Over lockdown, sales of surfboards and paddleboards have proliferated. But if you really want to impress fellow-beachgoers, why not try an Iron Age log boat? Built with traditional Iron Age tools, of course.
That’s what some volunteers at Granton Hub have been doing over the past few years, helping archeologist members of The School of Ancient Crafts, which sounds like somewhere you’d go to learn mystical dark arts, but actually teaches people the skills that our ancestors’ ancestors would have used in their daily lives in ‘Living History’ workshops.
This boat in particular is made from a tree cut down on the shores of Loch Ness and is being built as close to traditional methods as possible, with volunteers swinging their axes to carve out a historical replica that will be sailed from Granton to Fife this summer. Log boats were traditionally not seaworthy and typically used on rivers and lakes.
The boats would be made up of one hollowed-out trunk in a single piece, except for the oars - here, made by volunteer Judith Duncan with a drawblade after getting involved in summer 2020.
“I found my niche,” she says proudly. “It’s been absolutely amazing and I’ve met lovely people. I never thought I’d learn to be an Iron Age woman!”
The boat will be berthed in West Granton Harbour in the coming weeks, carried down on rollers ahead of a launch on 12th or 13th of June where it will travel to Wemyss Bay in Firth and back.
