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John Ruskin observed that the bow of a wooden boat is ‘the pinnacle of Man's achievement’. He appreciated that some of our most beautiful and effective creations are not designed as such but evolve to fulfil their task in their place, according to the history and affections of the people who use them. Some are scarcely noticed - because they are not buildings but boats, built to do jobs. In this series of The Essay five writers, each personally involved with their craft, circumnavigate the British Isles in five traditional boats – without leaving home.

The poet Keith Payne’s collection 'Building the Boat' chronicles the creation of a curach, the Irish boat created by tying wooden rods into a framework, stretching a skin of canvas over it and covering it with pitch. 'This is a boat you can't build alone,' he writes, and he relishes the community of the meitheal, the working party who together create it. Also, the language associated with the craft, and his connection with previous curach builders stretching back generations. St Brendan is said to have sailed to North America in a curach a thousand years before Columbus - and this has been done.

In the National Museum of Ireland there’s a seven-inch-long model boat of beaten gold, smooth hulled with oars for 18 crew. It’s a curach, hammered out by a goldsmith in the 1st century. Two millennia later curachs are still used, all around the Irish coasts, often with a phial of holy water tied in the bow. Payne writes about making and putting to sea in a curach, in prose that is poetic, like gusts of wind.

Presenter: Keith Payne
Producer: Julian May