In many of the countries of north-west Europe, quantities of butter have been found in bogs on a regular basis over the past 300 years or so and are still being found to the present day. The age of such finds and the reasons for burying them has been the subject of debate over the years and many suggestions have been made for such activities on the part of our ancestors.
An article in the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy in 1865 by William R. Wilde dealt with the twin topics of the potato in Ireland and the substance called bog butter. William Wilde (1815-1876) was an eye surgeon, antiquary, the author of medical, topographical and Irish antiquarian works and the compiler of a 3-volume catalogue of the antiquarian collection of the Royal Irish Academy. He was knighted in 18164 and his wife (1825-1896) was a passionate supporter of the Young Ireland movement and translated and wrote poems and articles for The Nation under the pen-name Speranza, as well as works of great merit on Irish folklore in the period 1884-90. They were, also, of course, the parents of Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde.
Wilde’s article in 1856 quoted Dinely, writing in 1681 on Irish foods, who noted that “butter layed-up in wicker baskets, mixed with a sort of garlic and buried for some time in a bog to make provision of a high taste for lent”. He also mentioned that bog butter had been found in Finland in 1736, in Scotland in 1820 and that in 1826 a “tub” containing 23 pounds was found in the Galtees and in 1826 about 21 pounds was found in a bog in Ballinasloe.
Further finds have been made regularly over the years since and in the 1940’s Dr. Joseph Raftery of the National Museum described in detail, to the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, a find made in 1939. This discovery in a bog at Killeenan More in Galway was contained in a decorated wooden vessel.
The burying of butter in bogs could in the days before refrigeration, have been used to keep the butter as cool as possible, and together with the exclusion of air and the antiseptic qualities of turf, would have prevented mould growth. It has been suggested also that it may have been thrown into lakes as an offering to appease the gods. However, it would seem to have been too well packaged just to have been thrown away for any reason.
Furthermore, it could have been a security measure for a valuable food stuff and with the “scorched-earth” policies of the 16th and 17th centuries, where famine, induced by the destruction of foodstuffs, was a weapon which was used against the native population.
Bog butter is found in a variety of containers. Wooden vessels (both single and two-piece are known), some made from hollowed-out tree trunks as well as wicker-work receptacles and cloth bark and animal skin containers. Recent years has seen much progress in dating wooden objects and it is hoped that some definite dates for buried butter may be soon available from a study of the containers rather than from the butter itself.
In a recent book, Domestic wooden Artifacts in Britain and Ireland from Neolithic to Viking Times, Caroline Farwood has noted that the keg found in1879 at Glen Gill near Morvern, Argyllshire has been radiocarbon dated to a period between A.D. 121 to A.D 261. The practice of burying butter in bogs appears, therefore, to have extended over two millennia and that it ceased in Ireland within only the last few hundred years.
Dr. Raftery published a distribution map of finds in Ireland up to the 1940’s. The main belt of finds has been made along the bogs in the southern midlands with a secondary group in the West and some finds in Ulster and relatively few in the counties of Cork and Kerry.
A number of recent finds have been made in Tipperary with one large find at Glenkilty bog near Cloughjordan in 1987 weighing-in at about 40 kg and enclosed in what looked like “some kind of wicker work”. It was reckoned locally that it was about 1,000 years old.
An example of a bog butter find from the central midlands is on exhibition in the Cork Butter Museum at Shandon. It is a solid oak cask and estimated to be from the 8th or 9th century, while the Cork Museum in Fitzgerald’s Park has a find from the Skibbereen area in its stores, but not yet on show to the public.
Increasing interest in bog butter and the regular finds around the country will continue to generate interest among archaeologists (in the wide range of the butter enclosures) and among the general public. Their ancestors, for some, as yet unproven, reasons, buried their agricultural produce in containers which vary from the crude to the very-skilfully made, in the natural storage areas of their local bogs. They then either forgot them or were unable to return to collect them. It would be nice to know for sure what the reasons were, but will we ever find out for sure.
The above article was written by Chris Synnott of Blarney and District Historical Society