Tartan tide
Jake Bowers on how learning old skills is helping urban Scots connect with their roots - and nature
Jake Bowers
The Guardian, Wednesday 19 June 2002
Article history
It looked like a post-apocalyptic vision. Amid the industrial decay of rotting wooden jetties and rusting cranes, a wooden long ship, or birlinn, was inching its way up the river Clyde. But the eight oarsmen pulling against the current last weekend weren't new age Vikings; they were Glaswegian volunteers who had helped build the boat and were reclaiming their heritage.
The majority of the rowers had been referred to the project by local drug support groups, mental health care providers and occupational therapists. They call themselves the GalGael after the Gal-Gaidheal (meaning "strange or foreign Gaels"), the 9th-century people who once inhabited the Hebrides. The boat, named the Orcuan, was proving to the people and politicians of Glasgow that urban regeneration can also be a powerful force for social and ecological renewal.
The 30ft-vessel may be the smallest boat to have been launched on the Clyde in recent years, but, like Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior, it is both a colourful means of transport, and a carrier of people's desires. It won't be saving whales, but trying to re-intro duce one of the most charismatic animals missing from large parts of the highlands and islands - people.
Many of the descendants of the 500,000 highlanders driven off the land in the 18th-century highland clearances now live in urban poverty in Glasgow. But, so far, the Scottish land reform movement, gathering pace through community land buyouts like those on the isles of Eigg and Gigha, hasn't touched the lives of the millions of displaced Scots of highland descent living on housing estates amid some of the worst gang violence and substance abuse in the world.
The launch of the Orcuan is intended to help change that. The boat has been built by the GalGael Trust, an organisation dedicated to training urban Scots with no experience of farming, forestry or the sea to live in the highlands.
"We've adopted training methods used by the Folkhögskola [people's high school] system found across Scandinavia," says master carver and founder of the GalGael, Colin McLeod. They are taught traditional and modern methods of working with wood, stone, metal and textiles.
"We aim to see people and nature more deeply connected by putting us back in touch with our Gaelic-Norse ancestors' relationship with natural materials, the elements, the river and the sea," says McLeod.
The GalGael Trust, funded by the Greater Govan Social Exclusion Partnership, was created in 1997 by the Scottish executive and Scotland Against Drugs. About 80 people so far have passed through their training sessions.
Alastair McIntosh, fellow of Edinburgh's Centre for Human Ecology and part of the campaign to bring the Isle of Eigg into community ownership, helps run the trust. "Most urban Scots are only three or four generations removed from the land, soconnection to the land is big in the Scottish psyche," he says. "We know that if we're to rebuild human communities and live in a world of dignified sufficiency, we must reconnect with a sense of place."
Just as the Orcuan is made of storm-felled timber, the GalGael consists mainly of what can best be described as storm-felled people. Former seaman and recovering alcoholic Davey Oliver bears the kind of facial scars that reveal Glasgow's destructive relationship with knives. Thanks to the GalGael, he's now far more likely to be converting wind blown trees into planks with a portable sawmill than "chibing" anybody in the face to give them an extended "Glaswegian smile".
"This work gets you back into the community, it roots you like a tree and helps you grow," he says. "I've learnt that I can do something different with my life other than drinking."
William Smith, another of the trainees, is even more ambitious. "The GalGael have taught us we can be a community again. But we don't want to be shoved into tower blocks any more, we want to be given the chance to build our own houses in some deserted island or glen!"
"When I first met the GalGael I thought they were mad," says local councillor John Flanagan. "But soon I realised that they weren't mad at all. They actually had a vision that involved reaching out to the socially disadvantaged."
Hugh Henry, deputy social justice minister for Scotland says: "The GalGael are giving hope to the community that there is something better. Ordinary working class people are showing the world that their proud tradition of shipbuilding is something worth celebrating."
They all have work to do. The Orcuan is a prototype of a 70ft birlinn, which the GalGael would like to build. They intend to house it in a traditional longhouse, and Glasgow city council and Scottish enterprise are funding a feasibility study into the idea. If it's anything like the Orcuan, people will be flocking from miles around to see it.