Chestnuts roasting by an open fire …

Chestnuts roasting by an open fire… 

Sorry for the seasonal opening. It’s a bit early for that kind of thing, isn’t it? Nonetheless, it is an enduring yearning, isn’t it? The homeliness of your home, how welcoming it is, is often measured by your fireplace, your hearth. That’s why the writers of seasonal songs often allude to the fireplace.

And this connection between hearth and home has ever been so. Anthropologists looking at the earliest habitations of mankind will always take the presence of fire – or in its most primitive form, a fireplace – as evidence of settlement. Mankind has clearly valued the fire as a friend and ally since the earliest times. These times themselves reach further back. The discovery of the remains of what are being called ‘human-controlled fires’ in South Africa recently dating from a million years ago have added 200,000 years to the timeline of mankind’s use of flame for comfort and, some argue, cookery.

http://genius.com/3122973/Nas-new-world/When-we-made-fire-by-two-sticks-rubbin-together

Clearly our dependency on the ability to control fire has shaped the way we have gone about designing our homes. Even if we flash-forward through the millennia to relatively recent times, we still find that our Stone Age ancestors had the fireplace firmly at the heart of the home. Later Neolithic houses have been unearthed which show that the fireplace was a stone box, designed to contain the fire. It was the Romans, of course, that applied some thought to the clever use of fire and the distribution of heat with their fancy hypocausts delivering hot air up through the floor.

But generally speaking, the open hearth was the main way of heating dwellings of any size for centuries. The smoke would go up and out through the roof (if you were lucky) or, from around the 12^th century and if you were a rich show-off, you might even have had a chimney.

Ah chimneys. They soon turned from being symbols of affluence to symbols of industry. How chimney sweeps came to be known as lucky is a bit of a mystery. Mostsources point back to a story about King George and a horse. And where would Mary Poppins have been without her friend Bert the chimney sweep (even if his mockney accent was a bit unusual!) For the rich, of which Mary’s employers certainly were, the fireplace could be a lavish bit of one-upmanship. Fireplaces themselves became ornamental and desirable. Architect Robert Adam made his name designing the great fireplaces of Georgian Britain. An Adam fireplace was a very desirable showpiece in the well-to-do home of the 18^th century.

http://the-octopus-garden.blogspot.co.uk/2010_08_01_archive.html

These days, you don’t have to engage a great architect to have a feature fireplace. A Bio Fire will bring all the homeliness you need and there are lots of traditional and modern designs you can choose from to suit your home décor. Best of all, you don’t even need a chimney. Sorry Bert! Whether or not you choose to wear the usual seasonal knitwear as you warm yourself and enjoy the flicker of a real flame is entirely up to you ;-)

http://www.ticatoca.com/view.php?product=1217

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Fireplaces – this time it’s personal. About a romance and homeliness of an open fire.

Fireplaces – this time it’s personal 

My partner, bless her, is always going on about the romance and homeliness of an open fire. We don’t have one, you see. What we do have is a gas fire that is fed by a pair of unsightly orange bottles that look like two unexploded 500lb bombs at the side of the house. We live in Northern Ireland. Mains gas is still a novelty and although it is slowly creeping out around the country, the first mains to be laid serviced the wealthy metropolitan areas, not out here in the wilds. Like most people around here, we rely on kerosene to fuel our central heating. When the wind is howling off the North Atlantic (next landfall North is Iceland!), you need it too. 

Her yearning for the open fire is based, I suppose, on memories of her Irish childhood, with the fire glowing peacefully in the grate, dogs lying comatose in front of it, the sweet pungency of turf smoke scenting the air. What she might have forgotten is that someone had to clean that fire out and lug buckets of filthy ash outside to be disposed of. Or that someone had to stagger in with a bucket of turf or coal and keep the blessed thing going. When you could get it going, that is. 

http://uk.pinterest.com/pin/113575221826473715/

Nonetheless, I understand her longing for a real flame, particularly now that we’re properly into winter (for those who don’t know it, the Northern Ireland calendar runs January, February, March, March, March, April, September, October, October, November, November, December …) and those longer nights are a bit nippy. The fireplace has always been the centre of the home, as I have pointed out in previous blogs, and she’s quite right to hanker after that special ambience and cosiness a real fire brings. Maybe she’s a fan of Frank Lloyd Wright, who maintained strong view about the role of the hearth in the family home. 

http://uk.pinterest.com/pin/320037117240093819/

Ever since those earliest hearths, those first controlled flames that brought comfort to our ancestors, upkeep of the fireplace has been an important part of the domestic routine. Not just the gathering of combustible materials but keeping the fireplace clean and free of obstructions to maximise its effects. The benefits of the fireplace were obvious. The downside was the upkeep. As human beings congregated in towns and cities, the combined outpourings of so many domestic and industrial cities became a hazard in itself. But there was no alternative cleaning out the fire and lugging the ash out for disposal. It was a necessary evil. Unless you lived in Downton Abbey, of course, and had the downstairs staff attend to it while you shot some peasants. I mean pheasants. 

Well, joy of joys, there is a way to enjoy all the physical and spiritual comfort a real flame affords without the endless burden of fetching and cleaning. A Bio Fire gives you all the advantages without the mess and bother. Styles to match your living space décor, portable or permanent and no fuss. What could be nicer? 

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