A rare 100-year-old racing boat has been donated to a Lake District museum.
The single sculler boat has been restored and put on display in the Windermere Jetty Museum after it spent 60 years hanging in a boat house.
It is now being displayed in the museum suspended from the ceiling of the museum’s Lakeshore café.
Senior conservation boatbuilder Stephen Beresford discovered the boat during a visit to a boathouse in Ferry Nab and immediately expressed interest in adding it to the museum’s collection.
Led by Beresford, the museum’s conservation team have worked on clearing the dust and debris from over 60 years of storage and have restored it to its former glory.
The boat belonged to a local Cumbrian and keen rower who attended Oxford University and reportedly took his boat onto Windermere.
It is considered a fine example of Victorian innovation in boat building and would have been an unusual site on Windermere in its heyday.
Designed for one person, the sculler has also come with the original owner’s shoes.
Beresford said: “The sculler is an amazing, unusual object. It’s not a boat you would typically associate with Windermere – the innovation that went into these boats in Victorian times made them very fast.
“It would have turned a few heads on the lake! It is a perfect fit for the skylight above the café and is a fantastic addition to the space.”
