Episode 3: Rituals of Power and Place

Episode 3 takes us to Loughcrew in County Meath, where travel writer Fionn Davenport witnesses the autumn equinox at one of Ireland’s most extraordinary ritual landscapes. It’s a moment when the rising sun meets ancient stone and the beliefs of the ancestors feel very close indeed. 

Here, Fionn speaks with archaeologist Dan Maher about Loughcrew’s significance on the celestial calendar and the myths woven into the land. Later, he hears from Eimear Burke, Druid and Chosen Chief of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, who explores the power and purpose of these rituals in the lives of the Iron Age Irish. 

With every new insight, we edge closer to understanding the belief systems that might explain the brutal deaths of Old Croghan Man and Clonycavan Man and why they were chosen for such a fate. 

Explore more of Ireland’s ancient past, from the Neolithic to the early Christian era, at https://www.discoverireland.ie/the-discovery-series

Transcript

SPEAKER_05 0:00

It's just after five here at La Crew, and the place is already humming. The sky is just beautifully clear. It's got that kind of wash blue you only get after a chilly night. And just beyond over the hills, I can see the sun starting to rise. It's cold, but oh the weather is just perfect. It's Sunday, September 21st, and the date matters because today marks the autumn equinox, which is that moment when day and night are more or less the same length. For us, it's considered the start of autumn. The leaves have already started to turn, and we're looking into the bottom of the wardrobe to dig out those winter jumpers. But in ancient times, this was considered the threshold between the abundance of summer and the leaner times to come. It was a key moment in the celestial calendar that culminates in Sawan, which is in about six weeks' time on November 1st. And it's that link to ancient times that brings me and hundreds of others to this beautiful hill just northwest of Old Castle in County Meath. You're very welcome to episode three of the Discovery series The Bog Bodies. I'm Fjund Davenport. In the last episode, we talked about some of the theories about how Clony Cabin Man and O'Crohan Man might have died. Whether it was tied to the social codes of the time, it could have been tribal warfare, punishment for cowardice, or even because they looked a little different. But we left you with another possibility, and that was that their own belief systems ultimately led to their deaths. Now it's a world that feels very distant to us now, but if we want to get any closer to understanding why these men died, and indeed in such a brutal way, we need to try to see things through that lens, which is why I'm here at Loch Crew, one of the great sacred sites where people once came to worship, honor their gods, and even slip a little closer to the other world. Danmar is an archaeologist and, as it happens, the founder of a band called Bog Bodies, and he's been here since 4 a.m. We caught up as he came down from the summit.

SPEAKER_00 2:08

Oh, it was amazing. Yeah, really wonderful sunrise this morning. Absolutely blessed with the weather and a great crowd of people up there. It was it's just such a special place. You know, it really has a vibe or an energy around us, and these people come from all over Ireland to gather here at this time of year. It's it's uh it's it was beautiful. It was mostly silent except for a couple of dogs running around barking. And um, as the sun came up, yeah, people started to whoop and cheer and bang drums and play music and just kind of celebrate the time of year that we're at.

SPEAKER_05 2:42

Was it a very individual response or was there a kind of a collective, organized response to the entire experience?

SPEAKER_00 2:51

Oh, yeah, it's very much individual. I mean, there's there's people just arrive here, uh, it's not organized in any sense, and it's a very kind of subjective experience. Everyone, you can you you get as much as you give, and you can you can receive a lot if you're quite open to it. So there's no formal organization, it's just people who are for here for all kinds of reasons. I mean, all walks of life, really. You know, you had young, you had old, you had, you know, people who are into new age spirituality, you had archaeologists, and you had people who just love a good hill walk early in the morning.

SPEAKER_05 3:23

And yet, what bound them all to this place at this time is this fascination with something that the ancient Irish would have recognized four or five more thousand years ago, and that's the rising of the sun at a particular time of year.

