It's a Birlinn. It's the ship of the the Scots, Picts and Gaels. Smaller than a longship (which we had too, but again, it has a rudder, not a steering oar)
The Pictish 'navy' saw off the Romans....we had virtually no roads until after the Jacobite uprisings, mostly people and goods in Scotland and Ireland (Wales and England too really I suppose, though they'd a lot more roads) moved by water.
We have an enormous plethora of traditional craft in these islands.....and this style of boat continued right through until the advent of gunpowder cannon and the determination that the King of Scots was also the Lord of the Isles. So, King Jamie had the birlinns blown out of the water, and slowly their building declined and they disappeared as larger boats were built...like the scaffie, and right through to the Zulu, until we launched one in Scottish waters nearly four hundred years later at dawn on New Year's day 2000, on the Clyde. The ship was called the Gift of the Gale, because she was built from the timbers of a really bad storm that felled trees right across Glasgow.
Norse ships of a similar style (one square mainsail on a hoop system) had a steering oar while the birlinn had rudders....it's how we can tell them apart on the carvings on gravestones and the like. Later, and larger versions developed with higher raking stem and stern, and sometimes with 'cabins' too.
The birlinns were fast, really fast, and nimble, with three men to an oar they could (and do) really shift. MacDonald ruled using them, and we have good evidences of sea roosts, channels cleared into castles and the like for them to berth.
I'm told that the two handled steering 'yoke' is much easier on the person using it for long in our decidedly uncalm waters. They used to take them through Corryvrechan, which is kind of hairy
M
