A Bygone Craft
This 1931 newsreel depicts Irish men making a coracle, a hide-covered boat used for salmon fishing.
The boat-making process is demonstrated to camera, from creating a base with twigs, to weaving the structure and covering it in animal hide for waterproofing. Men then push the coracle out onto the River Boyne and lay fishing nets. The intertitle tells how the Boyne is ‘the only place in Europe where such hide boats are still in use’.
This film is part of The Irish Independence Film Collection – The Early Irish Free State that explores facets of Irish society after the War of Independence and up to the birth of the Irish Republic.
