Discussion Forum

This is the time of year when the wistful fancy turns to the subject of coracles, and the nautical sense yearns to launch a coracle upon the lusty waters of the Severn or the Great Lough at Ballywobegone.

Coracles, of course - like everything else on the mysterious plane of awareness - are nothing new.

In old Mesopotamia, they used to say "each man to his own coracle". The Laws of Hammurabi established the rate a worker could charge for caulking a coracle. And it was no novelty to descry, of a sultry eventide, a groaning vessel come ashore, loaded to the hilt with eels and cinnamon.

Hannibal is famous for traversing the alps with elephants. Few are aware that in his younger days, before he joined the army, he was apprenticed to a Sardinian coracle-builder, where he was schooled in the arcane arts of graverring, true-skimming and back-caulking.

These skills were to pay dividends when - as a young corporal in the Bari Light Infantry - he was sent on a spying mission in the Persian swamplands, and survived for a week by building a coracle from woven reeds, caulked with red mud.

Tricky things is coracles. Hard to tell which is the front, what is the back, and where the sides are.

Let alone which way the thing will go when you start paddling.

Strictly for the experts I'd say.

The rest of the world puts water in their bath, Englishmen float them on top of water and remain filthy.