It’s A Record Breaker
Well at least it is for boat building in Mirfield!
Boats have been built in Mirfield alongside the Calder & Hebble since 1776 but this one is a bit special being the largest boat ever built in Mirfield.
Measuring 61′ x 13′6″ she is very much in keeping with Mirfield’s boat building tradition by being a broad beam barge, narrowboats wheren’t traditionally built in Mirfied until the modern plaything narrowboats arrived in more recent years.
Boat building in Mirfield as carried on with little interruption since 1776 at least 373 wooden boats known as West Country Boats (Keels) like the one being launched above were built here, the last boat of this type being built in 1952.
Even with the demise of the wooden commercial boats that wasn’t the end of boatbuilding because the yards attention shifted to the emerging leisure market and eventually they were at least four yards building the now popular recreational narrowboats.
It’s quite sad now that we are the last boat builder left in Mirfield (The others all went over the last ten years or so.) but ironically the days of the recreational narrrowboat seem to have passed and we now seem to be stepping back in time to building big barges again!
The builders of old might not approve of the steel construction and what they would make of the fact that nearly all off today’s boats are bound for France and will never even wet their bottoms in the waters of the Calder & Hebble they were built alongside I don’t know.
Anyway back to the ”Record Breaker” well she too is bound for France in fact she will be quite capable of sailing her self there, but she will not be wetting her bottom in the Calder & Hebble because she is simply too big! At 61′ she is too long for the locks and with a “V” bottom she is too deep in draft and would simply sit on the bottom.
I never really thought about it before but we are probably partaking in the oldest surviving industry in Mirfield, if we were to follow the trend and move manufacturing to Eastern Europe in the future then I suppose 230 plus years wouldn’t have been a bad run.
There is a bit more information about boatbuilding in Mirfield HERE .