How 1,000 years of history will help keep my energy bills down this winter

IT has been a long, showerclotted day in my week of holiday and, come eventide, I take pleasure in setting the fire just as my late grandmother used to. Sheets of newspaper I roll up, bend in two and stack loosely in the grate. The sticks of dry kindling I lay above in a sort of rack. With one match I light the newsprint in three places and, as the wood catches and crackles, I wedge in a number of peats.

Soon these are ablaze in golden flame and aromatic smoke and, now, I can commune with my forebears, especially once the last of the kindling is ash – for peat burns with a perfect, silky silence.

except that I am not actually at home on the Isle of Lewis. I am in the cottage in deepest Ireland I take for a few days every year. The peat – though he, long naturalised to the emerald Isle, calls it ‘turf’ – was the gift two evenings ago of my friend Duncan. And it was not the Stornoway Gazette I minutes ago scrunched up, but the Leitrim observer.

Yet, back home, I gather the moors have been busy, despite an indifferent Hebridean summer and in the face of increasingly terrifying prices for domestic heating oil. In 2001, it was but 19p a litre. In 2012 – and we grumbled enough at that – it was 70p. A friend this week ironically posted his bill on Facebook. He had just been done for 96.3p a litre.

Those with the strength and the time, accordingly, have been out cutting peat. Disinterring tools from long dust and neglect and tramping up the hill onto the moor, to the given bank their people have been hewing for as long as anyone can remember. It is hard work and, ideally, a two-man job, one to cut and the other to throw. The worst chore is ‘skinning the bank’, removing the top, heathery sod and placing it carefully at your feet to conserve the grazing.

BUT the work thereafter is a positive pleasure. I always elect to throw, flinging slabs of what resembles nothing so much as chocolate pudding into a neat lattice on the ground behind my mate with the iron, and once we get a good rhythm going we can cut perhaps 15 peats a minute.

We use an L-shaped peat iron on Lewis, a tarsgeir – the word is from the norse, ‘turfskur’ – and these tools are today so prized I have had two stolen from the hill over the years, for there is not a blacksmith left on the island with the skill to make one.

Peat is formed by water, acid and – most of all – time. Indeed, it is still being formed on Lewis, though very slowly – perhaps a millimetre a year, which means that the top row I am harvesting was laid down when I was in primary school, but the stuff at my boots is about a thousand years old.

And you never know what you might find. Forty years ago, an island youngster was invited onto Blue Peter after disinterring a Viking sword.

At my Harris peats, I frequently uncovered branches of birch and hazel, where no trees had grown in living memory.

And – given that, till the 1600s, any stranger unwise enough to set foot on Lewis was routinely murdered – there is always the fear of uncovering a dead body.

I always try to cut in May – early, by Lewis standards, but that is when we are practically guaranteed a couple of weeks of very dry weather: cold, if you are not in the sun, but with a bright and steady wind blowing from the north-east – which is exactly what you want.

Fresh-hewn peat is, after all, mostly water. Granted that kindly weather, in a week to a fortnight each ‘fad’ will be dry enough to stand on edge with a few brothers, like little houses of cards and which we call rùdhan. In three weeks or so they will be dry enough to bag up and take home.

But the weather, of course, is not always kindly. In 2002 the summer was so wet my peats were not dry till September.

In 1923 – now all but out of living memory – conditions were so awful that the peats could not be won at all and, on top of that, the harvest failed.

Folk all over Britain subscribed to a Lewis Destitution Fund, hundreds of households went hungry that winter and – the names of the liners are still bleakly recalled: the Canada, the Marloch, the Metagama – hundreds and hundreds of young men emigrated.

My grandmother, then a girl of 11, never forgot standing by the Butt of Lewis as the Metagama sailed by.

‘And did many of the Habost boys go?’ my father once asked her. She stared. ‘Donald,’ she said, ‘they all left.’ Most never saw their parents again.

I remember one man, all mid-Atlantic drawl and bewilderment, home in 1984 for the first time in six decades. He soon flew back, preferring the new World to his vanished one. Dozens and dozens simply disappeared, in the terrible and hungry Midwestern winters of the Thirties.

THeSe things come too readily to your mind, out on the moor. It is a strange, stripped environment, all wind and sky and water. There is no sense of unspoiled wilderness. The atmosphere, rather, is as if everyone who has ever mattered is dead and gone.

It is not without beauty, especially when the sun is shining. Bees drowse in the bell heather. Dragonflies thrum by like the Luftwaffe.

A heron stands by the lochan, quite still, in her lethal patience. out at my Shawbost peats – over a mile from the nearest house, well up the local mountain – I was often entranced by an eagle.

It was Duncan who helped me win my Harris peats in distant, sodden 2002. These days he labours with his fatherin-law, Philip McManus, on the shoulder of the Ben at the back of Gubaveeny, Thornhill and Roo. no one has ever been able to tell me what the name of the Ben is. Like so much else, such local knowledge was lost in the Famine.

Like most locals, Philip’s ‘turf’ is cut mechanically, by hired plant. All that’s left for him and Duncan to do is the ‘footing,’ propping the peats up to dry.

And, either side of the Irish Sea, you can tell at a glance if a man has been at the peats, for – once dried – it is remarkably difficult to wash off your hands, and remains at the edges of your fingernails for days.

I am always struck how cold fresh peat is, and the shimmer of its paraffin – and how much the peats shrink in the drying. often, too, I do resent the work. But, finally, about the turn of June to July, by hired truck or a kindly neighbour’s tractor, the bagged peats are home.

Those with the space and the skill still like to build the traditional and rather beautiful peat stack, a neat and aerodynamic thing that in profile deftly matched the old thatched blackhouses.

But, however you store them, they still burn – and, four decades from my childhood, I can still lose myself for an age in that fragrant, golden glow.