‘Bellaghy Boy’ the latest in series of bog bodies recovered in the Derry area

Yet ‘Bellaghy Boy’ is by no means the first bog body to have been discovered in the Derry area.

In the 19th century the remains of several of our ancestors were recovered within the space of a few short years locally.

Discoveries were made at Ballygudden, Terrydremont, Ballygroll, Camnish and Flanders.

Unlike ‘Bellaghy Boy’ the remains were not preserved and have not survived to the present day.

Their speculative stories are sad, mysterious and often distressing. How did they get there? What became of them? Some have theorised they may have been the victims of ritualised sacrifice or that they had simply died violent deaths in what would have been a much more brutal age.

Others have suggested they may have died by accident or naturally. In all likelihood we will never know.

The ‘Ballygudden Woman and child’ were discovered in 1831 south of the village of Muff, which would later be renamed Eglinton in the 1850s.

"The woman’s yellow hair seemed to have suffered little damage from the long time in the bog. The body remained in its natural shape but parts of the flesh were hardened like cement, much like the fat of an animal.

"The infant’s flesh disappeared completely. The child wore round its neck a leather strap, with a small buckle attached,” wrote Turner, RC and Briggs, CS in a chapter in IM Stead, JB Bourke, Don Brothwell’s ‘Lindow Man –The Body in the Bog.’

Various explanations as to what might have happened to them were suggested.

These were surveyed by Melanie Giles in her 2020 book ‘Bog Bodies: Face to Face with the Past’.

She refers to Briggs’ theory that the woman may have been trying to rescue the child after it fell into a bog hole, noting that the leather strap “might be a kind of primitive papoose or else a failed rescue attempt by a mother trying to ‘lasoo’ the child, ‘only to find herself a victim of the mire’.”

However, Giles points to the possibility of a darker explanation.

"The more uncomfortable possibility of infanticide that [Briggs] proposes in 1986 actually seems more likely: there are many reasons why a mother might despair and take her infant’s life, not least during periods of conflict or dearth.

"Whether she then drowned herself or was punished by her community is unclear. Sometimes the boundary between accident and suicide might be deliberately obfuscated, to preserve hope for the soul of the dead,” she writes.

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In 1832, a year after the discovery at Ballygudden, the body of a woman was found in the bog at Terrydremont South near Drumsurn.

Again ‘Lindow Man’ tells us: “A James Thompson discovered a female skeleton and a shoe in a bog near Terrydremont South in 1832.

"A wooden crutch was also found, excavated with help from a wheelwright. The woman had yellow blond hair. No flesh was left on the bones, only the skeleton remained. After inspection, the skeleton was buried very deep in the same place were it was found.”

Giles, in her 2020 overview, cites a 2011 article by Cowie, T., Pickin, J. and Wallace, to report that the remains were ‘collected together and buried very deep in the same place where they were found’.

"The depth of reinterment may have been part of the strategy through which locals ensured they did not physically or spiritually ‘rise again’ to the surface of the bog,” Giles speculates.

Little is known of the ‘Ballygroll child’ that was unearthed in the Slaghtmanus area in 1835.

“The Ballygroll child was coffined. The inside covering was a sheet of paper instead of the usual linen,” according to ‘Lindow Man’.

The sex of the child was never determined and the remains do not survive.

Slaghtmanus is a noted prehistoric site. The Ballygroll complex features 12 small cairns and six stone circles, wedge-tombs and a court-tomb.

The name Slaghtmanus literally means ‘Manus’ grave-mound or monument’.

A year later, in 1836, on the banks of the River Roe near Dungiven, the body of a woman was discovered.

Like the ‘Ballygroll child’, very little is known about ‘Camnish Woman’, though ‘Lindow Man’ tells us, her ‘well shaped grave...had a stone placed at the head and a foot of the grave, which stands in the interior of the above bog’.

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Her remains are no more.

Giles indexes a further bog body from south of the county, at Drumard near Maghera, where a bog skeleton was buried on the site where it was found in 1836.

Several decades before the bog bodies above came to light remains had been recovered from peatland just north of Dungiven.

“A decapitated murder victim found in Flanders bog in 1804 (Co. Derry) associated with a suite of ‘deadly weapons’ caused ‘great sensation throughout the neighbourhood and many persons came to the spot to inspect the body and garment’, but ‘after some deliberation the body and garment were re-interred near the spot where it was found’ (cited in Briggs and Turner 1986: 191, no. 84),” writes Giles.

The discovery of ‘Bellaghy Boy’, who was aged 1 3-17 years old at the time of death between 2000 and 2500 years ago, not far from the birthplace of Seamus Heaney, was considered fitting giving the late poet’s fascination with bogland and bog bodies.

Heaney wrote an ode to ‘The Tollund Man’, a perfectly preserved bog body, which was recovered in Jutland, Denmark, in 1950.

"Some day I will go to Aarhus, To see his peat-brown head, The mild pods of his eye-lids, His pointed skin cap. In the flat country near by, Where they dug him out...I will stand for a long time’.

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