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John Ruskin said the bow of a wooden boat is ‘the pinnacle of Man's achievement’. He appreciated that some of our most beautiful and effective creations are not designed as such but evolve to fulfil their task in their place, according to the history and affections of the people who use them. Some are scarcely noticed - because they are not buildings but boats, built to do jobs. In this series of The Essay five writers, each personally involved with their craft, circumnavigate the British Isles in five traditional boats – without leaving home.

The coble is the working boat of the northeast of England, with a high stem and knife-like forefoot for facing the breaking waves, but flat-bottomed aft, so it can be launched off the beach and sit upright on the sand at low tide, with not a straight line anywhere. Katrina Porteous lives on the coast of Northumberland and spent years with coble fishermen, learning their way and languages. Many of the poems in her first collection, The Lost Music focus on the Northumbrian fishing community, about which Katrina has also written in prose in The Bonny Fisher Lad. She weaves verse from her poem The Wund an’ the Wetter, into her unsentimental paean for the coble and the way of life it encapsulated. It's said it takes a village to raise a child; it certainly took a whole community to build a coble, to fish with and maintain one.

Presenter: Katrina Porteous
Producer: Julian May