ROYAL RUMINATIONS

QUEEN Elizabeth’s funeral last month was an impressive spectacle. As it happens, a few days after the funeral, I was in the National Museum in Dublin to have a look at the Kingship and Sacrifice exhibition — particularly as our near neighbours will soon have a coronation.

The exhibition focuses on the boglands of Ireland, and the very dark secrets they hold. Some of the darkest secrets focus on ancient royal families — probably.

The bogs have long loomed large in the folklore of the country. Those who passed the folk tales from generation to generation have long had tangible evidence of something other-worldly about them.

‘Where every hill has its heroes and every bog its bones,’ wrote the Northern Ireland author Sam Hanna Bell and, indeed, bones are regularly uncovered from the peat. Many people have come to an untimely end: some perhaps trying to find their way home across the treacherous swamps in the dark, stumbling off the safe pathway to their doom. Others have met their deaths in more spinechilling fashion.

In 2003, two bodies were found, separately, in Offaly and Cavan. They were evidently the victims of serious crime. But their killings dated back to pre-Christian Ireland and so were not investigated further by gardaí. The preservative nature of the bogs allowed further research to show they had died utterly gruesome deaths — with various parts of their bodies having been cut off — and it seems likely they died in excruciating pain. The Offaly man’s head had been cut off and his body cut in half.

The Kingship and Sacrifice Exhibition puts forward one theory that the human sacrifices, which can be found across northern Europe, could be related to kingship rituals. Research has deduced that many Iron Age bodies in Ireland were deposited on or alongside townland, parish or barony boundaries. Some of these hark back to the ancient land divisions.

This deposition of bodies may have had some sort of protective function for the community. Pop along to the National Museum and see what you make of it all.

The one question that’s not answered at Kingship and Sacrifice is whether the folk at the funeral, in timehonoured tradition, said to the relatives, ‘Ach, he’s gone to a better place, poor crittur’ or, ‘Sure he never did any harm only to himself.’ The last statement of course, would have been manifestly untrue.