The Drontheim
Typical Norway Yawls of the North and North-East Coasts
Donal MacPolin

In 1750, a Scottish family named McDonald left the Isle of Skye on the west coast of Scotland and made the long journey to the small village of Greencastle, in County Donegal, on Ireland's rugged north coast. They went to join other Jacobite Scots families such as the McCauleys, McGeoghans and the McIvors who had also fled Scotland in the aftermath of the 1745 rebellion.

The McDonalds were boat builders and they probably brought with them a knowledge of clinker boat-building. Indeed, their ancestors may have built galleys for their clan who, for generations, made the short passage from Scotland to Ireland in clinker galleys to aid their kinsmen, the McDonnells of Antrim. A carving of one such galley can be seen to this day in Dunluce Castle in County Antrim.

In 1996, descendants of this same family (still working in Greencastle) built and delivered a small clinker-built boat back to Islay in the west of Scotland, thereby continuing an ancient boat-building tradition, but also maintaining the attachment between the two regions. The boat they sent was a 26-foot double-ended clinker-built yawl, originally termed a 'Greencastle yawl' after the village where the McDonalds had originally settled, but also known locally by the strange name of 'dronthon' or 'drontheim', and on Islay as an 'Irish skiff' or sgoth Eireannach. Writing in the Belfast Newsletter in 1957, a Mr. J.S.F. Cooke described seeing them many years before:

I have seen a dozen or more of these boats engaged in handline fishing from Portaleen near Glengad Head in Donegal during the First World War. They were from 28 to 30 feet in length, and carried a crew of six hands and a helmsman, who was usually the owner. They were propelled by four oars, the two main oars being double-banked. These oars were heavy sweeps, about four inches at the loom and as long as the boat. They also carried a spritsail on a portable mast, stepped in the second thwart from the bow. Stones and sacks of gravel were used as ballast and tipped overboard before hauling the boats up the beach. After the war they fought an unequal battle with the Fleetword steam trawlers and were reduced to a few old boats working at the lobster fishing. The price in 1920 was £1 per foot length, but even this was often too much for the fishermen. They were built of imported spruce planking on home-grown hardwood frames, with larch or pitch-pine gunwales.

These yawls, unique to the area, were once the most common small fishing vessel on the north and north-east coasts of Ireland, from Donegal Bay in the west to Carlingford Lough in the east. However, they did not originate in Ireland but in the Trondheim area of Norway's north-west coast.

From the middle of the eighteenth century, timber carriers from the Norwegian ports of Trondheim, Bergen and Kristiansund traded across the northern seas to the Shetlands and the Faroes, which had been Norwegian territories from the ninth to the fifteenth century, and were virtually treeless. A similar commerce developed with Ireland's north coast, through the ports of Belfast, Coleraine, Newry and Derry, where Norwegian spruce was particularly valued. Here, as elsewhere planks were referred to as 'deals', giving rise to today's 'deal' - the ubiquitous cheap white spruce.

In the eighteenth century, a 'deal' was a plank 12 feet long by 11 inches by 1½ inches. Into the nineteenth century, these Scandinavian traders carried clinker-built sailing boats as part of their supplementary deck cargo and it was these 'Trondheim' boats that would come to be called 'drontheims' or, more colloquially, 'dronthons' in Ireland.

The small Trondheim boats (not significantly different from the three boats found inside the great Viking Gokstad ship buried in the ninth century and uncovered in 1880) were typical small fjord boats built for inshore fishing, transporting farm produce and ferrying people.

They were light, and easily rowed or sailed. Many were imported into Ireland up to the early 1800s but when trade was hampered by the Napoleonic wars and punitive taxes imposed on Scandinavian and Baltic timber products, local communities began to build their own replacements, modifying and adapting them to suit their own needs. The Irish builders, however, did not have the wide timber stock available to Norwegian boat builders, and never attempted the complex internal rib structure of the faering, fashioned from pine roots. Irish builders used a greater number of narrower boards and swept-grain oak ribs to produce an equally strong boat.

Nevertheless, despite the trade restrictions, a small number of boats continued to come into Ireland, and indeed mention of the Norwegian craft is found in a letter written by a Derry merchant in 1828 to the master of a chartered ship, the Nedelven, carrying a cargo of timber from Trondheim, He wrote, 'Reject any coarse, knotty deals that should be sent you, and if you would bring us a few good Drontheim boats they would pay you here'.

Thus we can be sure that by 1828 the name 'drontheim' had passed into local usage in Ireland. While the name persisted into the twentieth century, the origins of the boats were by then all but forgotten. As recently as 1984, however, Sammy Wilkinson, a drontheim fisherman from County Antrim was conscious of the Norwegian connection.

The first boats I think, that came here were, you know the ones with the high bow and stern. They came from Norway. Well, then they gradually took that away (the high bow and stern). The local people got them built on the same lines as these boats are now here ... more suitable. A big high bow caught terrible wind. Nowadays in these modern boats they 'higher the board' more than what they were in the early days. But that's only hearsay, handed down. Even my father, he never even remembered them boats.

