Home fires burning

The first fire of the winter! It always seems a moment for celebration, when the hearth draws people and animals close, united by the heat and the glow, the smoke and the crackle.

In times gone by the hearth was the hub of family life and the symbol of the home. Medieval Welsh laws forbad the extinguishing of the fire and it would be kept going all year round. To lose the vital spark would threaten the survival of the household. Even when a dwelling was abandoned and the stones carried away for other purposes the hearth would be left untouched. It was bad luck to remove it.

Men make them fires on the hearth
Each under his roof-tree,
And the Four Winds that rule the earth
They blow the smoke to me.

Across the high hills and the sea
And all the changeful skies,
The Four Winds blow the smoke to me
Till the tears are in my eyes.

Until the tears are in my eyes.
And my heart is wellnigh broke
For thinking on old memories
That gather in the smoke.

With every shift of every wind
The homesick memories come,
From every quarter of mankind
Where I have made a home.

Rudyard Kipling never shied away from sentiment but it's true that the sight and smell of an open fire seems to hold an atavistic potency even for those who never had one. For me, one of my first memories is of the cats of my early childhood basking in the winter warmth on this very same oak fender, just like Tablet here, in the cottage where I was born in another part of Wales. I can even remember the names of the cats: Zuleika, Dablet and Rutterkin.