Richard Ensoll, Senior Lecturer in Outdoor Studies at University of Cumbria, is planning an epic journey interwoven with research, in summer 2025. Richard, together with Johan Hoving, of Kepplewray, plans to circumnavigate Ireland in a vessel inspired by traditional canoe construction, interacting with coastal communities along the way and exploring layers of meaning through exchanges of storytelling.
The boat, Ronan, is a skin on frame canoe built for purpose in Ireland in a manner similar to today’s curragh, a design whose heritage extends into deep history, probably predating Viking clinker boats, with UK examples being excavated from bogs dating back thousands of years.
Known for their light, flexible qualities providing performance and ease of construction, skin-on-frame or 'pointed basket' boats were once common workhorses linking people and places around the vibrant coastal fringe of Britain and Ireland. Testament to their seaworthiness, it is thought that 500 years before the Vikings 5th century St Brenan the navigator might have visited America in such a vessel: this trip was recreated by Tim Severin in 1977 traveling by ox-hide clad curragh from Ireland to Newfoundland via Iceland.
Small boats plied the coast of Ireland for millennia and skin-on-frame canoes were common, yet modern materials and the migration of life inland from the coasts make this a journey of imagination into the past, giving an amnesia-infused sense of first.
The research plan for this voyage is in development and enquiries are welcome to Richard Ensoll.
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