The first swift strike of the match, gently held between the index finger and thumb, is taken directly to the most flammable point under the kindling, where smoky at the beginning, things slowly and then suddenly ignite and with that soon release the warmly scented and unmistakable waft of another time and place.
Everyone has their own particular habit or ritual around the clocks going back this weekend and the acceptance that wintertime begins for real and in this house it’s the first lighting of the open turf fire. Like in my parents’ house, and their parents before, it’s something of a long-standing exercise too and not just in that physical act of lighting it.
Only it seems to get more difficult every year, beginning with the supply of turf. It’s been several years since our dad stopped hand-cutting and saving it for himself from the last of the now mostly abandoned – or “banned” rather – blanket bogs spread thinly around the borderline of the Dublin-Wicklow Mountains. Despite repeated intentions, my lack of strength and stamina means we’ve been resigned to sourcing from elsewhere, in desperate times relying on that same unmistakable waft which depending on what way the wind is blowing can come from directly across the road at Johnnie Fox’s pub.
The bog has always been a country for young and old men, separated only by their willingness to engage with the proper physical toiling that comes with it. We got a laugh growing up telling anyone who telephoned the house looking for our dad that “he’s up in the bog and he’ll be up there all day” and in truth there is no such thing as a half-shift in this stern game.
Few people I know have written more eloquently about it than Con Houlihan, going back to his own days when the great turf rush on the moorland between Castleisland and Listowel was, as every pub wit in the country said, "the burning topic".
This was around the same time the first bookmaker set up shop in Castleisland, “put a lovely fair-haired girl behind the counter and the words Turf Accountant on the window”. On the day after it opened, an old man from the mountain came in and said to the bemused blonde: “I have a great reek for sale, every sod as hard and as black as coal, and as dry as snuff. How much a ton would you be giving?”
Houlihan wrote pure poetry about the physicality of turf cutting in all its glorious stages, beginning with the man who found himself on the mountain for the first time, where as if “cast back into the primal world” he had come to know the supreme crisis of trying to light a fire on a misty day and to delight in the first signs of steam from the kettle.
Each stage was and still is typically assigned its own man, or woman for that matter, beginning with the expert who held and cut with the sleán, dictating the pace and tactics for the day; the breencher would then dispatch the freshly cut sods to the spreader, who “needed the strength and stamina of a second-row forward and something of the skill of a scrum-half”.
Later, the sods duly dried a little, it was the turn of the clamper, and the footing process which involves stacking the sods into small piles to complete the drying. Such is the diligence required in this exercise Houlihan often saw the clamper eye his finished work with the satisfaction that Édouard Manet knew when he looked at his woman in A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.
With only a few old sods leftover from last winter, this weekend's lighting is another reminder too that a good turf accountant these days is hard to find. As in someone who truly understands the turf-cutting business as a long-standing tradition and exercise. So earlier this week I called up David Matthews, the two-time Irish Olympian and who up until June had held the Irish 800m record for 26 years with his 1:44.82 – before Mark English finally bettered it with his 1:44.71, a month before the Tokyo Olympics.
We’d been chatting out in Tokyo where Matthews was delivering his athletics expertise from the RTÉ commentary position, and where he first offered me some of his own supply of turf which he sources from the Mylerstown bog close to his home Robertstown in Kildare. “I’ve tons of it,” he told me this week: turns out he does.
Matthews wasn’t born into this long-standing exercise, rather married into it, his wife Niamh inheriting a slice of the raised bog area which has been in her family for generations, going back to when the Land Commission broke up this part of the country for farming purposes, frequently including a bank of turf, her father Joe Jacob still tending to several banks of his own.
Ownership gives them the right to cut and save every year: “We’ve gone commercial on the cutting, really, and one machine cut yields around two to two-and-a-half tons, or 3,000-3,500 sods, and we’d do maybe 15 of those a year,” he told me, which sounds like a lot of heat for nothing, until it comes to that long-standing part.
“The saving is actually the shrinking of the sod, paradoxically, and that’s all still done by hand. All the family would come down, and the footing, or the raring, is the hardest part, probably one of the perfect exercises in strength and conditioning.
"I've trained on the hills with Noel Carroll, up around Merville Road and Roebuck, and later under Dr Zbigniew Orywal, his bounding and squat exercises, old-school strength and conditioning. And on The Tan in Melbourne, the famous hill session there, I've done it all. But there's nothing like footing a row of turf to sort out the men from the boys. It's horrific.
“I’d also equate footing a row of turf to an 800m race. There’s the inevitability about it, it’s going to hurt, you know what’s ahead of you, you just have to put the head down and get through it. It’s a constant physical and mental battle, and you don’t lift your head until you’re at the end of the row.”
Indeed, Matthews has served as fitness coach for several intercounty teams, most recently the Laois hurlers, who balked at his suggestion they spend just one day in the bog.
“It’s that isometric hold of the semi-squat position, that’s the killer. Do that for two hours and it would challenge anyone. It’s sheer back-breaking. People in the locality who specialise in footing, old men and teenagers, and have muscles you never knew existed.”
Which may or may not necessarily transfer on to the running track or field, only as an exercise in strength and conditioning exercise, might it be time to invest more in the turf accountant?
