Bogs are curious places. They spark memories of Irish childhood summers spent footing and saving turf amid swarms of midges. They inspire awe and alarm as nature’s own carbon-capture technology, but rapidly disappearing. For others, bogs are political landscapes that evoke anger, as age-old turbary rights appear threatened by the urgency of conservation. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century – the ‘Romantic period’ – bogs were seen through the prisms of history and politics, read and treated as a record of human history.

In spring 1781, a surveyor working on the Co. Down estate of Elizabeth Rawdon, countess of Moira, presented her with a plait of hair that had been taken from a body found in the bog when one of her tenants was cutting turf the previous autumn. Rawdon’s report on the find was read at the Royal Society of Antiquaries in May 1783, and published in their journal in 1785. It was the first documented scientific investigation of a bog body, and the first publication by a woman in the Society’s journal.

Rawdon’s report details the way in which the remains had been treated by the finder – in short, not very well. He discovered ‘many garments’ upon the body, but retained only the ‘coarsest’ ones and these had been damaged by his children. He thought them of ‘no consequence’. The better pieces of clothing, he claimed, had been ‘carried off’ by others. It is most likely that he sold them; the rag trade was thriving at the time. Rawdon, undeterred, studied the remaining fragments and deduced that they resembled fifth and sixth-century European styles.

In the tradition of the age, Rawdon located the bog body within its archaeological and natural surroundings, finding special significance in the name of the mountain upon which it was found (Drumkeeragh). She connected the ‘vestiges of Druid worship, the rude altars, and the sacred well’ extant on the summit, and a ‘stone hatchet […] undoubtedly a sacrificial one belonging to the Druids […] dug up at the foot of this mountain a few years ago’, to her interpretation of the place name – ‘sliabh cro abh; cro signifying death, and abh the point or termination of a weapon […] the mountain of final death.’ The remains were associated with a violent end.

Rawdon, a liberal, bluestocking and sympathiser with the Irish cause, placed the bog body in the longer genealogy of violence in Ireland, stretching from ‘druidical’ times, through the Elizabethan conquest, to eighteenth-century agrarian secret societies. Early in her investigation, she conjectured that the remains were those of a victim of famine, in her words, ‘in consequence of the prosecution of those humane methods my countrymen continued to employ in Elizabeth’s reign, to civilize the Irish’. She employed the bog body to rupture the distance between past and present violence and highlight the legacies of colonial violence. 

Rawdon’s politicisation of these remains reflected the troubled political climate of eighteenth-century Ireland and represent an early example of the harnessing of bog bodies as symbols of the legacies of violence, which continues into the twenty-first century. Following a field trip to Roundstone bog in 1935, Robert Lloyd Praeger wrote: ‘the bogs and what they can teach us of the past history of our country are yet to a great extent a sealed book, although they will not remain so much longer.’

In 1864, Sir William Wilde noted the ‘learning and patriotism’ of Rawdon’s account in a report marking Rawdon’s great-grandson’s donation of the clothing fragments to the Royal Irish Academy. These fragments are now cared for by the National Museum of Ireland.

Sources

Byrne, Angela, ‘Sacrificed on ‘the Mountain of Final Death’: the Drumkeeragh Bog Body, 1781–5’ in Death and the Irish: A Miscellany, ed. Salvador Ryan (Wordwell, 2016), pp. 105–7.

Glob, P.V., The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved. Transl. Rupert Bruce-Mitford (St Albans: Paladin, 1971).

Praeger, Robert Lloyd, The Way That I Went ([1937] Collins Press, 2013).

Rawdon, Elizabeth, Countess of Moira, ‘X. Particulars Relative to a Human Skeleton, and the Garments that were found thereon, when dug out of a Bog at the Foot of Drumkeragh, a Mountain in the County of Down, and Barony of Kinalearty, on Lord Moira’s Estate, in the Autumn of 1780. In a Letter to the Hon. John Theophilius Rawdon, by the Countess of Moira; communicated by Mr. Barrington.’ In Archaeologia, vol. 7 (Jan. 1785), pp. 90–110.

Sanders, Karin, Bodies in the Bog and the Archaeological Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

Wilde, Sir William, ‘On the Antiquities and Human Remains Found in the County of Down, in 1780, and Described by the Countess of Moira in the Archaeologia, Vol. VII’. In Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, ser. 1, vol. ix (1864–6), pp. 101–104.