Time Song

by Julia Blackburn

  perhaps they held long hair into a clump,

  kept a cloak in place,

  closed a pouch made of skin,

  or nettle fibre.

  Polished stone axeheads were found,

  beautiful in their simplicity,

  one from green-tinged jadeite

  came from the Dolomite region

  in northern Italy

  and took at least two hundred years

  to travel from south to north.

  There is no way of knowing if such treasures

  were accidentally dropped and lost,

  or placed in the waters

  to placate a discontented spirit,

  or to give thanks to one who was more benign.

  I am walking with Bryony,

  the reeds enclose us,

  the sky watches us,

  the rest of the world is far away.

  ‘You find something,’ she says,

  ‘And then you try to understand

  what it is you have found.

  Your thoughts are captured,

  as much by a hazelnut chewed by a water vole

  and how it came to rest here,

  as by the jadeite axe

  whose journey is just as mysterious.’

  She describes the little heaps of white quartz grit

  scattered at intervals along the track

  and how they puzzled over them:

  was it magic or medicine,

  or the fashioning of some thing, since gone?

  Finally they decided

  it could be from the gizzards of swans

  whose dead bodies lay trapped

  by the wood of the track

  until everything of them had vanished

  apart from these glittering fragments,

  bearing witness to what once had been.

  Based on a walk with Bryony Coles on 22 September 2017. In a later email she wrote, ‘The Sweet Track was built across a reedy swamp with a few birch and willow trees, which was followed by fen woodland and then raised bog. When people came to cut the peat in the Middle Ages, it was the uppermost peat they took, the raised bog peat, and as far as we know they were quite unaware of the different sorts of peat below and of the buried trackway.’

  41

  Of all the images of time passing and yet not passing, of the dead being absent and yet present, nothing for me is as vivid as Tollund Man who was found in 1950 in the bog in which he had lain for two thousand four hundred years and who still looks as if he is drifting in a quiet sleep from which he might stir and wake at any moment. I first saw photographs of him in a book called The Bog People, written in Denmark by the wonderfully named P. V. Glob and published in Britain in 1969 and he has been with me ever since, as familiar as anyone else whose face I hold in my memory.

  This spring I got a commission to make a radio programme with my friend Tim Dee and so there we were in Jutland, walking through an area called Bjaeldskovdal where Tollund Man was accidentally uncovered by peat cutters who thought at first that he must be the branch of a tree. The peat cutters have all gone now, along with most of the peat, and the area has reverted to a sort of Doggerland landscape with wide expanses of shallow water and higher areas where salix and dogwood, heather and bilberry bushes grow, along with lots of silver birch, the silver turned a soft and dusty green. We saw some exposed patches of peat telling of what once was and pale dried clumps of sphagnum moss tumbled about on the ground, as light as sponge from a seabed.

  A bog is like a riddle: neither water nor land and yet both land and water. Ten thousand years ago when the ice had retreated and the weather in north-western Europe was cold but not too cold, bogs took hold of great tracts of the sodden landscape and many bogs like this one must have been formed in Doggerland when the climate was right for such a process. They became home to a profusion of life, but they were fickle and dangerous places. A blanket bog can climb a mountain slope and break its banks and engulf a whole area and all bogs have a quicksand quality enabling them to pull anything down into their soft dark hearts, but it’s only the raised bogs that have the special ability to grant physical immortality to their victims, keeping what they swallow in a hardly altered state for hundreds or even thousands of years, whether it is a leaf or a man. Bogs are also the home of sudden mists and miasmas and those self-igniting balls of fire as small as a candle flame, as big as a man’s head, darting about with restless energy or glimmering and hovering enticingly over one particular spot.

  Sphagnum moss in all its varieties is the plant out of which a raised bog is formed; such mosses first emerged three hundred million years ago. An ordinary peat bog can begin to take shape when dead plant litter accumulates in the still waters of a shallow lake or a marsh and as this debris builds up it is compressed into fibrous matter by its own waterlogged weight. If it becomes sufficiently poor in nutrients and oxygen, then sphagnum moss can establish itself. The moss sucks up twenty times its own weight in water that becomes as acidic as pickling vinegar. Every winter the uppermost layer dies, releasing a natural sugar compound that helps to destroy any bacteria and so the spongy structure of the dead layer is preserved and year by year the bog grows steadily higher until the living layer is separated from the water table and relies only on rain. A raised bog can reach a height of several metres and cover an expanse of several kilometres. It creates a landscape of domed cushions whose colours vary from luminous green to blood red. In the patches where the moss is absent, rounded pools of deep water are formed, so darkly stained by the peat they can appear almost black.

  The sphagnum makes the surrounding water table too acidic for trees to grow, but sedges and shrubs gather close and cotton grass and heather spread out over some of its surfaces. Bog beans live in the deeper pools and sundews on the moss itself, trapping insects with their sticky jaws, while underwater bladderworts suck up tiny organisms.

