Old Croghan Man
In 2003 a crew cutting a drain in an Offaly bog went through a human torso with no head and no legs. He died between 362 and 175 BC, stood about 6 feet 6 inches, and somebody had cut holes through his upper arms and threaded hazel withies through them.
Field Guide Entry
A Bord na Mona crew clearing a drainage ditch at the foot of Croghan Hill in County Offaly in 2003 cut into something that turned out to be a man. He had no head and no legs. Radiocarbon dating put his death between 362 and 175 BC.
He was tall for the Iron Age, around 6 feet 6 inches. His fingernails were manicured and his hands carried none of the callusing of manual work. His last meal was cereals and buttermilk. He had been stabbed in the chest, his nipples had been cut, and holes had been cut through both upper arms with hazel withies threaded through them.
The kingship reading
Eamonn Kelly, then keeper of Irish antiquities at the National Museum, put forward the argument the gallery is built around. Sucking a king's nipples was a gesture of submission in early Ireland. Cutting them off a man makes him permanently unkingable.
Kelly's reading is that these are not criminals or murder victims but failed or rejected kings, killed as offerings to a sovereignty goddess and placed on tribal boundaries, which is where the bodies keep coming out of the ground.
Clonycavan Man, found in County Meath the same year and displayed in the same room, was killed by blows to the head and face and had his abdomen opened. He was wearing a hair gel of plant oil and pine resin, and the resin came from southwestern France or northern Spain.
What you are looking at
Bog chemistry preserves skin, hair, fingernails, and the contents of a stomach, and destroys bone. What survives is not a skeleton. It is a body, and it looks like one.
The gallery is arranged so that each of the bodies sits inside its own enclosed chamber, off the main route, which means a visitor decides whether to walk in.
Visiting Information
Free, with no ticket needed. Open Monday 1pm to 5pm, Tuesday through Saturday 10am to 5pm, and Sunday 1pm to 5pm, with late opening on the last Thursday of the month.
The Kingship and Sacrifice gallery is built so the bodies are not visible from the main route, and each one sits in a separate curved enclosure you step into deliberately. That is worth knowing before arriving with children.
The same building holds the Ardagh Chalice, the Tara Brooch, and the Derrynaflan hoard, so the bog bodies and the goldwork are one visit. Kildare Street is a short walk from Trinity College and from the Merrion Square museums.
Field Gallery
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Nearby Strange Places
The Hellfire Club
7 miAn excavation in October 2016 found a Neolithic passage tomb under the ruined lodge on Montpelier Hill, dated between 3782 and 3377 BC. The man who built the lodge in the 1720s had quarried that tomb for its stone, which is where the story about the roof being torn off in a storm comes from.
Derrynaflan
80 miTwo men with a metal detector lifted five liturgical vessels out of this bog island on February 17, 1980, and said nothing for three weeks. The case that followed reached the Supreme Court and established that the medieval law of treasure trove had never validly passed to the Irish state.