 2005

Associated Pages

Sail Loft Project – Part One

Sail Loft Project – Part Two