Inshore marine fishing had some similarities with coal mining but also many differences. Both were long-standing, dangerous, quintessentially male industries, but, whereas mining was a heavily capitalised industry with an all-male workforce, inshore fishing involved petty commodity production in a family based system that also involved women and children. Not to be confused with deep-sea fishing, it was conducted by small entrepreneurs operating their own boats – called cobles – and was a holdover from preindustrial times. The exception to this was the heavily capitalised summer herring fishing industry, in which wives and young fisher girls were involved from the mid nineteenth century. While rarely far apart geographically, these coal mining and inshore fishing communities in terms of their environment could not have been more different: the mining communities set in a grimy, dusty environment over which loomed pit gear and slag heaps, the latter often burning; the fishing communities crouched around picturesque bays, the view that of white beaches, rocks, and charming small fishing vessels. The experience of inshore fisher women was as dictated as that of mining women by the industry in which their husbands worked. Like mining women, they were not allowed actually to participate in the craft, the men fulfilling the most skilled and dangerous part of the trade and gaining all the status. The typical pattern of women being denied access to machinery, in this case the fishing boat, was thus apparent.