SPEAKER_00 3:39

Absolutely, yeah. We're at the the autumn equinox here. Um the sun rises up, it illuminates in the chamber of the passage tomb, and and creates a lovely light inside on some amazing rock art. And people relate to that. I mean, that's that's something that's it's five and a half, six thousand years old at least, and uh it's just something that uh that people find a real truth in, or something, I think. Whatever that truth is for them, it's entirely up to their own experience. But uh yeah, this is the place for it.

SPEAKER_05 4:10

The phenomenon that Dan is describing is most famously observed during the winter solstice at Bruna Bogna, where the sun illuminates the passageway at Newgrange. At Loch Cru, the temple known as Cairn T is aligned to the Autumn Equinox. And the experience mightn't be as well known, perhaps, but it's just as magical. And places like Loch Crew matter deeply to people today because they offer a tangible way to reconnect with our pre-Christian heritage. A chance to stand where our ancestors once stood and feel that older, quieter thread of Irish identity that runs just beneath the surface. But what about those ancestors? What did Loch Cru mean to the Irish in the Iron Age?

SPEAKER_00 4:54

So the ancient Irish would have been well able to observe the shifting of the sun as it moved across the sky. And it must have been a great mystery to them in some sense, but whatever way they they kind of conceptualized it or or they organized it in their own minds, they built these incredible monuments to mark these very special times of year. It was part of their trying to understand the universe, part of their cosmology. So what we see up here on Loch Crew, it's a passage tomb, much like New Grange, that's aligned with the rising sun of the equinox. As the sun comes up, the light enters the chamber and hits the back wall. And we think that kind of symbolized the sun in a way almost impregnating the earth, or like mother earth and kind of father sky. And that, of course, could have just been a symbol for where we were at at that time of the year, what agricultural processes needed to happen, what kind of preparation needed to be done for the upcoming winter.

SPEAKER_05 6:01

I mean, as remarkable as the idea of the sun illuminating a passage tomb is, equally remarkable, I'd say, is the mats and prep that went into creating the passage tombs, is they must have been able to track the sun every day of the year and mark it on the ground to make sure that they were building the passage tombs correctly.

SPEAKER_00 6:23

Absolutely. I mean it's it's it's an engineering phenomenon, really. You know, I mean, they really must have had people here who were entirely dedicated to that, some kind of druetic class or priestly class who must have spent a significant portion of their lives doing just that and working out these alignments and then kind of crafting this megalithic art onto these stones, oftentimes which were dragged from miles and miles away. They're not from the region, they were brought here specifically. These tombs, or rather, temples is probably a better way to phrase them, were constructed for that reason. So it's just, yeah, it's it's it's incredible really to think about it.

SPEAKER_05 7:04

Now, this idea of a druidic or priestly class is important, and we're going to come back to that later. But for our Iron Age ancestors, the mystery of the cosmos, the movement of the sun and the moon, and the drive to make sense of it all, they weren't abstract ideas. They shaped daily life and were tied to survival itself. That mindset does feel worlds away from us now, but to help bridge that gap, we're going to turn again to Dr. Jacqueline Cachel-Wilson of the Royal Agricultural University, a Sirencester, who we met in episode two and who has a very personal connection to this story.

SPEAKER_04 7:41

I grew up in Longford, which as you know is in the heart of the bogland and the misty Midlands. So mine was summers of wandering the fields and growing vegetables and keeping chickens and talking to my father, who was, I think we'd regard him as a shaniky. He was a storyteller, and it was he who talked about ancient places, mysticism, mythology, and also sort of partly terrified us to keep away from the bog because of the ghosts and yellow lights that would entice you in in the evening.

SPEAKER_05 8:16

When you imagine the Iron Age era in Ireland, what do you picture?

SPEAKER_04 8:21

Oh, that's such a great question. And I have to sort of think myself back into the past, think myself back into talking to my father at the doorway of our lovely old house. I think for them, just like it was for my father, um, land and the and hands in the land, working the land, um was absolutely central. It was part of who they were and how they saw themselves. So you can see that anything like a crop failure or a cataclysmic event that meant that they could not feed their people, everything was very much for the short term. And for me, the myths, the legends, the mysticism all comes from that link to the land and looking up into those vast skies. They must have felt looking up at the moon and the stars that the gods were there to be placated. The gods were watching over them.

