I swept this unusual but rather attractive French Mirus Wood-Burning Stove very recently in a property in Mill Lane Saffron Walden. The stove is unusual in that the fuel is not loaded from the front, but from a side door. Looking on the web it is easy to see that these antique Mirus stoves are very sought after and achieve very high prices when sold on. It would appear that Mirus were making stoves in the early part of the 20^th Century, a number I looked at were made in the 1920’s.

Unfortunately for the customer I had to condemn the installation as being unsafe to use, as can be observed from the photos, the stove pipe was not securely fixed to the bottom of the liner. As can be seen the stove pipe had been secured using a jubilee clip, when this had failed a piece of chicken wire had been used. This is always a difficult moment for the sweep, who must tactfully point out the defects and negotiate a solution. In this instance the customer was very reasonable and could immediately see the fault and recognize that it required remedying. The customer added that it wasn’t the first problem he had encountered since buying the property, adding that the previous occupier from whom he had bought the property was a ‘bit of a bodger’!

I suggested when the customer has the repair undertaken, he have the elbow removed and replaced with a T-Piece which will collect any soot coming down the flue and to have a sweeping hatch fitted to the stove pipe.

Time for another thatched animals’ picture, I’ve not had one on the blog for sometime now! This time it’s running hares as opposed to the boxing hares I’ve posted previously. This picture was taken on a thatched cottage’s roof between Finchingfield and Stambourne; so very much a local thatchamals picture.

I have also found an appropriate seasonal poem about hares:

A Calendar of Hares by Anna Crowe

At the raw end of winter
the mountain is half snow, half
dun grass. Only when snow
moves does it become a hare.

If you can catch a hare
and look into its eye
you will see the whole world.

That day in March
watching two hares boxing
at the field’s edge, she felt
the child quicken.

It is certain Midas never saw a hare
or he would not have lusted after gold.

When the buzzard wheels
like a slow kite overhead
the hare pays out the string.

The man who tells you
he has thought of everything
has forgotten the hare.

The hare’s form, warm yet empty.
Stumbling upon it he felt his heart
lurch and race beneath his ribs.

Beset by fears, she became
the hare who hears
the mowers’ voices grow louder.

Light as the moon’s path over the sea
the run of the hare over the land.

The birchwood a dapple
of fallen gold: a carved hare
lies in a Pictish hoard.

Waking to the cry of a hare
she ran and found the child sleeping.

November stiffens
into December: hare and grass
have grown a thick coat of frost.

An unusual item literally for this weeks blog, something found up a flue which really shouldn’t have been there! The customer had asked me in to sweep the lined flue to her old Rayburn Range at a property in Radwinter. The customer reported that despite having had the appliance swept religiously for many years it had not been working as efficiently as it had done for a number of years. There was nothing too unusual about the installation, a couple of 45 degree turns in the flue, sweeping access from the appliance and a standard cowl on the top of the flue.

I swept the flue using 8mm power sweeping click rods and small scrubber head and retrieved from the flue the small brush pictured, along with a quantity of sooty debris. A simple type 2 smoke test demonstrated that the flue was now drawing strongly. I suppose to add insult to injury the removed brush was only half the diameter of the flue pipe and therefore would never have been suitable for cleaning the flue effectively. I’m guessing that it had become stuck in one of the turns or the cowl and that the power sweeping head was powerful enough to dislodge it. The dishonest tradesman, I won’t grace him with the title sweep, clearly didn’t tell the customer that he had lost a brush up the flue and made no significant attempt to retrieve it!

The customer told me that one of her previous sweeps had been an old man who always struggled to sweep the Rayburn and never issued her with a Sweeping Certificate! She said that she stopped using him after she came into the kitchen one hot summers day when he was sweeping the Rayburn and found him sweating, stripped to the waist and blaspheming.

I suppose the moral of the story is to always use a Certified Sweep to do any sweeping work!

