The Donegal Curachs
Donál MacPolín

Bidding McSweeney Doe farewell, we proceed with the fisherman to his little curach, to the care of which we committed our lives while crossing the swelling waves of the wide-mouthed harbour of Sheep Haven. This curach, which is constructed of very slender materials, rode on the sublimely swelling waves with all the grace and confidence of a gull or a scarf, now rising on the back of a noble surge appearing to our excited imaginations as high as Horn Head, next sinking into a valley as deep as Glentogher, which hid all the rocks and bins on the coast from our view.

When rising, we observed volumes of azure water rushing from the ocean, and threatening to overwhelm our curach but she mounted the backs of each in succession, and seemed to laugh at their fury. When sliding off the apex of a wave into the azure valley below, she would appear to many but a shabby security against the mountains of water that roared to her destruction, but she glided so lightly over valley and mountain that she not only gave us no cause to fear, but admitted no water except the light spray of the surges, and so rapidly as to cross the wide mouth of Sheep Haven, a distance of three miles in thirty six minutes.

The foregoing letter, written in 1835 by an Ordnance Survey engineer, sums up, in wonderfully dramatic language, the qualities of the simple, even primitive, Donegal skin curach, perfectly adapted to its time, its environment and its people.

Sheep Haven is a bay on the north-west coast of County Donegal, a land of rocks and bog, cut by deep fjord-like inlets, with sheltered bays and a string of almost 40 islands, only a few of which are still inhabited. They were home to thriving populations up to the 1950s when they were depopulated by emigration.

The curach - 'the poor man's trawler' - embodies the subsistence economy of this marginal but once heavily populated part of Donegal. This remote region held little attraction for Ireland's early settlers, and it was not until the Plantation of Ulster in the seventeenth century, when large numbers of dispossessed people were driven from fertile lands further east, that its population began to expand. These early migrants may have brought with them the knowledge of building river curachs.

While curach design became much more sophisticated elsewhere in Ireland, the region's remoteness has resulted in the retention of certain archaic features of curach design evident in river curachs of the twentieth century.

Sea-going curachs were made here with rough-cut hazel branches for ribs in a manner probably not unlike the vessels of the ancient Irish who raided the west coast of Britain almost 2,000 years before. A concise description of the general type and its construction was recorded by a visitor to Toraigh (Tory Island) in 1903:

The Curragh or Corach, a little fishing canoe consisting of a light frame of hazel rods, is interwoven with light flexible twigs or sally rods, and laced and held together with a lashing cord, made of twisted horse-tail hair. This peculiar framework is covered with strong calico, over which tar is plentifully laid; over the tar a layer of strong paper, and over yet another coat of tar and then the craft is completed and ready for her place among her sister craft - and they are legion in the Camus Bay. The curragh is about eight feet long, four broad and three in hold.

In the nineteenth century, the curach was largely replaced as an offshore fishing vessel by Norwegian-style clinker yawls, but it continued to be used for local transport and inshore lobster and line fishing well into the twentieth century.

In the gales and high seas that rage along this bleak and exposed coast, a small, lightly built curach would ride the waves rather than cut through them, and, when properly handled, would be safe in the kind of stormy seas that might swamp a larger wooden vessel.

It was cheap and relatively easy to build from locally available materials, and could be carried by one or two men on their backs. The curach was often the only kind of boat the people could afford to buy or make - 'sure it was made from nothing' (Bob Robinson, Donegal fisherman).

EARLY ACCOUNTS

Their boats, called curraghs, were oval baskets, covered with seal-skins; and in such weak and tottering vessels they ventured far out, as was necessary, to get fish enough for their families.

This brief account of the curach in Donegal forms part of a fascinating letter written in 1780 to an Englishman, Joseph Cooper Walker, who was interested in information 'respecting the native Irish'. His correspondent was an unnamed friend in Ireland - whether native or not is unclear - who has left a graphic account of the life and customs of the inhabitants of Na Rosa (the Rosses) area of west Donegal in the 1750s. His account of the Donegal curach is unique for it proved of little interest to other early visitors to this remote coastline. Lord George Hill, a landlord in Gaoth Dobhair (Gweedore) almost 100 years later, made a revealing remark about the relationship between 'absentee' landlords and their tenants:

None took any interest in the inhabitants other than to extract what money they could under the name of rent; and in one instance when the landlord came to visit his property, all the tenants took to their boats and corraghs, and remained in them till he was gone.

