Oak, Larch, Sweat and Tears: Trawling Through a Century of Scottish Wooden Boatbuilding Yards

Scotland, in the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, built thousands of ships that plied the oceans. However, at the same time, there were yards around the country building a wealth of wooden fishing vessels, many that remain fishing today. Often these yards have been forgotten as the bigger shipbuilders grab the headlines. This book presents Mike Smylie’s journeys around Scotland, with a few in England and Ireland as well, looking at what remains of these yards, and the few working today, and was inspired by a life lived amongst them, when as a small kid in the 1960s/ early 70s with a father who owned a boat, he spent hours in the rickety big wooden shed at Dickies of Bango, kicking sawdust and inhaling the sweet smell of oils and turpentine along with whiffs of oakum and Stockholm tar, watching boatwrights at work. This book records for posterity the important skills and toils of hundreds of men who produced some of the finest wooden fishing boats the world has ever seen, along with some of the old fifty+-year-old boats that are still working in the fisheries.