The Celts
Padraig O’Duinín, currach builder, on these ancient craft …
It’s a skin-and-frame construction. A good weight of tar goes on the skin, which lasts for about 10 years.
One thing that connects all the currach-type boats together is that they’re built upside down. One fine currach is a six-foot cowhide-covered vessel used for salmon fishing on the river Boyne in County Meath. That was made simply by sticking hazel rods into the ground in an elliptical shape, bending them over, tying them together by weaving a willow band around the top of them. That’s the most primitive, but it’s very efficient for what it does.
Horse hair string would have bound these together. Strips of leather made out of cow tongue may have been used as well, but the horse hair is an amazing material.
The currachs were made with cow or ox hides. They may have used horse hides as well, and there is some evidence that they might have used whale skins. Three large hides would have done it, but according to Gaelic literature from Scotland, they could have used as many as nine. Tarred canvas replaced hides in the mid-1800s when machine-made canvas for sails became available. The canvas is curved and tied on the inside first, then put over the frame. Then it’s stretched out and nailed on to the gunwales.
Nothing in these boats is straight – they sit right up out of the water. Even broadside to big swells, even 12ft (3.7m) swells, they will lift up like a seagull sitting upon the waves. If you can work the oars, you are almost immune to the weather.
In the past, the skins would have been taken off in the winter. This is because we share the same problem with Inuit: the dogs eat the skins off the boats when they get hungry in the winter. That’s why they were always stored up high. This is only a memory here but they still do it in Greenland.
If you look at the difficulty of making a dugout with stone tools and the fact that basketry is part of so many cultures, the idea of covering a basket with hide is not very farfetched. Could a currach have sailed to America? Yes, a big one, over 30 feet (9 metres).
I’d say that it’s a specifically Celtic style of boat. It has survived really only in Wales and in Ireland, at the extremities of the Celtic movement. There is written documentation about the currach from about AD 900, but I imagine they actually go back 3,000 years.
We see the sea as a barrier, but to the Celts, this was the highway. You got to places by the sea, from shore to shore. The currach was used for everything from spreading the gospel to going fishing. The early Christians would go into the desert to find God, find themselves. In the Gaelic or Celtic tradition, you go on the ocean – that is the desert.
There is a tradition that the tribe or elders would put someone on the water without propulsion as a punishment for a serious crime. And if they were brought ashore in Cornwall, say, that was OK – that was the judgement on it. If they never came ashore, that was another judgement.
