Bog Bodies

The discovery of two preserved bog bodies raises questions about both political and religious rituals among the ancient Irish.

An Irish bog. Bog bodies are common throughout Europe, with several high-profile cases having been found.

Sarah777 / Public domain

In March of 2003, workers at Bord na Mona--Ireland's leading provider of peat fuel--encountered a problem with one of their harvesting machines. Closer inspection of the vehicle revealed something horrific: there was a body trapped in the machinery. Had it not clogged the harvester, the corpse could easily have gone unnoticed. The visible part--mummified by the cool, oxygen-deficient but highly acidic conditions of bog water--had turned a shade of brown that was indistinguishable from the colour of turf, as the peat used for fuel in Ireland is commonly known. Only the strange, leathery texture of the skin and an elaborate quiff of strikingly red hair marked the body out from the mass of peat surrounding it.

Following established protocol for such situations, Bord na Mona contacted both the Garda Technical Bureau (Ireland's police forensic unit) and the Archaeological Development Services. The body was extricated from the harvesting machine, but only the torso remained intact; it is believed that the machinery shredded the lower half of the body before stalling. To the relief of those involved in the find, the archaeologists were quickly able to determine that Clonycavan Man--named for the County Meath town close to where he was found--died at some point between 392 and 201 BC. Yet even though the workers had not come across the body of any individual known to the living, the Garda Technical Bureau's conclusions as to the cause of death would still prove gruesome. Because, as it turned out, Clonycavan Man was the victim of an ancient--and extremely violent--act of murder.

Clonycavan Man grabbed headlines around the world when he was discovered. Bog bodies are not uncommon in Europe, and there have been several high-profile, well-preserved cases that have attracted widespread interest: Lindow man was found preserved in a bog in Cheshire, England in 1984, while Grauballe Man and Tollund Man had both come to light in Danish bogs as early as the 1950s. But it is a feature that Clonycavan Man shared with Grauballe Man in particular that was especially arresting: the vivid shock of red hair. Among a population with one of the highest genetic tendencies towards red hair, the sight of Clonycavan Man's carefully arranged, blatantly ginger Mohawk-like hairstyle couldn't fail to strike a poignant chord in Ireland.

Clonycavan Man's hair turned out to be significant in the case. It was most likely arranged in the curiously modern, almost punk-like Mohawk in order to add the impression of greater height: Clonycavan Man was just short of 1.6 metres (5 feet 2 inches) tall--small for an adult male, even by prehistoric standards. He was young when he died, perhaps in his early twenties, and the suggestion of a young adult male going to such lengths due to insecurity about his height evoked a great deal of sympathy. Forensics had one more thing to reveal about the hair, however. Traces of a type of gel were found there, gel which had been made from resins that can only be found in the south of France and the north of Spain. For the time period that he lived in, this connection is extraordinary. It suggests that Clonycavan Man was able to take advantage of a specific, international trade network, and pay for the goods that travelled along it. Clonycavan Man was, therefore, quite wealthy.

Clonycavan Man's elaborate hairstyle is one of the most striking features of the mummified remains. The other clearly identifiable feature is the injury to his nose, which is most likely what killed him.

Sven Shaw / Public domain

Analysis of the contents of the stomach would seem to support this theory. He had traces of protein and cereal in his digestive system, indicating that he ate his last meal at a time of year when food was plentiful--perhaps summer--but also having eaten quite a large amount relative to the standard quantities available at the time. What, then, accounted for the apparent murder of this privileged young man, and the unceremonious dumping of his body in a lake in the bog? The cause of death was specific. A large skull fracture was evident, and the blow that most likely finished him off flattened his nose, resulting in the squashed appearance that can still be seen. Both are believed to have been inflicted with a stone axe. But apart from the assumption that there was some ritualised element to his murder, that he was a human sacrifice to a deity of the unknown religion of pre-Christian Ireland, there was little else to go on.

Until, that is, another bog body surfaced. In June of 2003--mere months after the discovery of Clonycavan Man--the complete torso of an iron-age individual appeared in a bog near Croghan Hill in County Meath. Old Croghan Man--as he came to be called--was determined to be physically quite distinct from Clonycavan Man in one way. Analysts were able to determine that he was exceptionally tall even by today's standards, measuring 1.98 metres (6 feet 6 inches) in height. Old Croghan Man's killers had ensured that no further comparisons could be made with regards to appearance, however, as he had been decapitated and cut in half after his death. The head and lower half of his body were not found with the torso.