Most yawls were built in Moville, County Donegal, and in Portrush, County Antrim. Many were produced also for the Scottish Islands, to be delivered there by steamer or rowed and sailed from Moville or Portrush. On a flood tide Islay is only three or four hours' sailing from Rathlin. As happened in Ireland, the yawls died out in Scotland in the 1950s. The sgoth built for Jim McFarlane in 1996 by McDonalds was the first new boat of that type to go to Islay since then. It is the only sailing sgoth Eireannach in Scotland today.

The Norwegian Boats

No examples of the drontheim's ancestors have survived, so its direct origins cannot be identified with certainty. Nevertheless, we can trace the type's roots by comparing today's drontheim with contemporary nineteenth-century Norwegian pulling and sailing boats in the final stage of their development. The imported Scandinavian boats, which gave the drontheim its name, at first most likely came from the small village of Åfjord near Trondheim; none were actually built in Trondheim itself. The typical boat of this region was called the Åfjord faering (a four-oared boat).

The faering has changed little in design down the centuries, and its construction bears many similarities to that of our drontheim from the scarping of the keel and planks, to the with-the-grain lapped timbers and rudder scantlings. In Ireland, the faering's 'steer-stick', keip (oar support), short gunwale and squaresail were replaced respectively by the simple tiller, thole-pins and spritsail.

The lugsail, a modification of the ancient squaresail, remained popular in places along the east coast of Ireland as far as Dundalk Bay. However, where the drontheim was traditionally built with up to nine narrow strakes (and on occasion up to twelve), the faering had only five very wide planks, albeit carried on a similar-shaped keel, with bow and stern construction similar to the Drontheim.

The Norwegian boats which went to the Scottish islands were delivered as pre-cut and shaped pieces to be assembled by the islanders. Similar part-built boats, along with completed boats, were also transported to Ireland and, though none exist today, the tradition of their arrival in the nineteenth century was recorded by the great folk-life scholar, E. Estyn Evans:

It seems that many yawls were imported directly from Norway in an unfinished state, carrying only the bottom strakes. This 'garboard strake' was a 9 inches by 1½ inches plank hollowed by adze to a uniform thickness of ¾ inch. It was this hollow strake which was the secret of the yawl's seaworthy qualities, enabling it to sail close to the wind. Fitted with a false keel of Mourne holly it took on a local colour and character.

Another Norwegian boat which may also have come to Ireland, just as it came to Shetland and the Faroe Islands, was the oselver. This craft originated in the Bergen area and was rigged with a spritsail and jib. It had a higher, more deeply curved stem and stern and low freeboard. Similar boats can be identified in Ireland from old paintings, illustrations and some early photographs.

These Norway yawls (the word 'yawl' is derived from the Norse Yol, used to describe a small double ended boat), were light seaworthy craft. They proved themselves superior to the indigenous skin curach and the heavier carvel boats of the north-west coast of Ireland where they were quickly adopted by the small fishing communities of the region. The Inspectors of Irish Fisheries reported in 1891:

Along the Donegal coast Greencastle yawls, clinker-built, sharp at both ends, light, fast and weatherly, usually painted white or red-lead, and costing about £11 fully found, are rapidly replacing the old boats. When loaded with nets or fish they float lighter than the wall-sided (i.e. carvel) boat; and from their sharp-pointed ends will make better weather when running or when head-to-sea.

The curach had long since disappeared from the north-east coast, the skin construction techniques having been superseded by Viking and Scottish clinker-building, a method which held sway there from the nineteenth century. On Donegal's windswept, rocky and harbourless environment, the new Norwegian boats were light enough to be hauled clear of the water between fishing trips. Rigged with a spritsail and jib or rowed with four oars, men could venture further offshore in greater safety than had been previously possible in the older boats.

But the Irish fishermen needed a larger, beamier boat with a higher freeboard to cope with more severe fishing conditions, to carry huge loads of seaweed for the potato fields, and to ferry turf, animals and people between the mainland and the many inhabited islands. The increase in beam was achieved by raising the sides with four or five narrower strakes, and greater strength and carrying capacity was afforded by the addition of a sawn gunwale and a stringer below the thwarts. Performance in broken water and when beaching was improving by straightening the bow and stern. While detracting from the ease of rowing, this undoubtedly enhanced sailing performance, particularly to windward, using the essentially fore and aft rig of the drontheim.

No particular Norwegian boat type can be definitively identified as the sole precursor of the drontheim. It is perhaps an amalgam of many. The strongest evidence for its origins lies in the name itself, The Drontheim evolved from an alien vernacular boat type in the late eighteenth century, to one that was popular and specific to its own environment. The type had developed independent local characteristics by at least the 1830s. There is also the possibility that the evolution further absorbed various outside influence - possibly form such diverse sources as British naval whalers, lifeboats and Scottish fishing boats.

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