I recently swept this Yeoman County Multi-Fuel Stove with its rear flue and T-Piece. This and the smaller Exmoor Multi-Fuel Stove are unusual in the Yeoman Range in that they have a contemporary appearance with their large window to the firebox. This monster has a 13Kw rating and the owner tells me that it throws out a terrific amount of heat once it is in full operation. This stove and the smaller Exmoor do have one traditional feature that all Yeoman stoves have, the Tudor Rose emblem. However, on this stove as with the Exmoor, the Tudor are actually the primary air intake controls.

Yeoman Stoves are now owned by stovax, but you can find them at:

Yeoman Stoves,

Falcon Road,

Sowton Industrial Estate

Exeter, EX2 7LF

Technical Enquiries: 01392261950
Customer Services: 01392474500

County

I haven’t included a thatched animal in the blog for some time now, so I thought I would present this example from a roof in Ashdon. Clearly, this is an owl, but what type? Is it a Barn owl, Tawney owl or Little owl? Yes, there are six species of owl in the UK; Barn, Tawney, Little, Long Eared, Short Eared and European Eagle Owl.

Owls are birds from the order Strigiformes, which includes about 200 species of mostly solitary and nocturnal birds of prey typified by an upright stance, a large, broad head, binocular vision, binaural hearing, sharp talons, and feathers adapted for silent flight. Exceptions include the diurnal northern hawk-owl and the gregarious burrowing owl.

Owls hunt mostly small mammals, insects, and other birds, although a few species specialize in hunting fish. They are found in all regions of the Earth except polar ice caps and some remote islands. Owls are divided into two families: the true (or typical) owl family, Strigidae, and the barn-owl family, Tytonidae.

Man has long had a soft spot for owls. We’ve been around these creatures an awfully long time and are held in thrall by a mysterious bird that’s seldom seen in daylight, yet is master of the night: often heard, but hardly ever seen. Most woodland owls are nocturnal or crepuscular – active at dawn and dusk – and like to tuck themselves away in a daytime roost.

Whether you’ve observed five long-eared owls roosting in thick blackthorn, a barn owl hunting a road at dusk or a little brown owl peeping out from a hole in a tree, the one feature they all have in common is the stare, which, along with a parliament, is a collective noun for wise old owls.

What ever their collective noun is, I think this specimen from Ashdon is a particularly attractive bird! How about some Owl poetry?

The Wise Old Owl

A wise old owl lived in an oak
The more he saw the less he spoke
The less he spoke the more he heard.
Why can’t we all be like that wise old bird?

By Billy Mills

Late Night Ramblings

As the moon shines
And the stars decorate the sky,
A lonely owl hymns
While the bats fly.
Lightning bugs scatter around
Like will-o’-the-wisps at night,
Without any sound
Oh, what a delight!
The neighbour’s hound is on guard
She will not allow anyone to pass,
No one is allowed in her yard
At this hour, only a fool will walk on her grass.
Her howl pierces the air
Bringing an end to the silence,
She announces she won’t share
She will not tolerate any form of violence.
Across the street, few floors above
Two players are taking their turns,
In the famous game of push and shove
While a tiny candle burns.

By Tanay Sengupta

I recently swept this very attractive Aga Little Wenlock Classic Multi-Fuel Stove in a house in Wood End Widdington. I also ordered and returned to replace the rear ceramic firebrick in the stove; the original having almost completely crumbled away after 16 years of use. As is clearly visible in the Photo this stove is unusual because it has a black enamel finish. I think it is rather attractive, however Aga quickly discontinued this model as the enamelled version did not sell at all well. A shame, I think, don’t you?

As usual I ordered the part from Fire Spares in Barnsley West Yorkshire:

Unit 4 Park Spring
Springvale Road
Grimethorpe
Barnsley
South Yorkshire
S72 7BQ

01226 715100

Because of my membership of the Guild of Master Sweeps I was able to obtain a substantial £25 discount which I was able to pass on to a grateful customer.

Here is an example of some of the minor repairs I do on some of the woodburning stoves I get to sweep. I discovered that this rather attractive Chesney Beaumont 6 Stove required a little servicing attention when I attended to sweep the flue this year. As you can see from the photographs, the rear and right-hand side firebricks were in a number of parts and the integrity of the brick was beginning to fail; putting the stove casting in danger of damage.