  In winter or in early spring when the weather is cold and the temperature of the water is not above 4 degrees C, raised bogs can preserve whatever enters their domain, whether it is the autumn leaf or the fully clothed human body, a woven basket, a pair of shoes, a dog, a wooden roadway, a canoe, a carved god, or a clay pot still holding the burnt remains of the food that was cooked in it. But in the moment when something is lifted out of the bog and into the air it begins to change and disintegrate and if it is kept in its sodden state it quickly rots.

  Raised bogs have a life of their own. They twist and turn as they grow in size and this slow movement changes the position of whatever they are holding: a wooden shaft is snapped in two, the limbs of a person or an animal are shifted into unnatural positions and the head turns as if its owner has decided to stare in another direction. And because every bog has its own particular chemical composition, each one immortalises its treasures in a different way. Some might strip a body of all the calcium in the bones which then turn soft and without structure, while the keratin in skin and fingernails becomes peat-dark and as hard as old leather and every hair is kept intact but dyed a bright orange. Others destroy clothing and leather belts and hats and all trace of flesh, while leaving a perfect and intact skeleton.

  The people who lived close to raised bogs harvested the dried peat for fuel and as if in return for what they had taken they placed gifts into the still pools that reflected the face of the moon or their own faces so clearly, or into the deep cuts they had made into the body of the peat. The more a bog was used, the more gifts were given, presumably to appease whatever gods and spirits lived there in the form of mists and miasmas, sudden inexplicable noises and wandering flames.

  Around two thousand years ago when a rough sort of iron was first being taken from the bogs and used to make weapons and tools, then valuable but inanimate gifts were augmented with the gift of human beings. These could be the bodies
of the dead defeated in a battle, but there were also human sacrifices in late winter or early spring when everything was at its lowest ebb and people must have been hungry and afraid. The life of one person, such as Tollund Man, would be offered in exchange for the life of a whole community.

  * * *

  —

  Tim and I were following a path that skirted a lake scattered with little islands that looked like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that could easily be joined together again. The silence was broken by the occasional noisy goose and a swan or two, but the dimension of bird cry and song was mostly missing, probably because the season was too young and the first of the migrating birds had not yet arrived. The path meandered along until we reached our destination: a tall tree trunk, stripped of its bark, had been fixed in the ground like a post. It had a simple brass plaque attached to it on which was inscribed a date and the name ‘Tollund Man’ and the names of the two people who found him.

  We sat next to the trunk on pale grasses that must have been recently covered by snow and Tim recorded the wind that was blowing through the silver birch trees to use as a background noise in the radio programme. Then he recorded us talking about where we were and why we had come here and I explained what I knew of Tollund Man’s story.

  After a while, damp and a bit cold, we got to our feet and continued on the path which led us to a wooden walkway built across the remains of the old bog. The brightly luminous colours of the sphagnum moss were interrupted by dark pools, and the mixture of wet land and solid water seemed as alive as a breathing thing, made dangerous by the knowledge that if you fell there were no firm edges to hold on to and if you were foolish enough to try to cross the bog’s surface it might simply suck you down.

  I thought of the people following the narrow wooden tracks they had made when the bog was deeper and the landscape so much wider, stretching out for miles in all directions. I thought of them navigating their canoes, or stepping precariously from one hummock of safe ground to another.

  I wondered if some of them were still held within the black peat; smiling faces close by or even under our feet, and I felt dizzy with the idea of them being as uncorrupted as the dead are supposed to be when they are woken at the Last Judgment.

  Tim is a bird man. On our way back I asked him rather absentmindedly what bird he would like to be if he were a bird. ‘Redstart,’ he said, without a moment’s hesitation, probably because he had just seen one flitting among the birch trees.

  Time Song 16

  The weight and the power

  of the bog that held him

  tight in its dark embrace,

  took away his youth

  and replaced it with the face

  of old age.

  He is photographed

  as he emerges into the air,

  the skin creased,

  the slack mouth shut,

  the half-closed eyes

  seeming to take in

  the strangeness of the world

  he has returned to.

  The body has lost much of its true shape,

  but the feet look as though they could stand firm

  and one perfect hand is held for ever

  in a gesture of benediction:

  the first three fingers

  folded softly

  towards the palm,

  the index finger slightly raised,

  while the side of the thumb

  rests against it,

  hardly touching.

  He died in winter,

  made to kneel while his throat was slit

  then carried naked across the bog

  to a water-filled peat cutting

  where he was lain face down,

  lumps of peat on top of him

  to keep him under.

  His last meal

  was a bowl of gruel,

  famine food that told its story

  in gossamer-thin scraps of leaf,

  in tough stalk and broken twig,

  seed casing and pod,

  wisp of grass,

  moss, two kinds of.

