Imagine going back in time to visit your Irish ancestors in their thatched cottage. I bet you think of the bucolic setting. Have you given any thought to the odors you would encounter? Apparently, it’s not quite the beautiful experience we pictured.
Dr. Marion McGarry, a lecturer at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology in Ireland, describes the smells your delicate 21st-century nose would be accosted by when entering a 19th-century Irish thatched cottage. (Nevertheless, I’d still like to time travel to visit them.)
She writes:
“The immediate smell on entering a cottage would have been the ambient smell of the materials used on the thatch, semi-dried straw, reed or heather, then: the turf smoke.
. . .
“In the evening time the scent would also have been apparent of crude candles made of animal fat or tallow candles which were burned for everyday use (beeswax and better quality candles were saved for special occasions). Towards the end of the nineteenth century oil lamps became common and these omitted the odours of whale oil or paraffin, depending on the oil used.”
To learn more about the smells of an Irish cottoage, read Dr. McGarry’s blog post, Sensory experience in an Irish cottage: smells. Her blog post, The traditional Irish kitchen table, may also interest you.
