Another Life/Michael Viney: The new wood-stove came from Canada, a splendid, four-square companion in black cast-iron, with see-through doors and baronial embossments.
It is even heavier than its Scandinavian predecessor, all glossy green enamel with moulded reindeer on the sides. That one would have let us smoke salmon in the top if we'd ever had the right kind of wood, but its seams eventually expanded past nursing with fireclay and it has had to go outside to hold geraniums.
A friend beside Croagh Patrick can boast of the ultimate woodstove, of the sort we may all need if the Gulf Stream switches off. It was built by a hands-on visitor who grew up with the tiled masonry stoves of so many older homes in central Europe. This one took 700 bricks and rises at the heart of the house, where one hot fire for a couple of hours now radiates a comfortable warmth all day.
It does help, of course, to live in a wood, as my friend does, and to know about coppicing. Otherwise, the fuel supply can become a problem, even within view of whole hillsides of conifers. A feeling for wood is quite missing from the bleak traditions of Connacht, and the wholesale switch from burning turf to burning oil and gas has prompted little thought for timber as a fuel. One is left to choose between a limited local supply of ready-cut logs in bags and a much more economic delivery of thinnings from Coillte's forests.
The latter can be quite intimidating and on a scale more suited to a pulp factory or sawmill. At the house of another wood-stove friend, I admired a towering rampart of trunks, freshly delivered by forestry lorry and beautifully stacked with the vehicle's own crane, all within 15 minutes.
Such a woodpile will, of course, last for years and make, in the interim, a great nesting-place for wrens.
We have had our own adventures with seven-foot logs straight from the forest, each with the appalling weight of seven buckets of water: the same log, after a year or so of drying, can be hoisted to the sawhorse for the chain-saw with ease. Burned too soon, especially in a stove at low draught, such resinous softwood coats one's chimney with highly flammable creosote, and the chimney-sweep must go aloft with a chisel to chip the soot from the pot.
A real connoisseur of wood fires would not, of course, countenance a pine log in the grate, hissing and spitting out sparks. An incomparable guide and enthusiast was Douglas Gageby, this paper's last editor but one, whose pithy column on the natural world ("In Time's Eye", signed Y and tucked away in the letters page) was a daily refreshment, especially on anything at all to do with trees. At this time of year, he liked to offer counsel to those suburban dwellers who, conditioned by the Christmas cards of childhood, still yearn to top up the central heating with a Yule log glowing in an open fireplace.
People offering ready-cut logs at the door, he warned, are likely to be flogging unseasoned timber, and almost certainly not the ideal fuel of beech logs cut a full year ago. "In general," he advised, "the bluer the wood the better the fire." Ash, with its smooth grey bark, has the special reputation of burning fresh from the saw, but even then, Gageby cautioned, "you might be disappointed if the logs have just been cut. No doubt you can blow flames from them after much use of firelighters and the bellows . . ." Later, he found an old rhyming formula, supposedly written during the 1926 coal strike in Britain, which ran, in part: "Oak logs will warm you well, If they're old and dry/Larch logs of pinewood smell, but the sparks will fly/Beech logs for Christmas time, Yew logs heat well/Scotch \ logs it is a crime, For anyone to sell/Birch logs will burn too fast, Chestnut scarce at all/Hawthorn logs are good to last, If you cut them in the fall . . ."
Douglas Gageby has planted trees prodigiously most of his life, but December, he reminds us, is also the ideal time for cutting them down (if only, in his case, "so that you can see out and feel yourself part of the neighbourhood"). On our crowded acre, where oaks reared from his acorns are now having acorns of their own, we welcome the winter fall of leaves that lets us see more of the mountain and the shore. We made a few gaps last winter by thinning out redundant shelter-belts of fuchsia, in places 3-metres high. Those old branches, often thicker than my arm and oozing a beautiful purple sap, have dried out hard as oak and give great thermal value in the new stove.
Happy Christmas!
Michael Viney's new book, Ireland: A Smithsonian Natural History, is published by The Blackstaff Press at £20