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full to the gunnels
© courtesy of Bill Quinn
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County Down fishing |
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In terms of the Co. Down experience, commercial seafishing can best be described as an occupation of alternatives. It was a seasonally-determined affair, in which fishermen followed various types of fishing throughout the year, either at home or from more distant ports, or where other employment of a land-based or maritime nature was sought only at times when fishery activity was impossible.
Traditionally the most important fishery in Co. Down was a local manifestation of the wider Irish Sea herring industry, in which boats from all parts of the British isles joined in a travelling enterprise that circled Britain and Ireland in pursuit of this fish.
At the height of this fishing season Ardglass was packed with boats from Scotland, the Isle of Man and, in the nineteenth century, Cornwall. This was the fishery which fed the curing industry which became established locally in 1906 when Scottish curers working in Donegal ports were persuaded to travel east by the richness of the herring harvest in Co. Down that year. The fish was processed by women known as gutting girls. Many of those working in Co. Down came from Donegal and West Ireland but local women also took part.
These women also followed the fleets from Co. Down in a working season that encompassed the Isle of Man, the west and east coasts of England and Scotland and sometimes even the Shetland Isles.
There were also two purely local herring fisheries. One took place in early summer and was followed by local large boats before the foreign drifters arrived and the main season began. These large boats - the Nobbies of Portavogie and the Nickies of Kilkeel and Annalong - also hunted for herring in other parts of Ireland with some travelling as far south as Kinsale to chase mackerel to be cured and sold in America.
The other was a small boat fishery followed when the harvest herring came very close to the southern shores of the country from September. Many of the fishermen who took part in this fishery were farmers or landsmen for the rest of the year. Others worked as crew either for local large boats or on foreign fishing craft in faraway fisheries.
The herring fisheries were enormously valuable to local people in commercial terms. But the great mix of people that were involved in them from Ireland and beyond was significant in more intimate ways as the number of romances and marriages between locals and visitors multiplied over the years.
Words: Dr. Vivienne Pollock, Ulster Museum
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