Scale: 1:16. A modern full hull exhibition model of the Severn trow ‘Norah’ (1868), fully rigged with a complete suit of sails, the whole of which is mounted on turned pillars on a wooden baseboard with a Perspex cover. The partially decked hull is complete with a large windless on the foredeck together with canvas sidecloths rigged on iron stanchions in the waist.

These vessels were known as ‘open moulded’ trows by virtue of the fact that the hull was constructed with planked wooden frames with an open waist and small decks at bow and the stern. The two-masted ketch rig allowed easy access to the hold for loading and unloading cargo. From the late-19th and into the early 20th centuries, their preferred cargo was coal, which was loaded directly from railway wagons via a chute alongside a quay. These vessels were often seen in large numbers working their way up the River Severn from the large coal ports such as Cardiff, Barry and Newport. Their cargo was bunker coal, which was used by the numerous coasting steamers for fuel as well the domestic market inland.

The ‘Norah’ was built at Bridgewater in 1868 and had an overall length of 56 feet. After a long and busy working career, Captain Leonard Smart bought her in 1932, where upon he beached her as a houseboat moored at Weston. He died in 1936 and she lay with a number of other wooden coastal hulks, all of which were considered hazardous by the local council. They were offered up for auction but no one bid for the ‘Norah’ and so at the outbreak of the Second World War, she was stripped of all her reusable metalwork and burnt.