  Traces of sixty-five plant species

  turned hard and leathery by peat-juices,

  were found in his stomach and intestine,

  among them:

  spelt and rye,

  naked barley and hulled barley,

  cultivated oat and wild oat,

  rye grass, tufted hair grass,

  wood bluegrass and lopgrass;

  a capsule of gold of pleasure,

  a seed of shepherd’s purse,

  field pennycress, thyme-speedwell,

  pale persicaria and redshank.

  Sheep’s sorrel, curled dock, black bindweed,

  hemp nettle and corn spurrey,

  common mouse-ear chickweed,

  wallflower and tormentil,

  fat hen, goosefoot and forget-me-not

  – not ever, no matter what –

  Self heal, hawk’s beard and pansy,

  violet and long-headed poppy,

  ribwort plantain and black nightshade,

  – also known as deadly –

  cockspur and Yorkshire fog,

  clustered bellflower and spiny sow thistle.

  Also sand and small stones

  from the threshing floor,

  eggs of the whip-worm parasite,

  tiny traces of cooked meat

  and ergot,

  a fungal disease in cereals,

  especially rye,

  causing hallucination in mild cases,

  coma leading to death in extremis.

  Remember all those men, women and children,

  dancing across Europe in the thirteenth century,

  mad as the wind and hoping for salvation?

  St Anthony’s Fire they called it –

  that was ergot.

  But on a cold day

  two thousand three hundred years ago

  there was not enough ergot in Grauballe Man

  to protect him from the shock of the death

  that had been chosen for him.

  Based on Grauballe Man: Portrait of a Bog Body by Pauline Asingh, Moesgård Museum/Gyldendal, 2009. Grauballe Man was discovered in April 1952, near the village of that name. He was thirty-four years old when he died in 290 BC. I went to see him in the Moesgård Museum in Jutland. He is its most famous exhibit and he lies in the heart of the building. You enter a dimly lit space and walk across a brown floor with a spongy quality that is meant to imitate the surface of a peat bog. You reach an area fenced off by plate glass, from where you can look down at the body lying in a soft brown sepulchre. You go to the floor below to gaze at him more closely but I was so shocked by what I saw, I left almost at once. During two years of careful work the original face was cosmetically stretched and lifted and as a result the battered but calm person who was there has been replaced by a strange and frightening creature, more Hollywood ghoul than human being.

  42

  In Danish the word for book is bog.

  This is the story. On Saturday 6 May 1950 and not far from the village of Tollund – the name means a grove belonging to the Norse god Thor – a woman called Grete, her husband Viggo, their three children and Emil her husband’s brother travelled along a sunken road in a cart pulled by two horses called Red and Grey. When they reached a small raised bog which belonged to the family, the men began cutting peat with their spades while Grete and the children laid the peats out to dry on the drying ground.

  A couple of days earlier they had come across what looked like a short-handled wooden sword and now Emil’s spade again hit a hard object which he thought must be a tree stump. G
rete came to see. She clambered down to join the men in the cutting that was some two metres deep. She put her hand into the peat and realised later her finger must have moved between the forehead and the skullcap that Tollund Man was wearing. She scraped back the peat and uncovered the surface of the leather cap made out of eight pieces of sheepskin, fur-side inside to keep the head warm. The others helped her and they reached the face.

  The man they saw was small, dark-skinned and perfectly preserved. He appeared to be lost in sleep, his eyes closed so softly you might expect to see the eyelids flickering from the workings of a dream, and, just like a dreamer, his lips were set in a private smile. He looked as though he might wake up at any moment, yawn and stretch his limbs and wonder what strange place he was in and how long he had been there.

  The family had not previously found any bog bodies, not even those of animals, but they knew of the recent disappearance of a schoolboy who never came back from a bicycle trip. Perhaps this was the boy or even someone else who had been recently murdered. They hid what they had found with peat and went on with their work. They worked on the next day as well, cutting around the block in which the body lay. On Monday they went to a public telephone and contacted the police station.

  A detective who also helped at the local museum in the town of Silkeborg arrived at the site, along with the museum librarian and the archaeologist Professor P. V. Glob who knew all about bogs and the bodies they could hold.

  They could see the outline of the man within the block of peat. He was lying on his right side, his head turned to the west. Although some parts of the body seemed quite firm, other areas were wet and crumbly and so it was decided not to try to remove him. A carpenter was sent for and asked to bring planks to make a crate big enough to hold both Tollund Man and his bed. The news of the find had travelled and a cluster of people turned up to stare. A local newspaper reported that the body was wrapped in a fur coat, but this was only the soft, pale and fibrous layer of a type of peat called dog’s flesh on which he lay.

  Ten men helped to heave the crate and its heavy load out of the bog and to manoeuvre it on to the cart to which Red and Grey were harnessed. A policemen strained his heart while doing the lifting and died shortly afterwards. ‘A life for a life,’ said Professor Glob later when he wrote about the occasion; he had a natural gift for the dramatic. The crate travelled by cart and then by train to the National Museum of Copenhagen and for some reason the journey took eight days.