Appin Forest provides larch for a boat to be built by GalGael in Govan
published this on 5:51 pm, Wednesday, 25th February, 2009Charity projects| Community News | Comments (rss) | Respond | Ping |
The GalGael Trust based in Glasgow’s Govan, formed in the 1990s, is a charitable community project that lays out a route back to work for people with addictions or who have not worked for a long time. They learn to build and sail wooden boats.
One of the problems the project faces is getting supplies of the right timber to build the boats. Last week they had two lorry loads of timber delivered, courtesy of Appin Forest in north Argyll.
How did this come about? Well, the Galgael people have learned not to be backward about coming forward. They asked former Environment Minister, Michael Russell, if he could help them get timber supplies and, as Tam McGarvey from GalGael puts it, Mr Russell ‘came good’. He put them in touch with the Appin Forest people, leading to the 50 tonnes of timber just delivered.
Amongst the delivery were a dozen fully mature and good quality larch trees – ideal for boatbulding and described by GalGael’s Tim Norman as: ‘…the kind that every traditional boat builder in Scotland is after. And there was some oak for the keel and some Sitka Spruce for oars and the like. You could build anything from a boat to a house with this amount of wood’.
The GalGael trainees will now get to grips with the entire timber processing sequence from the forest to the workshop to the Clyde.
This is an inspirational project in so many ways. Michael Russell and Appin Forest will be remembered as the bow of the boat to come cleaves the waters of Scotland’s west coast.
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