But there were striking similarities between the two. He lived and died in roughly the same time period as Clonycavan Man--between 362 and 175 BC in Old Croghan Man's case--raising the intriguing possibility that they could even have been contemporaries. Like Clonycavan Man, Old Croghan Man was young when he died from multiple stab wounds--early twenties, in fact. He was also of evidently high social status; he had an elaborate arm-ring around his left arm, made from leather, fibre and bronze. The contents of his stomach showed that his last meal was wheat and buttermilk--standard fare for the time--but there were also signs that he had eaten a meat-rich diet for at least four months prior to his murder. And there was another strong indicator of Old Croghan Man's relative privilege: the condition of his hands. These were astonishingly well-preserved, with the individual's distinct fingerprints still easily visible. Archaeologists were quick to point out that these hands had done very little manual labour. It seems that, despite his exceptional size and strength, Old Croghan Man lived a life of relative leisure.

The remains of Old Croghan Man, found a few months after Clonycavan Man in a bog in County Meath. The arms and hands are particularly well-preserved.

Mark Healey / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)  

It was at this point that a feature of both bog bodies that had previously been dismissed as insignificant started to draw more attention--the state of the nipples. It had been noted that the nipples were missing from the remains of Clonycavan Man, but the archaeologists and forensic technicians who examined the body could not say with any certainty that this was not the effect of its contact with the peat harvesting machinery. However, there was clear evidence on the torso of Old Croghan Man that the nipples had been mutilated either shortly after death or immediately beforehand. This curious coincidence led Eamonn Kelly of the National Museum of Ireland towards a theory that could explain the brutal slayings.

Working with both Clonycavan Man and Old Croghan Man, and comparing the remains with those of six other bog bodies that had been discovered in varying states of preservation in Irish bogs, Kelly was able to determine that there was relative consistency when it came to the mutilation of nipples. Given that there is ample evidence that sucking on a ruler's nipples was a common sign of submission among the ancient Irish (Saint Patrick even mentions it in his writings, as late as the 5th-century AD) and that both corpses were found a short distance away from hills associated with inauguration rituals for iron-age kings, Kelly proposed the theory that both men were failed or rejected rulers. The mutilation of the nipples would have been an important gesture; any amputation served to disqualify an individual from power among Irish communities at the time, and the removal or mutilation of the nipples would have sent an especially powerful message when their significance in submission rituals is taken into account. 

This explanation tallies with what is known about the two men. They were of high status, and seem to have lived relatively easy lives for the time period. It is very likely that they came from the ruling classes. But, even for the era in question, they were both quite young to have achieved the status of king or chieftain. In ancient Irish kingdoms--of which there were about 150 on the island at that time--kings were elected the ranks of an elite which included seasoned warriors. Even taking into account the shorter life-spans that people had two millennia ago, it would be difficult for an individual to ascend to the rank of ruler by his early twenties. Old Croghan Man's remarkable physical stature may have helped somewhat in this regard, even if he had apparently done very little manual work; it is less easy to imagine how the diminutive Clonycavan Man could have risen through the ranks.

An artist's impression of Christian missionaries interrupting a human sacrifice ritual among the ancient Britons, drawn in the 19th-century. Human sacrifice theories invariably surface whenever bog bodies do.

Metropolitan Museum of Art / CC0

Perhaps the alternative theory is more accurate. It has been suggested that, despite--or perhaps even because of--the wealth and high status of both men, they were selected for human sacrifice to appease the gods during times of poor harvests. From this point of view, the placement of the bodies in bog lakes becomes more significant--the two men were offerings to the earth goddess. This explanation is an attractive one, and Eamonn Kelly also believes that there was an element of human sacrifice in the murders. But if this was indeed the case, the question remains as to why the victims of a ritual intended to ensure the return of good harvests and sufficient food supplies were so evidently well-fed. Of course, religious notions do not always correspond closely to logic and there may have been a ritual significance to their last meals, but it is worth asking why they had such rich diets in times of scarcity.

It may well have been the case that neither Clonycavan nor Old Croghan Man were rulers or sacrificial victims. They could have been the collateral damage in dynastic struggles or tribal feuds--their murders being symbolic acts of violence intended to intimidate despised rival groups. It is also possible that these particular bog bodies do indeed bear the scars of ritual sacrifice, but that does not necessarily mean that such practices were common. Both men may have been taken hostage by groups that followed marginalised belief systems--cults in modern parlance--and put to death in ceremonies that may have seemed just as bizarre and horrific to society in general back then as they do to us today. 

And there is another possibility. Considering that those who killed both Clonycavan Man and Old Croghan Man went to great lengths to dispose of the remains, dumping them at the bottom of bog lakes where they were unlikely to be found again, it is clear that they wanted no evidence of the deed to remain. Bogs were not used as a source of fuel by the Irish until at least the 16th-century, once the process of deforestation on the island was more or less complete, and nobody at that time could have foreseen either the preservation or re-emergence of the bodies. It is possible, then, that both are the victims of simple, old-fashioned murder.