Clyde puffer

Built between 1856 and 1939, these stumpy little steamboats achieved an almost mythical status thanks largely to the short stories Neil Munro wrote about the Vital Spark and her captain Para Handy, which produced three television series.

Clyde puffers characteristically had bluff bows, crew's quarters with table and cooking stove in the focsle, and a single mast with derrick in front of the large hold.

When publication of the Vital Spark stories began in 1905 the ship's wheel was still in the open, but later a wheelhouse was added aft of the funnel giving the puffers their distinctive image.

Some non-condensing puffers (included those with compound engines) were built until the 1920s when purely canal traffic decreased and the vast majority of coasters had to operate in sea water.

Puffers of a third type, the outside boats, were built for the rougher sea routes to the Hebrides islands with a crew of four and the length increased to 88 ft (27 m) still allowing use of the larger locks on the Crinan Canal, which cuts across the Kintyre peninsula.

The coasting trade serving the islands was kept up by the Glenlight Shipping Company of Greenock until in 1993 the government withdrew subsidies and, unable to compete with road transport using subsidised ferries, the service ended.

The short stories that Neil Munro first published in the Glasgow Evening News in 1905 appeared in the newspaper for over twenty years and achieved widespread fame, with collections issued in book form since 1931 still in print today.

After fitting of a new boiler by Pridham's Engineering and Corpach Boatbuilders,[2] she steamed down from Fort William to Crinan, from where cruises on the Caledonian Canal have now re-commenced.

She was renamed Auld Reekie, and starred as the Vital Spark in the third BBC TV Para Handy series where she was berthed at Crinan Basin for 14 years, deteriorating.

The Pibroch, built at Bowling, West Dunbartonshire in 1957 as a diesel-engined boat for the Scottish Malt Distillers Ltd, had been lying at Letterfrack, County Galway, Ireland, in desperate need of restoration, since 2002.