In Ancient Bones, a reminder that the ghosts of Northern Ireland are never far away

They appeared around Halloween, when a howling storm gripped Northern Ireland’s wetlands and tilled the ground: human bones, sticking up from the tea-colored water in the Bellaghy Marsh, halfway between Derry and Belfast.

The skeletal remains were disturbing enough. Then researchers saw the meat.

“The skin was as pink as ours,” said Detective Inspector Nikki Deehan of the Police Service of Northern Ireland.

We now know that the exceptionally well-preserved remains belonged to a teenage Iron Age boy, who was held together for thousands of years by the preserving power of the peat. But in the weeks before radiocarbon dating turned the find into an archaeological triumph, researchers grappled with a more uncomfortable possibility: Was the body an echo of a not-so-distant history, one that the tiny island has yet to fully reckon with?

Such is the pallor of gruesome discoveries in Northern Ireland. It carries an ominous reminder, unique to the region’s fragile peace: Ghosts – and bodies – don’t stay buried forever.

Illustrations of that dark reality can be found everywhere, including in recent, geographically proximate history. When the Bellaghy swamp man first emerged from the ground in October, researchers were scouring other swamps for other secrets, in the wetlands of County Monaghan. There, a disturbing parallel story emerged, when a long-awaited search for another body was abandoned mid-November.

Researchers had scoured the wet earth for the remains of Columba McVeigh, who was shot and killed by the Irish Republican Army and secretly buried in 1975. Mr McVeigh, who was 19 when he died, is believed to have been executed and dumped. in the quiet swamp near the Irish border.

He is one of Northern Ireland’s so-called Disappeared People, 17 people who were killed and secretly buried by paramilitary groups during the Northern Ireland Troubles, the guerrilla war that ravaged the island’s six northern counties for almost three decades. In the years since the Good Friday Agreement formally ended that conflict in 1998, a independent committee has recovered the remains of 13 missing people. The search continues for the other four.

Other news broadcasts have noted the geographical juxtaposition of the two quests, with one ending in a celebrated, centuries-old find, the other in a crushing disappointment.

News organizations were not the only ones to note such coincidences. Detective Inspector Deehan, noting both the freshness of the body and its geographical location – near the border of County Tyrone, a sectarian hotspot during the Troubles – said investigators had consulted the committee investigating cases of the Disappeared when the body was presented for was first discovered. They asked if the body could be Mr. McVeigh’s.

“They are very confident that their intelligence leads to Monaghan,” Detective Inspector Deehan said, and police were given permission to continue exhuming Bellaghy’s remains.

It’s a delicate maneuver, especially in this region of evasive truths and elusive closures. The Disappeared Cases Committee is not a legal entity and any information it receives is not admissible in a court of law. The aim, as stated, is purely to help the families of missing Troubles victims find closure.

“It’s very important that the police don’t trespass in that area,” the detective said.

As it turned out, there were no reports of grieving families or missing persons for Bellaghy’s body. After being carefully excavated in November, the remains were dated around Christmas by Queens University Belfast. It was estimated that he was about 2,300 years old.

“Imagine the resources that would be spent on this if radiocarbon didn’t work,” says Dr Alastair Ruffell, a forensic geologist at Queen’s University Belfast, who helped with the dig. Dr. Ruffell also initially thought the body had died more recently. If radiocarbon technology failed to determine the age of the remains, he said, authorities could investigate a possible murder, unaware that a possible crime was centuries old.

The phenomenon of so-called peat bodies dates around in the 17th century, when they were astonishingly well preserved, mummified remains began to rise – literally – from the various swamps of northern Europe. It is quite common for the bodies to be so well preserved that they are mistaken for a more recent victim; Perhaps the most famous of the genre, Tollund Man was initially considered a recently missing person when he was found in Denmark in 1950. His body had held up so well that the creases in his forehead were still easily noticeable.

The body thrown from the Bellaghy Swamp is significant. Geographically, it is the furthest north that a well-preserved bog body has ever been discovered in Ireland, said Dr. Ruffell, and it originated in a little-understood strip of Celtic land located between two ancient tribes. Among the best preserved features: fingernails and a fleshy kidney. The pink skin was oxygenated during the excavation and is now the familiar leathery brown associated with the bog bodies that fill museums across Europe.

The discovery is being hailed as a historic find and the remains will be managed by the National Museums of Northern Ireland. For those, like Detective Deehan, who work closer to Northern Ireland’s modern dark edges, the archaeological celebration was a welcome change.

“When we’re called, specifically for body recovery, you know full well that there’s a family there that’s going through trauma,” he said. “It’s great to be part of something where you know there’s no grieving family on the sidelines, and you can share these stories.”