Hillyard Yachts for Sale

Updated 27 August 2026 · By Hulls.io Editorial

About Hillyard

Hillyard is one of the most prolific and best-loved names in traditional British wooden yacht building. For most of the twentieth century, the Hillyard yard on the River Arun at Littlehampton, West Sussex, turned out simple, immensely strong and sensibly-priced cruising yachts that put genuine seagoing sailing within reach of ordinary people. The founder, David Charles Gershom Hillyard (1883–1965), was among the first British builders to produce cruising yachts in series rather than one boat at a time to individual commission, and in doing so he did as much as anyone of his generation to democratise yachting. Around 800 yachts were built to his own designs, and a remarkable number are still sailing today — testament to the honest, heavily-built construction that remains the hallmark of the marque.

David Hillyard was born in 1883 at Rowhedge, an Essex village on the River Colne steeped in the world of the great racing and cruising yachts, and was apprenticed to the boatbuilding trade from the age of fourteen. In 1906 he moved to Littlehampton and, after a spell working for a local motor-boat company, set up on his own from a loft on River Road on the east bank of the Arun, building dinghies, pinnaces and workboats and repairing fishing craft. Yacht building came a little later: his first yacht commission, the hard-chine ketch Jamaie, dates from around 1919, and by the early 1920s he was exhibiting gaff-rigged 4- and 5-ton cruisers at the London boat shows. In late 1923 he acquired Harvey's Yard on the west bank of the river to build a large 22-tonner, and that riverside site became the David Hillyard yard for the rest of the century. He continued to attend the yard almost daily until shortly before his death in 1965.

What sets a Hillyard apart is a distinctive and consistent design philosophy worked out in the 1920s and refined over decades. The features most closely associated with the marque are the canoe (double-ended) stern, the centre cockpit, shallow draught and the sheltering "doghouse" coachroof — though not every Hillyard has all of them; many carry a conventional transom stern with a transom-hung rudder, and aft-cockpit versions were built alongside the centre-cockpit boats. Beneath the waterline they share a long, straight keel, moderate to heavy displacement and a hull built for durability and an easy motion rather than outright speed. Construction is traditional carvel — mahogany, and sometimes pitch pine, planking on steam-bent oak frames, copper-fastened over grown-oak floors — although David Hillyard was also an early exponent of hard-chine construction, which was simpler to build and gave more interior volume, and which he used on many of the larger models. Early boats were gaff-rigged; from the 1930s onward most were Bermudan, offered as sloops, cutters and ketches, with schooner rig on some of the largest yachts.

The Hillyard Range: From the 2½-Tonner to the 28-Ton Ketch

Hillyard identified its standard designs by "tonnage" rather than by length, and it is important to understand that this is not Thames Measurement tonnage. Because so many hulls carried a canoe stern — with buoyant volume aft of the rudder that the Thames formula ignores — Hillyard measured its boats "stem to stem", so a Hillyard 6-tonner might measure only about five tons by the conventional rule, and a 13-tonner about twelve. By 1930 the catalogue ran from a 2½-tonner up to a 14-tonner, with an 18-tonner added in 1933, and the yard's own gallery spans everything "from 2½ tons to 28 tons".

The smallest standard design was the 2½-tonner, a pretty little cruiser of roughly 18 to 20 feet that was marketed in the 1930s as a proper seagoing yacht for under £100 — the boat that, more than any other, made the Hillyard name. Above it came a family of 4- and 5-ton cruisers of the mid-twenties in length, and the popular post-war 6-tonner of about 27 feet, the first of the standard hulls to adopt the trademark centre cockpit. The 7-tonner of 28 feet is the class of Arthur Ransome's famous cutter Nancy Blackett, built in 1931, and the early-1960s 8-tonner of 30 feet introduced the hard-chine, bilge-keel hull that broadened the range.

The heart of the range — and the reason so many Hillyards crossed oceans — lies in the larger centre-cockpit boats. The 9-tonner, introduced in 1954 at around 32 to 33 feet, is often called the most successful Hillyard of all, with more than eighty built into the early 1970s, while the 12-tonner of 36 to 37 feet, the second most numerous, scaled the same idea up into a comfortable liveaboard and passage-maker; both were built as sloops and ketches. Between them sat the 11-ton hard-chine bilge-keel ketch of about 33 feet, launched in 1968, together with the 13-tonner. Larger still were the 14-, 18-, 20- and 22-ton designs — substantial cutters and ketches — rising to the biggest production boats of around 28 tons and fifty-odd feet. The largest single Hillyard was a one-off 29-ton, 52-foot ketch built in 1965 for shorthanded long-distance cruising, while notable specials included Nevil Shute's 40-foot schooner Runagate of 1939.

David Hillyard had no children, and on his death the yard passed to his nephew Dennis Cullingford, who had led its design work since the late 1950s and carried the range through the post-war decades. Dennis retired in 1990, handing over to his son Simon and reconstituting the firm as David Hillyard Ltd. By then the economics of wooden boatbuilding had long been overtaken by glass-reinforced plastic, and the yard's final new design was itself a departure from tradition: the Moonfleet 36, a GRP cruiser drawn by the celebrated office of Laurent Giles and launched at the 1990 Southampton Boat Show. Only five were built; a fire that destroyed the uninsured moulds brought production to a close in 1992, ending some seventy years of boatbuilding at Littlehampton. Repair and restoration work continued for a number of years afterwards, and the marque is kept alive today by the active Hillyard Owners Association, which maintains the yard's records, sales particulars and a register of surviving boats.

A Hillyard today is a wooden classic, and buying one is as much an act of stewardship as a purchase. Asking prices are modest by the standards of modern cruisers of similar size, but a wooden hull demands honest assessment and ongoing care: a purchase survey by a surveyor experienced in traditional construction is essential, with particular attention to the planking, the fastenings, the oak frames and floors, the garboards and the deck. Well-found, well-maintained examples reward their owners with a seakindly motion, genuine bluewater capability and a character that no production GRP yacht can match — qualities that have taken 9- and 12-ton Hillyards on ocean passages and full circumnavigations. For sailors drawn to traditional long-keel cruising, the marque sits alongside heritage names such as Moody, whose own story began in Hampshire wood, and bluewater builders like Tayana and Pacific Seacraft — though a Hillyard's blend of affordability, shoal draught and unmistakable canoe-sterned profile remains entirely its own.