- Sometimes
the remains of stone-built houses and
fields are also found, for example in
Shetland or the west of Ireland. They were
buried by blanket peat, which grows
over the land surface, covering and
preserving earlier settlements.
- The
most macabre or eerie archaeological remains
to come out of bogs are probably human
bodies. These have been found in Britain
and Ireland, and the best known British bog
body comes from Lindow Moss in Cheshire. Many
of the best preserved and most well known
bodies come from Denmark. Some of these
people and occasionally animals seem to have
fallen into the bog, but other times they
were deliberately buried there. Often we
don’t really know why, but some of the
bodies do seem to have been deliberately
sacrificed and placed in the bog. A bog body
has also been discovered in Greenhead Moss,
although he is certainly not ancient, and
probably lived in the seventeenth or
eighteenth century.
A gruesome
find: a Dark Age Cow (8th Century AD) from Solway
Moss, Scottish Border. The cow appears to have been
killed in a ritualistic way, as only the head and
front legs remained, along with the remains of a
wooden pole.
These may have been placed on the bog as a totemic
symbol. Keep out!
© Colin Wells
Bog bodies
www.archaeology.org/online/features/bog/
The
bog body from Greenhead Moss
LINK to GHM history pages or Cambusnethan site
The wide range of evidence from peat
bogs shows that they can tell us so much about
different parts of the environment- people, plants,
wildlife, climate – from times long before
written records. This is what makes bogs so
important, but if peat is removed, destroyed or dries
out the record is gone forever. For example, most of
these special archaeological objects have been found
when the peat was being destroyed, for example by
peat cutting and drainage.
The future for peat bogs:
threats and conservation
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