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 The
book Cool Metal - Clear Water
just
published by the Heritage Boat Association with the support of Waterways
Ireland contains the individual histories of 72 of Irelands Inland Trading
boats as well as general articles about Bollinder engines, G boats, the
Guinness fleet and Sand Barges on Lough Neagh.
As well as
many previously unpublished private photographs, Diageo gave the HBA access
to the Guinness archives and thanks to Paddy Shortall it has an amazing
collection of photographs from the Robert Shortall collection. The
information in the book was gathered from innumerable sources, the men that
worked the boats, former and current owners of these boats and from people’s
personal archives and logs.
The book
concentrates on boats that in some shape or form are still around today. It
covers nearly all of the Horse Boats, M Boats, B Boats, G Boats, E Boats,
Royal Canal Boats, Steam Boats as well as some of the other Barges and work
boats that are still on our system. Unfortunately because of space other
boats didn’t make the book this time, these include Timber boats, the
Shannon Tugs, River and Estuary Barges, Flying Boat tenders, Liffey Ferries
and many the more individual boats of Historical interest.
It’s
unbelievable the amount of Heritage boats that are still around so needless
to say the HBA have already 1/3 of the next book written. We hope people
will appreciate that the talking on of such a venture as publishing a book
of this magnitude was a huge undertaking for a relatively small organisation
so what we need now is for people to go out and buy this book to enable us
to keep up the momentum and get some funding in place to continue the
project.
We believe
that once you see the book it will sell its self, what we are asking people
to do is to buy a few copies as they would make a wonderful Christmas
present not just for anybody interested in our Waterways but for anybody
with an interest in History.
The book is available from the
IWAI shop, price €15 + p&p.
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