Turf love provides the smell of the summer on candle front

The big seller locally in the world of candles this year doesn’t have essence of lavender or vanilla or eucalyptus infused to its wick to engage your scent. No – this year the scent of choice is that aroma of pure Irish turf.

And for around €12 – or the price of a bag or two of the real stuff – you get a small candle in something the size of an old tobacco tin, which, when lit, radiates the smell of a turf fire.

All of which is wonderful and evocative and a memory of halcyon days at home – or alternatively the very smell that you’ve spent half your life trying to get out of your nostrils.

I’m sure it’s big in America – where actual turf is probably harder to find than gold – or in high-rise apartment blocks where you can marry the scent of the candle with a video of a real fire on your wall-mounted, flat-screen television to give you an artificial yet authentic taste of home.

There was a time when candles just smelled of candles, before they were nothing at all if they weren’t laced with the essence of this, that or the other.

There was a time when candles were almost exclusively for church use, because our forebears had discovered the joys of electric light. And given that rural electrification is still in living memory for some, using candles by night when you had lights burning bright might be seen as lacking a modern outlook.

Of course, everything turns full circle; just as the notion of having exposed floorboards – when you could have Lino – would have once been seen as an indication that you didn’t have the cash to fully furnish your house.

But now, sanded floorboards are back and so too are candles, only now they come with so many scents and smells that you’re either spoiled for choice or tied up in knots.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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