There is always
something sad about seeing the rotting carcass of a boat sitting on the shore
or at a rivers edge. A boat has personality
and character with its own temperament and idiosyncrasies, and carries
its history around the world along with the histories of the people who travel
with it and work on it. Then, when it is
abandoned, all is lost. With the rising and
falling tides, the woodworm and the decay, the character and personality of the
boat disappear into a pile of disintegrating timbers and rusting metal.
Like
a corpse, all that is left are the skeletal remains.
While on a few days
holiday in Kirkcudbright, every time I went out walking along the banks of the
River Dee I passed the remains of this boat, the Wellspring.
Sitting
in amongst the reeds with its stern raised up at a slight angle it always
looked as if it was trying to sail up the bank and away from where it had been
grounded.
So, one day on my way
back from a walk I decided to ignore the biting flies and the squelching, muddy
ground and have a wander around the wreck.
In
the evening sunlight the blue of the paintwork seemed to shine, though up close
it was nothing more than flaking shards on crumbling wood.
Wood
so rotten that I could almost push a finger through it.
The
deck of the boat had completely disappeared in places leaving the rusting metal
of the engine below exposed. Green shoots of
riverside plants grew through the hull while crusted ropes, solid with age,
hung down like some weird concrete ornaments and vanished into the mud below.
Quiet
and still, the boat sat amongst the rustling reeds and just up from the burble
of the river.
The Wellspring was
built in 1950 for Ernest Wood by J. N. Millar & Sons of St Monans in Fife.
Originally
named the Wilsheernie KY140, the boat was a fishing trawler constructed of
wood. She was 52 feet long and had an 88hp
engine built by Bergius Co Ltd, Glasgow.
The
boat then went through several owners and was renamed Wellspring FR406 at some
point before being purchased by David Paterson of Campbeltown when she became
the Wellspring CN207.
Before becoming a pile
of rotting wood and rusting metal the boat was for years out in all weathers
and in seas rough and calm. A working boat,
it provided men with livelihoods and trawled the seas to feed a growing
population. Some of us, of a certain age
in Britain and parts of Europe, may well have eaten fish netted by it. Why the boat is now abandoned on the
riverbank I don’t know. I imagine it will be
the usual scenario of it being bought for some sort of business project, then
the money ran out, so it was dumped.
Whatever
the reasons for its abandonment, it appears to have been there since the 1990s,
a local landmark that is just slowly disintegrating away.
Pushing my way through
the reeds I made my way to the bow of the boat.
There,
between rotting wood and rusting metal, I left the Skulferatu that had
accompanied me on my walk.
The
coordinates for the location of the Skulferatu are -
