2000 Year-Old Resurfaces
A digger man in the turf bogs of the midlands has bumped into the remains of a 2000 year-old woman who may have been ritually sacrificed and has had her upper torso and head disintegrate but remains a leggy sort to this day.
Some people might find this ghoulish, but the bogs of Ireland preserve human remains longer than almost any medium, save perhaps glacial ice. Out of Irish bogs you normally get bits of bodies, just the odd femur or tibia.
But this gal was in good shape from the waist down, since the tanins of near eternity kept her flesh amazingly preserved. The odd thing is that what may have been the usual Druid suspects wrapped her head and torso in a leatherycloak to preserve them for all time, but then these parts did not have protective tanning action in that region. So they fell off and disintegrated.
Even in an age of cynicism, Ireland remains a land of mystery. To go to the various national museums of ancient relics here will wallop you back in time.
But there are more intimate ways to probe Ireland’s depths everywhere. And unlike over-regulated places elsewhere, you can start by just talking to the local eccentric who may know more about a certain field, one certain field on planet earth, than any geologist, historologist or the rest will ever show you. You don’t even have to buy him a pint. Those step and fetch it days in Ireland are mostly gone.
But maybe you should show genuine interest to what the man who craves the verities of the next field might have to say. So maybe you should buy him a pint.
A few years ago I befriended a man named Seamus K. in Waterford who digs in very private bogs. Very, very private bogs, I might say if I felt like saying it, just to wind him up. He would be an elf of 5 feet 10 and until recently he smiled too much.
Seamus likes nothing better of an evening than to muck about in bogs, because he is a kind of a finder, and a mystic, and a lovcr of ancient Ireland. And he found out the oldest technique in Ireland to find out the ancient history of Ireland — try anywhere and be patient. So he makes marvelous sculpture and furniture out of thousands year old tanin-preserved wood and bones and giant elk racks from the bogs — and to him, this history of our ur-European ages is everywhere.
We have had the ruin of a recent phase of Ireland, but mysteriousness… easy enough if you wish and do not pay for it. Just try a friend of the local bog and think…. where do I come from?
