Category: wooden boat

Welcome developments at Faversham

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

It feels as if there has been a welcome change in the atmosphere in Faversham: the town now has a new draft neighbourhood plan including improvements sought by the Faversham Creek Trust and others, and the to vote on in October.

What’s more, the town’s new mayor Shiel Campbell has chosen to make the FCT her appointed charity – after the furious arguments that were going on in the town a few years ago, this seems like an excellent development.

What’s the photo above? It’s a half-scale replica Anglo-Saxon boat based on a 9th century craft found on Graveney marshes, and I happened across it while it was at the FCT’s Purifier Building premises recently as a fund-raising attraction.

BBA class of September 2015 launch their boats on the 9th June

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A date for your diary: the Boat Building Academy has sent out an invitation to the next student launch on Thursday the 9th June.

This season’s crop of boats include:

  • 11ft 6in Iain Oughtred Guillemot
  • 17ft International Canoe
  • 19ft Replica of a traditional Beer Beach Boat
  • 20ft Paul Gartside daysailer Terror
  • 21ft 6in Gil Smith South-Bay Catboat

If anyone is able to get along and to send me some photos, please do! Email me at gmatkin@gmail.com . Thanks!

Working and life on the Norfolk Broads in the late 19th Century

2003-5001_3_21475_50, 7/2/05, 1:51 pm, 8C, 4628×5570 (318+737), 88%, bent 6 stops, 1/15 s, R26.1, G28.7, B73.7
1990-5037-P13/8/6, 27/4/05, 2:38 pm, 8C, 6630×3444 (725+3383), 125%, bent 6 stops, 1/15 s, R37.4, G18.7, B35.3
2003-5001_2_21472, 25/6/04, 10:30 am, 8C, 5076×3438 (858+2979), 112%, bent 6 stops, 1/15 s, R26.6, G28.4, B72.4

My pal Malcolm Woods has just found a new online collection of Victorian photographer Peter Henry Emerson’s atmospheric shots depicting the Norfolk Broads.

They’re stunning – though I can’t help that despite the dreamy tranquility they do seem to depict a hard and narrow-looking sort of life. There would be work and the struggle of getting by all week and on Saturday, of course – and then on Sunday there would other duties for many, often listening to fiery sermons in the chapel.

When novelist LP Hartley wrote: ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,’ he could so easily have been writing about these folks.