I ordered the required bricks from a Company called Fire Spares based in Barnsley West Yorkshire:

Unit 4 Park Spring
Springvale Road
Grimethorpe
Barnsley
South Yorkshire
S72 7BQ

01226 715100

I was able to order and pay for the items on the phone and the were dispatched out to me the following day, excellent service. I was also able to get a 25% trade discount on the parts because of my membership of the Guild of Master Sweeps. I was then able to reattend the address and fit the parts. The customer is now pleased and set up for some safe winter burning!

Chesney are a British company who amongst other things interior design, do a wide range of contemporary and traditional wood-burning stoves:

Battersea Park Road

194-202 Battersea Park Road,
London, SW11 4ND

0207 6271410
0207 6221078
sales@chesneys.co.uk

https://chesneys.co.uk

A good news story this week! Here is a Clearview 750 Stove that I swept in Steeple Bumpstead not too long ago. Its an impressive stove, the largest on in the Clearview range. It has a phenomenal heat output of 14Kw. As you can see from the photograph, I used my large Viper to sweep it; a piece of equipment specially designed by the Germans for sweeping lined appliances. It is basically old-style sweeping rods, but on a continuous real, so no time is wasted fitting rods together. A very fast, efficient and clean method for sweeping a chimney. This Clearview stove worked so efficiently over the last burning season it produced only a very fine soot when it was swept. This shows to the sweep that the stove is working well and has been burnt efficiently, i.e. nice and hot with plenty of oxygen being allowed into the stove.

Clearview are a British company based in Bishops Castle, Shropshire:

Clearview Stoves

Bishops Castle,

Shropshire,

SY9 5GB

01588 650401

https://www.clearviewstoves.com

It’s a few months ago now that a lady customer called me to her farmhouse outside Hempstead, because her stove wasn’t working properly. She told me that the woodburning stove just wasn’t drawing properly, she was having difficulty getting it lit and when it was a light the room quickly filled with smoke. Straight away it sounds like some kind of blockage in the flue.

The blockage was actually found very easily, when I dropped the baffle (Throat Plate) to examine the flue. Wedged between the baffle and the mouth of the flue was the dead jackdaw in the photograph. Having removed this, I then swept the chimney as usually, removing only a small quantity of nest material, i.e. a few small twigs etc. I then smoke tested the flue to ensure that it was clear of all blockages and was working correctly.

The poor old Jackdaw must have fallen down the flue when right at the start of his/her nest building enterprise and got stuck at the bottom of the flue. At least the customer was pleased that the solution to her problem was so simple.

I haven’t had a thatched animal for some time so I thought I would do one this week. The offering today is from a thatched roof in Walberswick which I saw when we were having a short break back in February – Seems like a long time ago now! I think that this animal is meant to be a wild boar? But I stand to be corrected on that one as it might just be an ordinary pig?

Looking at Wikipedia for wild boar you find the following information: The wild boar (Sus scrofa), also known as the wild swine, Eurasian wild pig, or simply wild pig, is a suid native to much of Eurasia, North Africa, and the Greater Sunda Islands. Human intervention has spread its distribution further, making the species one of the widest-ranging mammals in the world, as well as the most widely spread suiform.  Its wide range, high numbers, and adaptability mean that it is classed as least concern by the IUCN and it has become an invasive species in part of its introduced range. The animal probably originated in Southeast Asia during the Early Pleistocene, and outcompeted other suid species as it spread throughout the Old World.

As of 1990, up to 16 subspecies are recognized, which are divided into four regional groupings based on skull height and lacrimal bone length. The species lives in matriarchal societies consisting of interrelated females and their young (both male and female). Fully grown males are usually solitary outside the breeding season. The grey wolf is the wild boar’s main predator throughout most of its range, except in the Far East and the Lesser Sunda Islands, where it is replaced by the tiger and Komodo dragon, respectively. It has a long history of association with humans, having been the ancestor of most domestic pig breeds and a big-game animal for millennia. Boars have also re-hybridized in recent decades with feral pigs; these boar–pig hybrids have become a serious pest animal in Australia, Canada, United States, and Latin America.