Man finds 10-kilogram chunk of ancient butter

Finding buried treasure is a dream as old as stories themselves. Treasure chests, gargantuan lumps of 2,000year-old butter.

OK, maybe most don’t dream of unearthing enormous chunks of butter, but that’s exactly what Jack Conway discovered in the Emlagh bog in County Meath, Ireland, at the beginning of June, Atlas Obscura reported.

Conway is a turf cutter, meaning he harvests “turf” or peat from a bog to later burn for warmth during the cold winter months. He was chopping turf at the bog when he came across a 10-kilogram chunk of butter, the Irish Times reported. Researchers at the Cavan Museum estimated it to be more than 2,000 years old.

Bog butter is just that: butter made from cow’s milk that’s been buried in a bog, though, after thousands of years, it often has the consistency of cheese.

It’s actually not that uncommon of a find for turf cutters in Ireland. As Smithsonian magazine noted, a 3,000-year-old, 92-centimetre-wide barrel stuffed with 35 kilos of bog butter was found in 2009. Even more shocking, turf cutters found a 5,000year-old wooden “keg” containing 45 kilograms of the butter in 2013.

People have actually been stumbling upon bog butter for at least two centuries.

In the 1892 edition of the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, Rev. James O’Laverty recounts finding a lump “which still retains the marks of the hand and fingers of the ancient dame who pressed it into its present shape,” and which he noted, “tastes somewhat like cheese.”

No one is sure why the butter was buried in bogs but evidence suggests it was a method of preservation.