Fractured English
History Tales- coracles & fishing
Visited
St. Fagan’s today which is a collection of Welsh homes and barns, churches, and
shops, and more all gathered together at St. Fagan’s to create an open air
museum that is delightful and informative and fun. We visited in late January which is
admittedly not the best time of year as there were very few flowers blooming
(just a few crocus), and the trees were bare and some of the exhibits weren’t
active yet but it was still delightful.
One
part of the museum is a fishing exhibit.
We entered and walked through reading about the fishing nets and eel
pots and such. Quite a nice exhibit and
good explanations. There were 5 coracles
sitting on their ends. Most of the
buildings have a caretaker in them or a docent or someone with some knowledge
to answer any questions. We asked the
caretaker about the coracles. He started
telling us about the men who fished them.
First off, they were made for rivers only, not ocean going although
there is a variant to them that could be taken into the ocean. The coracles themselves are quite small, one
person only, and very, very tippy. He
said he had tried to get into a coracle two times and both times ended up on
his bottom in the water! They weren’t
made to be rowed but they had an oar that was for steering only. The men would launch them into the river and
the current would be what took them downstream.
Families would buy a license for a certain part of the river, maybe a
mile or maybe two. Usually, two men
would each have a coracle and would stay even with each other, one steering
right and one steering left. As they
floated downstream, a net would be stretched between their coracles and they
hoped to catch fish in it as the moved.
They had the ability and skill to stay still in the river as well and
could pull in the net and land the fish, usually salmon. Depending on water level, current strength,
time of year, they would often be late afternoon to past twilight fishing and
could catch maybe 3 or 4 large salmon on a run.
There would be time for two or three runs depending on all the
factors. They would put the caught fish
into a bag and tie it up on a tree so that a fox couldn’t get it, carry their
boats back to the starting point and begin again. To kill the fish, they would whack it over
the head with a wooden mallet. We
commented how we had seen the same type of killing on a cow just a few weeks
ago in Albania. That led to more
stories.
These
days there are no salmon left in the rivers which is rather ironic because in
the 1800’s when this style of fishing was going strong, men would complain
about having to eat so much salmon. The
fish licenses would remain in the family and there are still families that have
their licenses and councils are trying to buy them back for heaps of
money. The law is on the side of the
fishermen so they know they have a bird in hand with their hereditary licenses
and are loath to relinquish them.
Of
course there was poaching. Poachers came
out in the middle of the night with lights to entice the fish and would scoop
them up with nets of some kind or eel pots.
The eel pots had a one way entrance and were long and skinny to
accommodate the eels. Women would
collect cockles, a type of mussel from the tidal flats. They’d take donkeys out onto the flats and
scrape a bit of a hole then use a rack to further rack out the cockles, sieve
out the undersized ones, and load up the donkey for the trip home.
Our
friendly docent had some more tales for us.
He was part of the British Embassy in Ankara, Turkey many years ago and
was a caterer. So he had to go to the
slaughter house to pick out the meat for the dinners. He was commenting on our story of finding it
a bit uneasy to see the meat/cow actually being killed and he didn’t much like going
to the slaughter house either.
It was
quite nice and always is to talk to the locals and to the people who have
experienced different parts of history that we only usually read about in
history books.
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