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Armlet, Old
Croghan Man

362-175BC

The dazzling regalia that survives from ancient Ireland suggests that the rulers of the time had enormous prestige, both physical and spiritual. By the Early Iron Age at least, however, power had become highly conditional. The deal for the ruler was clear and brutal: produce the goods or be ritually slaughtered and sacrificed. If the king could not guarantee peace and prosperity, he was sent back into the land to which he was ritually wed.

In 2003, shortly after a well-preserved Iron Age body was found in a bog in Clonycavan, Co. Meath, another was found at Croghan Hill in Old Croghan, Co. Offaly. Both bodies, on close examination, had the marks of high status. Clonycavan Man’s hair contains an imported gel. Old-croghan Man has a leather and tinned bronze armlet, with stamped metal clips representing the sun and decorated in the fashionable continental style, on his arm. His hands show no sign of manual labour, implying special or aristocratic status.

Most bog bodies are a tribute to the preservative qualities of Irish bogs and provide important information on dress, etc. Such bodies are often clothed and represent accidental death or casual burial; most are of mediaeval or more recent date. A very small number of bog bodies are Iron Age sacrifices of naked or nearly naked males, providing grim proof of sinister rituals. These bog bodies appear to have been ‘killed’ three times: by strangulation, by stabbing and by drowning. However ritualised, Old-croghan Man’s death was garishly violent. Hazel rods that may be the remains of a spansel were threaded through holes in his upper arms. He was stabbed in the chest, struck in the neck, decapitated and cut in half. (All that has been found is his torso and arms.) But the violence was not mere sadism. ‘This’, says Eamonn Kelly of the National Museum, ‘is not done for torture or to inflict pain. It is a triple killing because the goddess to whom the sacrifice is made has three natures. She is goddess of sovereignty, of fertility and of war/death. So sacrifices are made to her in all her forms’.

Poignantly, Old-croghan Man has a wound on his arm, which he lifted instinctively to try to shield himself from the weapon with which he was stabbed in the chest. Before his death, he was fed a ritual meal of milk and grain: not the high-status meat-based diet that is revealed by analysis of his nails, but one meant, rather, to symbolise the earth’s fertility. He had been a huge man, almost six-feet-three-inches tall. It is easy to imagine him as a champion or hero. He was young and healthy, and, as mentioned, there is little sign that he did physical labour. The bog where his body is found is close to the foot of the hill where the kings of the Uí Failge were inaugurated.

This culture of brutal sacrifice may tell us something about the mood of the times. In the last centuries BC, Ireland became colder and wetter. Food may have been more scarce. The great prestige of those who ruled had always been linked to their claim to reflect the views of the other world. When times were bad, this very claim became fatal.