Traditional wooden boatbuilder Gail McGarva awarded Heritage Crafts grant

Shipshape Network Scotland project Gail McGarva is among the recipients of a new round of grants to help safeguard some of the UK’s most endangered craft skills.  

Dumfries and Galloway-based Gail and the team at Building Futures Galloway are one of the nine recent grant recipients in the latest round of Heritage Crafts Endangered Craft Fund grants.  The Fund was launched in 2019 to increase the likelihood of at-risk craft skills surviving into the next generation.

Gail's project is to equip a community workshop on the Solway Firth with tools needed to teach young people traditional wooden boatbuilding.  The youth employability scheme in Whithorn is aimed at young people with barriers to employment in an area where youth unemployment is endemically high.  It already includes traditional skills such as stone and lime construction, green woodworking and architectural carpentry. 

The town has close links with its nearby mediaeval harbour at Isle of Whithorn, where today there is a vibrant coastal rowing society.  Young people have requested traditional boatbuilding as a course option, having been working on a clinker-built faering over the last year.

Gail said: “Thank you so much to the Heritage Crafts Association for awarding the Endangered Craft Fund grant to Building Futures Galloway.  The grant will enable us to acquire specific hand tools that are vital to the teaching of the craft of traditional wooden boat building. The passing on of these skills to the younger generation will help safeguard the future of this endangered craft.”

Mary Lewis, Heritage Crafts Endangered Crafts Manager, said: “The survival of endangered craft skills relies on the people who make a positive choice to learn, make and teach these crafts. These projects will provide future generations with opportunities that they might not otherwise have, to become productive and healthy members of our shared craft community and to safeguard this important part of our national heritage.”

Source: Heritage Crafts website and Facebook

Read more about Gail McGarva, one of our Shipshape Network Scotland projects.