Building and Refurbishing Highland Folk Museum Buildings – the Coracle Guys

This is a good example of how working with a group of volunteers in quite a limited way can develop over time, resulting in that group making a significant impact to our maintenance and interpretation at the museum. Over several years two members of our local Insh Coracle club, Raymond and Jeremy, progressed from bringing their coracles to the museum Sawmill Pond for special event days, through becoming a regular feature of our Heritage in Action Days – weekly event days throughout the summer, to taking on the refurbishment or construction of aspects of our historic building collection.

Winter of 2019/2020 – due to transport and storage issues with the coracles it became clear that a boat house beside the Sawmill Pond was essential. The Coracle Guys (Raymond, Jeremy and Nick) quickly drew up appropriate plans, working drawings, a 3d model and scoured our builder’s yard and woodstore for materials. Unfortunately, the pandemic intervened and from March to June 2020 building work ceased. The boat house was completed by the end of July and is a great facility for the volunteers and for the visitors, enabling them to see and learn about the ancient river craft.

A second and third pandemic lockdown impacted greatly on our building maintenance programme, with our Woodsman’s Caravan refurbishment looking unlikely to be completed in time for the museum to open in July 2021. Our intrepid Coracle Guys volunteered to take on the project and worked through from March to the end of June, re-roofing and cladding, and fitting out the interior. We were able to dress the caravan as Charlie Ross, who lived in it for 60 years, had it and an official launch in July 2021 welcomed family and friends who thought it was a great transformation.

Following a summer of demonstrating the coracles to our visitors, a third project arose for the winter – the building of a stone/brick hearth in our Smiddy to create a working forge. We have reconstructed the Smiddy in 2019 but had not had the funding to build a forge at the time and had relied on a mobile forge for demonstrations. Once again, lots of research, particularly into the use of lime mortar, planning, drawings, and scouring for salvage materials got underway and the work continued through early 2022. This time their skills were passed on to one of our staff – a Craft Fellow funded by Historic Environment Scotland spending a year with us learning traditional skills. Euan learned a great deal about the construction techniques and blacksmithing in general.

The next project will be helping our staff with the reconstruction of the Woodsman’s Caravan again – much more work than the initial refurbishment after taking a direct hit from several trees during winter storms.

In the UK we have a Men’s Shed organisation Länk till annan webbplats. where men can meet and work together on typical “shed” activities, which also help reduce loneliness and isolation. Our Coracle volunteers have proved to be a similar group and have shown us how successful a local Men’s Shed might be. The benefits of working with volunteers are considerable. They have helped us undertake projects that we would not have had the capacity to do otherwise. Their knowledge and experience have added to our museum’s interpretation of the coracles and the blacksmith’s workshop. Providing all health and safety issues are catered for, planning is clear and communication channels are always open, where volunteers are the experts, they can be a huge addition to the museum team.

This is some advice to others:

Be clear when recruiting volunteers what you want them to do, and make sure their skills match the tasks required.
Be open to suggestions from them, especially if their knowledge is greater than yours.
Be flexible and remember that they are giving up their time, from what are usually very busy lives outside the museum.
It is amazing what people can make from recycled and salvaged materials.

Download pdf: A story of a Boathouse pdf, 4.2 MB.