I am so very glad to be back in the Lowcountry, back on the familiar turf called sand and where the Southern breeze wafts in that mystical, aromatic allure of pluff mud at low tide. (Correctly, that should be spelled "plough" mud but more about that later.)

For those of you who don't know me, I wrote a history column for the Moultrie News for many years before, in 2001, my black Labrador retriever, Bird, and I took off for a 10 year walkabout. We've had an interesting decade. For a time we lived in the charming, pre-Revolutionary town of Lewisburg, W.Va. Spent a year in Savannah. Settled in Gettysburg, Pa., where we learned far more than perhaps anyone needs to know about the Civil War.

It was also a productive time during which I wrote six books - three on Lowcountry history, a children's book written with Kitty McCord and, for an organization that teaches management skills through history, a book on the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg and another on Churchill and Eisenhower.

And now I'm home. Interestingly, my being here was not something planned. I came for a visit but broke my leg rather ferociously on Thanksgiving. It required an operation (my thanks to Dr. Del Schutte and his team at the Medical University of South Carolina for putting this Humpty Dumpty together again), and I'm still in a cast and on crutches. Ah, but the Lord works in mysterious ways. Being laid up has kept me here in the Lowcountry and I marvel at my good fortune. I've spent part of the time at Romain Retreat in Awendaw and a month at Folly Beach. Now I'm somewhat settled in the Old Village and hoping to make being here permanent.

But, as the egoist said, "enough about me." This is a column about pluff mud - more rightfully, plough mud - that deliciously black, gooey, oozing and highly odoriferous marsh mud found in Lowcountry salt marshes and along tidal creeks. Those who do any boating know it well. It's the stuff you put one foot into and then sink up to your gizzard.

While pluff mud is one of the most distinctive physical aspects of our Lowcountry landscape, the name itself is unique to the area. Only on the South Carolina coast do you find pluff mud. It is simply called marsh mud in other places.

How did this unusual name come about? One needs to go back to the early 1800s when Lowcountry farmers finally began to fertilize their fields, particularly where cotton had devastated the soil. They realized that right outside their doors they had a ready-made, easily procurable fertilizer in the nutrient-rich marsh mud.

"The creeks and marshes abound in inexhaustible stores of the most stimulating manures," wrote historian David Ramsay in 1808. Similarly in 1828, the Southern Agriculturist wrote that on Edisto, John Raven Mathews had through a "judicious system of mudding" watched his land go through "a radical change. Under its former proprietor it was an unproductive estate," but now, "a luxuriance of herbage now exists."

It was also in the early 1800s that General Peter Horry of Revolutionary war fame began using marsh mud as fertilizer on his plantations outside of Georgetown. "Rode out with Daniel & took in Several Large Pieces of Sea Mud, Intended as Manure for our Brown Town Garden," Horry noted in his diary. "It is very Salt & Counted Excellent Manure."

Indeed it was excellent fertilizer. Marsh mud is perhaps the best natural compost in the world - a myriad blend of rotting microorganisms which, through a series of biochemical processes give off a sulfuric odor, that rotten-egg "fragrance" we in the Lowcountry know so well.

So how did it get the name pluff mud? This was fertilizer that was plowed into a field. It was plow mud. The archaic way of spelling plow was "plough."

Somewhere in the ensuing centuries as perhaps only Lowcountry South Carolinians can do, the word "plough" changed to "pluff"- not so far a stretch if you think of how one pronounces the word "enough."

So now you know. When that distinctive aroma comes drifting in your window on the next low tide, you're not only smelling the essence of the Lowcountry salt marsh, but a bit of history as well. As for me? It is the smell of home. Glad to be back.