105 Fishing, Fishing Boats and Traditional Lore Based on Maritime Memorates Collected in the 19 th and 20 th Centuries in Ireland and Scotland Séamus Mac Mathúna 0. Introduction The focus of this paper is on matters relating to fishing, fishermen and their boats, in Ireland, especially on the Gaelic-speaking western seaboard, and to a lesser extent in Scotland, during the period under consideration. 1 Most of the narrators and some of the collectors themselves were fishermen, and the close bond and shared beliefs and taboos between informant and collector serves to emphasise the personal nature of the accounts. The information gained from these stories is supplemented here by works of other writers and scholars on Irish vernacular boats and on the practice of fishing and the legends, taboos and other matters associated with it. 2 What we have been collecting are called memorates, a term coined by the Swedish folklorist and ethnologist C. W. von Sydow (1934), who defined them as short loose accounts in the first person of a personal experience or encounter with the supranatural, normally centring around one main theme. In addition to the first-hand accounts, there are also those which are at a further remove from the experiencer-narrator which have been told to the narrator by the person who has had the experience, often a family member or a close relative; or have been told to the narrator by some named person in the community or outside the community other than a family member. Others are more general still, being based on what 1. This paper is based on a research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of Great Britain and Northern Ireland about stories of the sea which were collected in Ireland and Scotland from members of coastal communities, such as fishermen, beachcombers and other local people, between the middle of the 19 th century and the beginning of the 2000s, from 1847 until 2002. The stories are mostly in Irish and Scottish Gaelic, with some also in English. The project was carried out by Dr Maxim Fomin as Principal Investigator and myself as Co-Investigator, in collaboration with Dr Críostóir Mac Cárthaigh, University College, Dublin, where the Irish Na- tional Folklore Collection is housed, and Dr. John Shaw, Celtic and Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh, which has the Scottish collections. Our Research Assistants were Séamas Mac Floinn and Dr. Pádraig Ó Tiarnaigh. We have examined in previous works the parameters and content of the collection, to which the reader is duly referred. See, for example, Fomin and Mac Mathúna 2015, 2016. I am grateful to Dr Críostóir Mac Cárthaigh, Director, National Folklore Collection, for granting his permission to use photographs of the NFC’s Photographic Collection. 2. See studies such as Mac Cárthaigh 2008, Ó hEochaidh 1965, Ó Súilleabháin 1942.