The smell of peat. I first glimpsed it in a whiskey distillery 4 years ago. Burned, dark, the odor of pure earth. I still don't understand how chunks of earth can be cut out of the ground and burned, but so it is. That was the smell of our beach holiday in Ireland. We drove to the west coast and slowly off pavement, to gravel, to grassy gravel, to a near field, when we ended up in the middle of some flowers on the seacliffs. The winds pulled us out of the car into the house, where we cooked and …
