What the heck is a lek?
Males great bustards perform spectacular courtship displays, gathering at a ‘lek’ or small display ground to try to impress the females.
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This oil painting of the launch of the Abeona in 1794 is a rare glimpse into an industry that has hundreds of years of tradition in Poole. From an Iron Age logboat to modern superyachts, vessels of all shapes and sizes have first been put to sea in Poole Harbour.
Ships gliding down a slipway into the harbour would have been a common sight in Poole during the 1700s. The burgeoning Newfoundland trade would have increased demand for ships like the Abeona that could weather the dangerous trips across the Atlantic to bring back salt cod to Europe.
We don’t know who built the Abeona, in fact we have very little information about its construction or launch at all, apart from this painting by an unknown artist in 1794.
There would certainly have been no shortage of options for merchant Joseph Olive when he was considering who to appoint to build his new brig. Many shipbuilders had established their yards in Hamworthy, just over the water from Poole Quay, by the end of the 1700s.
They were far from the first, people have been building crafts in and around Poole for hundreds of years, both before and after the Abeona. The huge oak felled in the Iron Age to build Poole’s 10m log boat was likely hollowed and shaped in the hinterlands of the harbour while in the 1400s a medieval boatyard was operating on the shore just down from where Poole Museum now stands. Archaeologists discovered the boatyard in the 1980s while excavating the site of Poole Foundry and unearthed stacks of recycled ships timbers ready to be re-used.
By the mid-1800s the biggest player in Poole shipbuilding was Thomas Wanhill, who reported employing 128 men and 16 boys in his yard. Rather than rugged merchant ships like the Abeona, though, his speciality seems to have been sleeker pleasure craft and yachts. In April 1861, the Poole and Dorset Herald reported that Wanhill had just launched ‘a handsome cutter (yacht) of 50 tons’ with three other yachts and a schooner nearing completion in the yard.
If you look across from Poole Quay today, you’ll see the modern successor to Wanhill Yard in the shape of Sunseeker who manufacture luxurious yachts of all shapes and sizes in their Poole facility that are sold around the world. Just around the corner in West Quay, you’ll also find another facility for building boats in Poole, the RNLI’s All Weather Lifeboat Centre. Here hi-tech methods are being employed to build 50 new Shannon-class lifeboats to equip lifeboat crews around the country. Poole’s boatbuilding tradition, it seems, will be continuing for a long while yet!
You can check on the progress on the RNLI’s new lifeboats with the webcams on their website.
Males great bustards perform spectacular courtship displays, gathering at a ‘lek’ or small display ground to try to impress the females.
The great bustard has a dignified slow walk but tends to run when disturbed, rather than fly.
The hen-bird on display at The Salisbury Museum was one of the last great bustards to be eaten in the town!