Barry Clifford: A Stove Of Economic Proportions

There was Paddy, a seasoned veteran of logs from Mayo, that, it seemed anyway, had the great knowledge of wood. It was all about it’s character apparently, it’s own story that each piece and log had to tell, or so he told me. I thought this guy should have been a poet and not a woodsman. He looked the part too: grizzled, tanned permanently from working in the great outdoors, and had cultivated a personality that suggested stories often told and those yet to tell. He had come to deliver my first order of wood for my brand new stove that I had hoped would do what it said on the tin: A stove of economic proportions.  A year down the road I had learned a lot about wood, about economy, about a stove, and Paddy is a distant memory. 

I sought another price for the wood from hither and thither. One man from Gort dropped a load outside the door. From a distance it all looked good, but in the dark the darkness can deceive for in the morning it resembled some kind of brown vomit that would fill no more than a few large dustbin sized black bags. That vomit cost €130. So research and bargain was the game now. Soon the contacts grew, the sizes of the loads got bigger in tandem with the prices getting smaller.

There was the dampness of wood, the strong ash, the softer beech, and a few more assorted types in between. I was getting better at this new world of fire by wood. It is renewable and sustainable too; that alone makes for a good feeling for this beat up planet. No more was the stove glass blackened by damp wood and had found new ways to overcome it. All rather basic sense really which can only get basic if you make more than a few mistake as I did. Dodgy damp and stubborn wood is easily sorted by dry kindling and equally dry economy chunks of wood to get the stove all molten; then, as long as you feed the beast it will burn easily the most stubborn wood.

The other rule to remember: there is nothing cheaper than free. If you got skills or something else to barter you can cut the cost of your wood to next to zero.

So get chopping, get bartering, or get bargaining for what is fire from the sun, addictive to watch, and cheap to run. This winter my oil bill ran to €50 and I expect this next winter my wood bill to be zero. One thing that Paddy said was true, kind of anyway: each log has it’s own character, it’s own story to tell. I would like to add: no image of a real fire is the same or can ever be repeated. It’s original in it’s form and brilliance every time.

By Barry Clifford