The yard, in three eras
Seventy-nine years on the same slipway.
The yard has changed hands twice and trades under its third name. What has not moved is the slip itself, cut into the rock in 1946, and it is still the reason anything gets built here.
1946 to 1972
The wooden years
Larch on oak, built by eye from half-models rather than drawings. Forty-one boats went down the slip in those years, most of them seine-netters for skippers who paid in instalments over a season’s fishing.
1973 to 2001
Steel, and the long argument about it
The first steel hull was laid against the advice of nearly everyone on the payroll. It outlasted the argument: by 1980 the shed had been re-roofed twice, the loft had gone over to lines drawn on paper, and the last wooden keel had already been laid.
2002 to now
Refit work, and timber again
New builds stopped in 2002 and the yard turned to refit, which is what keeps forty people in wages. Timber came back with the refits: eleven of the boats on the hard this winter were built here, and three of them were built before 1960.