JIMMY White my neighbor arrived over to the cottage door earlier this evening with a bag of real turf, cut by hand in his native Co. Limerick. We live in an age where a bag of handcut turf is a gift to be savored.

We drank a small whiskey over the whiskery brown sods before Jimmy went back home to his own fire. The weather this April, as the cuckoo begins to sing again, was bright and mostly dry, but there is still a frosty sting about the place when the sun goes down. Perfect nights for a real turf fire.

We didn't burn much oil this winter, not so much for the obvious cost reasons but because we invested in a solid fuel stove back in the summer. This, combined with the huge hearth fire in the front room of the cottage, and our thick walls and thatch, has been more than adequate. The Dutch Nation often complains about the rooms being too warm!

And we burn briquettes rather than turf, timber or coal. Briquettes are the modern Irish turf, produced by a state organization called Bord Na Mona. Briquettes come in bale form.

They are bricks of compressed peat, each one exactly the same size and shape as the last one. They provide a clean, efficient fuel, giving off rather more heat than the old turf, burning away slowly to a fine white ash.

If you never sat at a hearth fire glowing with the ruby bellies of real turf sods you would be 100% with briquettes. But if you reddened your young ankles ever by a real turf fire burning away under a crane laden with iron pots then there is a gap there.

Something is always missing. It is the aromatic thing mostly, the perfume of the bogs.

The briquettes almost smell neutral. Outside the house, on a frosty night, you will sometimes catch the faint peatland aromatics.

But never, ever as powerfully or as heartwarmingly somehow as the scent which began to wreath around my front room as I set some kindling and a single firelighter in the big hearth, and circled Jimmy's mighty handcut Limerick turves around the crackling woodland. Every long black sod was as different as the moods of the man who cut them with a long-handled "slean "(turf spade) last summer.

And the white sere grasses that had adhered to them when they were laid out wetly on the face of the bog to be "saved" and dried by the sun all burned away quickly, cracklingly, whitely, in a rush of sparks. And then the sods leaned up close together like old men in a pub. Whispering secrets.

And then their bellies reddened from the wooden kindling, as it began to die. And then the flames began to dance on the walls and ceiling.

And the room filled with the ancient spirits of the bog. Dull would he be of soul who would turn on an electric light at such a time.

I was alone with one dog and one sleeping cat, the flames filling Friday's terrier eyes with mysteries - mine, too - the cat's sheathed claws curling up with comfort, the old cottage room warming up slowly the way it warmed a century ago. Heaven.

When we were children there were two years when Sandy, my father, rented a bog bank so we would have the experience of going to the bog to save our own turf. I flash back there, to those days, inside the scented halo of Jimmy's turf.

Sandy had rheumaticky arms I never saw straight-locked at the elbows, so he hired a neighbor to cut the turf from the moist brown bank both years. And the neighbor's strong teenage son barrowed the turf away from his father's flying slean to the flat drying area.

But Sandy and his four "cubs" and one "cutty" (Maura, God rest her) spread out the heavy wet sods to dry. And our mother Mary came up in the evenings with "bog tea" in bottles, and thick ham sandwiches and biscuits, and you will never forget that taste.

And we came back several times to turn the drying turf over, finally to "clamp" it into small piles of about a dozen sods each. And finally we borrowed a donkey and cart and brought the turf home triumphantly in about a dozen highly piled loads for the fuel shed. We were so proud.

And those fires afterwards, lit with twists of the old Irish Press newspaper that employed three of those cubs afterwards, were special indeed.

We cut them out of the guts of Fermanagh. Fermanagh's name actually, in loose translation from the Irish, is Fir Manach - the Bogmen!

There are always what I call pragmatics. Sandy's turf was what they called "fum turf." It was very lightweight and very brown. It flared up quickly but would last no time at all, and not that much heat either.

So he would cannily buy several loads of what they called "breasted turf" from a friend up near Swanlinbar on the Cavan border. This turf was heavy and black, like Jimmy's turf, and was so called because it was cut by a sleansman not cutting straight down, but parallel to the bog bank because invariably this fine turf was resting atop beds of stone.

They called it "stone turf" too and, when nudged now and again with the tongs, it would not alone burn all night, but the stubborn embers hiding in the ash would spring to life again the next morning. No firelighters back then!

Those thoughts were what came back to me because of Jimmy's turf. I must have been musing there, sitting on one of the hobs, for the better part of an hour. I went outside finally to check that the chimney was okay because you do that when you have a thatched roof.

Another neighbor of my own generation was passing the gate. He sniffed and said, "Lord, that's a fine smell, the smell of real turf."

I said to come in and enjoy it properly and he was glad to. We had another dram comfortably around the hearth, talking about the old days.

And the flames danced in time, no light on at all, and Friday the terrier fell asleep. And the cat never awoke at all. And everybody was happy.

Because of Jimmy's turf.