Britain has had, over many hundreds of years, a huge diversity of working boats operating around her coasts. Fishing craft probably have the widest diversity of any of these working craft. Fishing is an occupation carried out in every part of the coast and usually involved vessels of a similar design that plied routes from one side of the country to another. Small coastal fishing boats, on the other hand, often never worked outside of their locality, thus remaining largely peculiar to that area. Yet the West Coast of Scotland has its own peculiarities that have led to altogether different boats developing through their usage.Amongst these craft is the Lochfyne skiff that emerged from several generations of innovation and which resulted in one of the prettiest workboats to have graced the British shores. Although neither extraordinary in design nor pioneering in boat technology, the Lochfyne skiff was the last evolutionary stage in the era of sailing boats in the Clyde area, prior to the advent of motorisation in the first decades of the twentieth century.