His wooden workbenches are clean and tidy and the shed, an old Nissen hut by the water’s edge, reeks most wonderfully of timber and Stockholm tar. Planks of Oak and Scottish Larch are neatly stacked in the rafters and in the middle of the tamped-earth fl oor the sweet lines of Freyja, a beautiful lapstrake skiff are taking shape. Like all his boats she is being built on commission. Such is the MacAulay reputation that he currently has orders for three boats booked back-to-back. The fact that people are willing to wait in line is a measure of John MacAulay’s stature as one of the best boatbuilders in Britain. John works here, alone for the most part, but sometimes with a young helper, from fi rst light until, nine hours later, darkness sends him home, a two minute walk up the ice-gouged gneiss to his tidy cottage on the hilltop looking south over Flodabay. With no one to interrupt him the work goes along quickly. The skiff, 16ft overall, 5ft 2 on the beam and with a draft of 2ft 2, will take him 16 weeks to complete. He will be paid £5,000 for her: mast, tanned dipping lugsail and all the standing and running gear – a trifl ing sum, really, when one considers the enormous amount of skill and energy that will go into her construction. MacAulay-built boats are water-born works of art, each a defi ant symbol of the kind of old fashioned pride in craftsmanship which fl ies in the face of the modern world’s obsession with tacky mass produced tubs in fi breglass or aluminium. Mention those two ghastly words and an involuntary shiver passes over John MacAulay’s weather-beaten face. "There is only one boat worth having," he says fi rmly, "and that is a wooden boat. They are unique; one off and beautiful. How anyone with any sensitivity could choose a plastic hull over a wooden one made by hand, I will never know". John is not only a great boatbuilder but also a distinguished writer and an authority on the folk lore and maritime traditions of the Outer Hebrides. We catch a glimpse of the kind of man he is, and the kind of boats he builds, in this passage from his book on the Birlinn (pronounced beer-lin), the great sea boats of the Gaels:

"A close relationship, like a spiritual bonding, develops between the shipwright and the fi nished vessel, which continues throughout its entire material life. It has been known for certain boatbuilders to refuse to build for a particular client, if they did not feel an affi nity toward one another. A reputable shipwright might not want to see some work of devotion fall into the wrong hands, and would rather fi nd some obscure reason for refusing to build, than later be in a position of accusing an untrustworthy client of incompetence…" I asked John if he would decline a commission if he didn’t like the cut of a would-be client’s jib. "Oh, aye", he said, "I do it quite often. I like to do things my way and after all these years I feel that I do know what’s best when it comes to boats and people. I don’t just give people what they want. I give them what I think they ought to have. Most people are happy to abide by that because they know that if they don’t, they’re not going to get a boat from me". John MacAulay designs and builds his boats to live in one of the world’s most treacherous seaways, the Minch, that long, narrow, and sometimes deadly stretch of water which lies north-east to south-west and separates the west coast of Scotland from the islands of the Outer Hebrides. The essential elements of his lines, a deep forefoot, a fi ne knifelike entry, a powerful beam-to-waterline-length

ratio and a handsome transom stern have all been handed down to him like a precious inheritance. They have evolved over the many centuries of seafaring in these waters, fi rst with the fi ghting longships of the Viking raiders, then the galleys and the Birlinn, the roomy working ships of the Gael and, in Victorian times, the smacks and skiffs of the herring fl eets. Hebridean boats are therefore exceptionally seaworthy. From the Butt of Lewis to Barra Head, the Minch covers 120 miles. "We get huge swells rolling in from the Atlantic," he says, "and if there’s wind with it the wave height can be multiplied four, maybe six times. That’s when we get tremendous volumes of water crashing on shore, moving great boulders around and tossing them up into the grass. When you see a tremendous natural force like that it makes you feel very humble indeed. That’s why we’ve always got to respect the power of the sea. Those who do not show that respect very often pay for it with their lives". John explained that the Minch narrows to just 15 miles between Harris and the Isle of Skye and that is where the greatest turbulence occurs. "The tidal movement through the Minch is exceptionally powerful," he says. "Tides come in from both ends and meet almost half-way. It’s quite deep in some places and very shallow in others with the result that the velocity of the water passing through changes so much that it creates a lot of disturbance on the surface, even if there’s no wind at all. You can get steep waves and overfalls and whirlpools and eddies. Waves suddenly leap-up almost vertically and at times the surface of the sea looks exactly like beaten eggs, a giant meringue with sharp peaks and troughs right around the horizon. You need a special kind of boat to cope with a sea like that… and special people to sail them". The MacAulays have been Hebridean fi shermen over many generations and after John left school at 15 he also went into the lobster fi shery. "Fishing was something I grew up with," he says. "I didn’t go into it; it came into me. I had my heart set on boatbuilding, but I couldn’t start my apprenticeship until I was 16 so I went fi shing for a year on the Monach Islands off the Atlantic coast of Uist. We stayed ashore on the islands for a week at a time although sometimes if the weather was bad we could be stuck out there for a fortnight. Fishing for lobsters is dangerous work because you are close to shore in shallow water, right in amongst the rocks. Storms can blow up at any moment and we always have to keep a weather eye open and be aware of our next move. Even on a calm day those big Atlantic swells can be dangerous.

A very experienced fisherman, a man who had spent his whole life at sea, recently found his boat, a big 36 footer, high and dry on a rock when the swell suddenly subsided. All of a sudden the sea just departed and there he was perched like a shag on a rock he had never seen before. He thought his end had come. He was looking into the abyss. Surely when the wave came back he’d be dashed to pieces. But no, when the swell rose up it lifted the boat off like a feather and he was free. He came straight home and retired from fi shing. And that’s someone who had spent all his life working out there". John served a fi ve year apprenticeship as a shipwright at Sir Charles Connell’s yard on the Clyde. There he learned everything from design to the building, commissioning and launching of large steel ships. As soon as he gained his trade certifi cate he moved into the smaller boatyards on the River Clyde and the west coast of Scotland where he concentrated on the construction of fi shing boats, private yachts and commercial craft. He came home to Harris 27 years ago and has never looked back. He worked at fi rst in maintaining the wooden boats in the lobster fl eet and later took on commissions to design and construct vessels along traditional lines. "In the Outer Hebrides", he says, "each island has its own tradition of boatbuilding and each island produces vessels which have their own distinctive shape. I can see a boat and tell at once exactly where she’s from and probably the name of the man who built her as well". I asked him why he was so wedded to traditional wooden boats. "I was brought up in wooden boats," he said, "and learned to love every aspect of them. A wooden boat is not just an inanimate object. It has its own special characteristics, its own personality. Every part of a wooden boat is created by hand and by eye; a craftsman has cut each joint and fi tted each plank with care and precision. A boat might start out as a pile of timber but it ends up as a living creature, something with personality, something worth having. With good care a traditional wooden boat will last a hundred years or more. You can’t say that about fi breglass or aluminium, can you". No indeed.