Ship figureheads

The front of a ship has often been the point at which decoration or sculpture is placed. The Ancient Greeks and Phoenicians painted eyes on each side of the bow. The Vikings had carved figureheads, perhaps to ward off evil spirits. In the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries British naval ships usually had a carved figurehead that illustrated the ship's name. Merchant vessels had them too: the Cutty Sark, as I recall, has a bare-breasted Nannie, a witch, holding a horse's tail. It was this scantily-clad personage that, dressed in a "cutty sark", chased Tam O'Shanter in the poem of that name by Robert Burns.

Today, the Cutty Sark, in Greenwich, is a museum and underneath it is a fine collection of figureheads from ships of various ages.

photo © T. Boughen     Camera: Olympus OMD E-M10     2014

Westward Ho

The village of Westward Ho! (including exclamation mark) near Bideford, Devon, was developed as a holiday destination in the 1860s. The developers took its name from Charles Kingsley's popular 1855 novel of that name which was set near Bideford. It subsequently became a popular name for a number of British sailing and powered boats. The small ferry in the foreground of this photograph was built in 1987 in Ardrossan, Scotland, and it was used on Cromarty Firth until 2010. In 2012 it was bought for use as a pleasure boat taking tourists from Weston-super-Mare (where it lies above) to the nearby islands of Flat Holm and Steep Holm, and renamed, Westward Ho (no exclamation mark). Interestingly the deck of the ship can be modified to carry 10 tons of freight or a single vehicle. This feature makes it Britain's smallest car ferry.

photo © T. Boughen     Camera: Olympus OMD E-M10