Looe and Luggers

The Chard family take us on a tour in and around Looe taking in the harbour and coastline. The Eddystone Lighthouse is the fourth to be built on the Eddystone Rocks and was designed by James Douglass. The town amalgamated East and West under Looe Urban District Council in 1898 but had been joined by a bridge since 1411. The current stone bridge of seven arches opened in 1853. Caught on camera also are the Cornish luggers, the mainstay of the local fishing industry.

Luggers are a particular type of clinker or wooden boat popular in Northern Europe where the hull planks overlap with two or three masts set with lug sails, on elf the earliest examples of fore-and-aft rigs. They became the boat of the Cornish fisheries and known for line catching hake, whiting, ray and turbot as well as using driftnets to catch herring, mackerel, pilchards or sardines. In Looe the warehouses on Buller’s Quay were used for preserving fish through bulking, salting, packing and pressing into barrels. The lugger FY 310 Eileen lands its catch of turbot in traditional baskets at the fish market. Looe retains a coastal fishery although many of the warehouses now serve the tourist trade.