Swamped by history
Working on a new musical story programme about my part in the discovery of the UK’s first ancient bog body just outside Wilmslow, Cheshire in 1984, has made me look at history with new eyes.
For a start - we all have a sense at times of being part of history, as during the pandemic we heard the word ‘unprecedented’ being intoned on a daily basis. Two weeks ago, when I went to London’s British Museum and leant over the case containing the torso of Lindow Man, I was hit by a strong sense of responsibility.
Gazing at the brown crumpled body of the young man believed to have died around AD60, complete with fur armband and tidy polished fingernails, I found myself marvelling and muttering: “You wouldn’t be here now if I had not told the archaeologists where to look.”
The next thing I found myself saying under my breath was: ‘Sorry.” I felt an overwhelming sense of real shame that because of my interventions, this Romano-British young man was sentenced to being gawped at in a showcase, which suddenly hit me as being macabre.
I don’t know why it had not struck me so forcefully before. Back in 1984, when I was tipped off about the discovery of a foot in Lindow Moss, I was a rookie reporter exhilarated by having rescued the body from going through a peat shredder and prevented it ending up in people’s plant pots.
I was the person who told the archaeologist, Rick Turner where to look for what turned out to be a unique archaeological discovery. This set off a whole chain of events. Lindow Man was excavated, he was found to have sustained several deadly injuries (blows to the skull, a broken spine, strangulation and a cut throat) and investigations by experts all over the world suggested he might possibly have been a noble or priestly young man killed to appease his community’s Celtic gods, in exchange for protection against the Romans.
Revisiting the story of Lindow Man now, decades later, with fresh eyes I see that Lindow Man is not merely a piece of history. The fact that he was preserved for nearly 2000 years in a peat bog is potentially a powerful catalyst and focus for all of us to fight to save these special swampy places - to combat climate change. Bogs store more CO2 than forest.
If Lindow Man can galvanise us - his ancestors - to preserve the land which preserved him, then he is not ‘just a piece of history’, he’s the ultimate Eco warrior.
* Read more about my Lindow Man performances in the next few weeks.
