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“The skin was as pink as yours or mine,” says Detective Inspector Nikki Deehan. “The kidney was malleable to the touch.” But when the teenager’s remains were removed from a bog in Northern Ireland, it turned out they were approximately 2,100 years old.
The Iron Age body — missing a head but otherwise well preserved by the peat, including down to some fingernails — is one of only three bog bodies ever to be discovered in Northern Ireland.
Heavy rains softened the land that had already been cut back on Bellaghy Bog in County Londonderry, also known as County Derry, helping reveal what experts said last week was the ancient body of a boy aged 13 to 17.
It was serendipity — but a painful counterpoint to months of combing another peat bog for the remains of another Northern Irish teenager — one murdered and secretly buried by the Irish Republican Army nearly half a century ago during the Troubles.
Poor weather delayed that search, the sixth to attempt to locate the body of 19-year-old Columba McVeigh, who was killed in 1975 and is believed to have been shot in the back of the head. Diggers deployed to Bragan Bog across the Irish border in County Monaghan finally gave up their latest quest to find him last November.
Two bogs. Two young men. Two profoundly opposing emotions: the joyfully unexpected historical discovery contrasting with the desperate heartbreak of disappointment.
In my last posting, in Mexico, I once joined a group of mothers in the northern state of Sinaloa who slung shovels into a pick-up truck and set off to search for their long-lost loved ones, some of tens of thousands of “disappeared”. They could not rely on the government to find them.
I can still recall the adrenalin rush, the stench when spades struck something, the discouragement of a false alarm and the unquenchable hope that if they just kept looking, they would eventually find them.
This bog body, temporarily dubbed “Bellaghy Boy”, was unearthed after a member of the public spotted bones sticking out of the soil last October.
The Police Service of Northern Ireland was summoned in case it turned out to have been a criminal case — initially considered a possibility, given the fresh state of the remains.
But a postmortem and radiocarbon dating followed and last week the discovery was finally announced, putting the “best guess” at 2,100 years old — or a couple of hundred years either side, says Alastair Ruffell, a forensic geologist at Queen’s University in Belfast. “There was nothing to indicate it was ancient,” Deehan says. “We were obviously gobsmacked.”
Around the time the ancient remains were discovered, hopes of locating McVeigh were fading. Finding his body is among the unfinished business of the legacy of the Troubles, the three decades-long conflict between republican paramilitaries opposed to British rule, pro-UK loyalist paramilitaries and state security forces. Seventeen people were “disappeared” before it ended in 1998; four have yet to be recovered.
Efforts to find them are unaffected by new UK legislation aiming to draw a line under the Troubles by halting inquests. The law is reviled by rights groups and all the region’s political parties, and has prompted Ireland to take the highly unusual step of taking its neighbour to the European Court of Human Rights. The passage of time is already bogging down the search for truth as those involved die and evidence becomes harder to find.
“Bellaghy Boy” was discovered about 25 miles from McVeigh’s home. “That impact wasn’t lost on us,” Deehan said.
Dympna Kerr, McVeigh’s sister, knew it was not the same bog where her brother is believed to be buried. “But at the same time, I did want it to be Columba. In my heart, I did,” she says.
Investigators will now be looking for further information to make another search possible.
Sandra Peake, chief executive of the Wave Trauma Centre that helps those affected by the Troubles, says the bog body offered a faint shred of comfort — “always the opportunity they could be found in the future”. But Kerr wants to bury her brother with her parents. “I want to be there when Columba is found. I’m not going to be there in 2,000 years.”