The curach reflected a world of subsistence living and, like the rough thatched houses of the people, it was constructed with whatever materials were available (often what was washed ashore or cannibalism from another source). Frames were of rough - cut timber or driftwood, the hull of hazel or willow 'rods' tied with horse hair and covered with cowhide, sealskin - even old flour-bags. As one fisherman put it rather inelegantly, 'and there you are... a boat as rough as a badger's arse!.' A Toraigh (Tory Island) curach built in 1923, now in the National Museum of Ireland, has couples cut from split greenwood, possibly hazel or alder, and its longitudinal pieces are composed of split hazel and just three sawn laths. Most of the tyings are horse-tail hair, but twine and bits of wire are also in evidence. This variety of materials confirms that the early curach-makers had to make do with what few materials came to hand. Because it required few raw materials and was simply and easily constructed, there were once huge numbers of curachs in daily use here. The longitudinal pieces used in curachs built today are exclusively sawn laths.

Elsewhere in Ireland, the single-gunwale curach evolved into the elegant and quite sophisticated double-gunwale curachs of such places as Galway Bay and the Dingle Peninsula. It is quite extraordinary that the primitive hazel-rod curachs of Donegal survived into this century. There are a testament to the isolation and harsh economic conditions in which the small farmer/fishermen of west Donegal lived in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nowhere else in Ireland or Western Europe have boats made with such simple materials survived to the twenty-first century.

Mr. Walker's correspondent goes on to describe a remarkable scene that he witnessed at a funeral going into the island of Árainn Mhór (Aranmore):

The corpse was put into a curragh with the feet and legs hanging over the stern; and with it a man with a paddle, to conduct the whole train to the island of Arran, where the burial ground was. This curragh was followed by that which carried the priest; next to him went the relations of the deceased, in the order of their proximity in kindred; and then as many as had curraghs; and of these there were sixty or eighty in a train.

Little is recorded about Donegal curachs again until the surveyors of the Ordnance Survey in the 11830s noted their presence in various districts of Donegal. The vessels they observed at that time have changed little to this day.

The corrachs are 10 to 11 feet long, 3 feet wide, very shallow, made of a wooden frame and wickerwork covered with hide or double canvas with tarred paper between them, and cost one guinea each. In one of these apparently frail vessels two fisherman ride over very rough seas and pursue their occupation. (Ordnance Survey Memoirs, 1835-36, Ros Goill)

In 1846, Lord George Hill described the curachs used by his tenants as having 'frames of sallies and laths; skinned with a hide or tarred canvas and lashed together with horse-hair'. (The 'sallies' [ir. saileog] referred to here are long willow rods and 'laths' are 1-inch wide sawn strips of timber or, possibly, split hazel rods.) The earliest coverings were animal skins - whether seal (as mentioned by Walker's correspondent a century before), horse, pig or cowhide. Cow - and horse-hides were the most valued, but islanders often killed large numbers of seals for food and for by-products such as skins, oil and sinew. Hides, whether seal or cow, were un-tanned and allowed to dry and tighten on the frame like the skin of a drum. Butter or animal fat was used to keep them supple and prevent them from drying out. It is quite common today to hear a fisherman whose curach needs to be re-covered remark that 'I'll need to put a new hide on it', illustrating how deep in the folk memory is the use of animal-hide covers for their boats.

There is a delightful story from Na Rosa about Aodh Ó Domhnaill, the brother of a renowned poet, Séamus Ó Domhnaill, who once sold an old cow with a crooked horn (known locally as An Chrúbach, 'the crooked one') to a man from Toraigh. The Toraigh man slaughtered her and used the hide to make a skin boat [curach seithe]. One stormy night, as the curach lay at anchor in the bay of An Camas in Toraigh, it broke free from its mooring and was swept as far as the mainland. And where did it land but at the shore below Aodh's house! The old cow had returned home, Within a week of the event, a song was composed about the cow that died of loneliness and whose spirit returned to her former pastures:

Beir scéala uaim siar chun na Rosainn
Chuig an Dálach arbh ainm do Aodh
Gur éalaigh an Chrúbach as Toraí
Is go ndeachaigh sí anonn ar an ghaoth.
Ní raibh ann ach a cnámha is a craiceann
Is nach láidir a chuaigh sí chun scaoil,
Gan coite gan bád ina h-aice
A bhéarfadh go seascar í i dtír.

[Bear a message from me to the Rosses To the O'Daly known as Hugh That the Crúbach has escaped from Tory Carried over the sound by the wind. Nothing was left but her skin and bones How well she was able to break free, With no help from boat or cot To guide her safely home.] (Vincent O'Donnell)

Today, Donegal curachs are generally covered in tarred cotton (calico) or canvas, but other materials can be used. Flour or sugar bags were commonly used up to the 1950s. Hessian sacking, even curtain material, and any form of cotton textile that can be stretched, nailed and tarred are used (hot tar will melt any synthetic material).

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