[Stoves] Peat

[neiltm at uwclub.net]

Just a quick note on returning from a month's wild car camping in 
Scotland to report my pleasant surprise to disover how well and easily 
peat burns in a TLUD.

In the highlands and far north we found sporadic small scale peat cutting 
and drying, no doubt for occasional domestic fires, but on nothing like 
the scale I remember in Ireland in the mid 1960s where the roads were 
lined with substantial piles of drying peat for mile after mile, and it 
was obviously relied upon by the crofters for all their heating and 
cooking needs.

It crumbled into small lumps very easily, so was a lot easier to load a 
stove than with prepared chunks of wood.  It took a little longer to 
establish from startup, but then burned with a steady clean flame and 
longer duration than with wood.  The first experiment cooked our meal 
nicely.

Best fuel on the moors and in the mountains apart from that was heather 
and gorse, often easy to just pick up in dry well seasoned easy snappy 
pieces, sometimes also a legacy of moorland fires.  And Scots pine cones 
of course.  It was all just so easy, when we weren't coming under attack 
from Culicoides impunctatus of course (punkies - biting midges) which are 
the principle reason for not much habitation of the highlands!

Neil Taylor