FISHING ETCETERAS. 119 
From the ‘folding-up’ point of view, at any rate, the inflated 
rubber boat eclipses in portability its rival, the Welsh Coracle, 
said to be the earliest floating vehicle in the British Islands. 
A frame of ash-laths, bent into the shape of an elongated 
walnut-shell, some four feet long by three feet wide, is covered 
with pitched canvas—the seat, adjusted with a view to equili- 
brium, occupying a central position right across the middle. 
What the coracle is now, is probably—to judge by old records— 
for all intents and purposes what it was a thousand. years ago 
(and who can say how many thousands before that?). A 
Welsh chronicler, Giraldus de Barri, writes that he crossed the 
Towey (presumably in a coracle) in 1188, whilst preaching the 
Crusades in Wales in company with Archbishop Baldwin, and 
that the boats they (the Welsh) ‘ employ in fishing or in getting 
over rivers are made of twigs, they (the boats) not oblong, ncr 
pointed, but almost round, or rather triangular, covered within 
and without with raw hides.’ [Now canvass painted or pitched. ] 
‘When a salmon, thrown into one of these boats, strikes it 
hard with his tail, he often oversets it, and endangers both the 
vessel and the man.’ } 
This beats the hitherto undefeated record of the Mullingar 
boats, which were described by my dear old friend Dr. Peard, 
in his ‘ Year of Liberty,’ as ‘erfectly safe provided you didn’t 
cough or sneeze’! . .. It is seldom that the medio tutissimus 
26is maxim finds more apt illustration. 
It appears, however, that they can manage, on occasion, to 
get two people into one of these ‘tarred clothes-baskets,’ as a 
ducked cockney once sarcastically described the nautilus of 
Wales. Whether either of these navigators could really wield 
and cast with a salmon rod? and a fly is a problem in hydro- 
statics I have never presumed personally to solve, but that 
‘ Annals and Antiquities of the Counties and County Families of Wales, 
Longmans, Green, Reader, & Co., 1872. 
2 Thousands of salmon have been killed with rod and fly out of coracles— 
but with only one man in the coracle. It requires long practice and clever- 
‘ness to do it; guiding the coracle and minding the rod at the same time is 
not easy.—ED, , 
