Words: Ben Wilde.
Ben Wilde
Photos: Ben Wilde,
Shelley Richmond,
Tony Lucas &
Amanda Travis
Connecting people with craft: Archipelago Folkschool
“One of the best experiences of my life, I can’t believe how much we’ve achieved.” – a participant from our June 2025 boat-building course.
It’s a sunny day on the Isle of Mull, and we’re on the last day of our last course of 2025. In the Archipelago Folkschool workshop, four brand new wooden canoes and kayaks are getting their final touches before we finish for the day. The open doors look out over our 10-acre croft to Loch Scridain and, in the distance, we can see Ben More, the only Munro on Mull. Tomorrow, our participants, who started the week as novice woodworkers, will load up their new boats and go home; I’ll be left with a quiet workshop and quite a pile of wood shavings.
The boats
Our courses run from Saturday to Saturday throughout the summer. Participants can choose between three boats: a 15’6” Peterborough canoe, a 17’ Prospector canoe or the 17’ Shrike sea kayak. We’ve chosen these boats to be something that a complete novice can confidently build in just a week, without compromising on the quality of the result. They are light, practical and robust. The shrike is an exceptional sea kayak styled on Greenland boats: tippy at first, but responsive and incredibly capable once a paddler is used to it. The smaller Peterborough canoe is beautiful and an excellent choice for solo adventures or gentle days with two people. At the same time, the larger Prospector is a real workhorse, able to take multiple adults with plenty of gear for a multi-night expedition.
The course
On the first day of the course, we start with a safety talk and a pile of precut plywood planks, and by the second hour, everyone is busy drilling, glueing and assembling. We build in the stitch and glue style, so our boats are first ‘sewn’ together with cable ties, backed up with masking tape and strategically placed superglue. Once the rough shape is in place, we use epoxy resin to glue the boat together and remove the cable ties. After a day of fibreglass and epoxy work, everyone has something boat-shaped. Then the real woodworking skills begin: we pull out traditional tools like block planes and spoke shaves, and we shape timber to make inwales, outwales, masiks and thwarts.
We think it’s this balance of traditional work and contemporary materials which makes our courses special. Not only do you get a beautiful boat which will stand the test of time, but you also learn real woodwork skills along the way. Throughout the week, we occasionally stop to learn about related topics, such as sharpening tools or understanding how the cellular structure of wood influences its bending and moisture response.
The Folkschool
Archipelago Folkschool is a social enterprise, founded in 2017 to connect people with craft. Our courses take place in our purpose-built teaching workshop on our croft on the Isle of Mull.
We are also a mobile organisation, and work across Scotland on diverse projects, from community boat-builds to bespoke sessions for disadvantaged groups. Over the last eight years, we have run courses with disabled people in an old warehouse in Glasgow, and a course for someone’s 50th birthday party in Torridon; we’ve taught fathers connecting with their kids in a community garden in Musselborough, and an LGBTQ youth group in a canal boat shed in Kirkintilloch.
Alongside our community projects, we’ve developed our public courses, fine-tuning and honing the boat-building process to make it as easy yet rewarding as possible. We aim to find the sweet spot where everyone learns valuable skills and has a great time in the process. We’re proud to say that every single person has managed to build their boat and get it on the water. We’ve lost count, but we must have built more than 100 boats across Scotland. Many have travelled far afield: at least two are in Switzerland, two in Holland, and one went on an expedition to Svalbard!
The group
One of the things we love to see is the way a group comes together. Through the process of building a boat, genuine friendships are forged. It’s a social activity: we spend all day together in the workshop helping each other, and most people camp on the croft or stay in one of our cosy yurts. Once the work day is finished, people relax. Often this includes a beer at the kitchen table, but the intrepid head off to climb hills, swim in the sea or sample the local pubs.
We encourage our participants to come in pairs, and one of the magical things we see is relationships reforged through mutual working – old friends rebuilding a friendship, or parents reconnecting with their children. New friendships form, and people who began as strangers often keep in touch long after the course has ended.
Finishing the boats
By the end of the course week, the boats are strong, watertight, and ready to float, but not quite finished. We recommend that every participant take their boats home and varnish or paint them to a high standard. This protects the epoxy from UV damage, which makes the boats last while looking really good. We love to see photos of people’s creativity after the courses. Some people put on enough varnish to get on the water as quickly as possible, while others spend hours developing complex paint schemes which show off their new creation.
It’s perhaps best to finish with some of the comments from this year’s participants
Tori came to build a canoe, and told us, “The experience was immersive, mindful and full of achievement, the kind that can only be achieved when you use your hands and your body to craft something. … working on our canoe, looking out across the Ross of Mull, we could see the rewards of our effort unfolding day by day as the boat grew, changed and took its final form … Building our own canoe is just the start of the adventure.”
We can’t say more than that!