SPEAKER_05 9:21

A complete connection to the land means that so many of our oldest myths and legends are rooted in it, and Loch Crew is no exception. Its Irish name, Sleeve Nakalyuch, means the hill of the witch or hill of the hag. Dan and I ducked into an old thatch cottage beside the cafe at the foot of the hill to get some respite from the autumn chill, and I asked him why it was so named.

SPEAKER_00 9:45

So the the popular folklore story relating to Loch Crew is that the Kalyak who brought in the winter flew over the three hills and dropped the boulders that she was carrying from her apron. The Kalyak would be the kind of counterpoint to Bridget or Brege, which we see on the 1st of February Imbalak. So Brege would be the youthful fertility of the spring, and the kalyak would be the older kind of declining sense of life that comes with winter. A goddess, perhaps, a sovereignty goddess of the land, which we can see later throughout our mythology. Um, and it's fascinating because it's not just related to here, there's also the kalyok is referenced in Cork, it's referenced up the north and other parts. There's sites relating to that. So again, it's like the mystery of the changing of the seasons. Why does winter come? These people must have wondered why does death come? How can we relate to this? Well, we can relate to this through the feminine, we can relate to this through the notion of the earth being a living female mother who provides. And in springtime, we have Breed who starts the process of having plenty, the fertility of the land. And perhaps as we approach winter, we can see the kalyak, that time of deep introspection, sitting in by the fire, and and the end of the life cycle, in a way. They must have seen it like a cyclical process whereby life came and went annually, and that must have been a mystery to them. So, of course, as human beings, what we do is we we relate to that in the only way we can. We humanize it, we we anthropomorphize it. Um, in that sense, that it's I can relate to this if I understand it in terms of an individual's life cycle. And the the earth, the mother earth, the goddess, the triple goddess that we see is very much embodied through the kalyak, which is related here. We see then the sun comes up the chamber, illuminates the passage, we know where we're at in the year. The kalyak is here, and from this time on, we're approaching the winter, we're approaching the long, dark, hard months, the harvest is almost over, we're prepared for this stage of life in a way.

SPEAKER_05 12:17

At the heart of how our Iron Age ancestors understood the natural world was this idea that there's no us and them between people, animals, and plants. Everything is part of the same living network. Everything is connected and influencing one another. Emer Burke, who's the chosen chief of the order of bards, ovates, and druids, explains exactly what that means.

SPEAKER_03 12:43

They were very animistic as well as theistic, and that animistic view is that there's a web of connectedness. We're all the one, so we're not apart from it. That's that Cartesian divide, that mind-body split, has influenced our modern way of thinking. But pre-that is that we are all one. And then pre-Christian, too, because we'll say with the Christian worldview is that animals and plants don't have a soul, but that the animistic worldview is that everything, everything, animate or inanimate in the world, like every stone, river, leaf, plant, tree, animal, including humans, are insuled and that we are all connected. And that's a very, very powerful worldview to have because when you have it, you're less likely to do damage. Because you have an imperative to protect yourself as an insoled being and all the other ensoled beings, knowing that each one of us depends on the other in order to survive. That doesn't mean we're we have to be v vegans. I'm I'm talking about that recognizing that in order for a species to survive, it has to consume another. So we consume species, but we are also consumed, and we have species within our bodies at the moment consuming us.

SPEAKER_05 13:47

Respect for nature was woven into the laws and social codes of the time. And Emer shared a lovely example, the way trees were ranked and protected, and a special place they held in Iron Age society.

SPEAKER_03 13:59

Um tree is like a metaphor for our lives. You know, the roots of the past, the trunk is the present, the branches and the leaves of the future. They demonstrate that cycle of life, death, and rebirth. They're almost like a clock or a calendar for us in in the in the landscape. We just watch when the buds come. Uh each and different species will herald different things. So the herald of spring, for example, is the the blackthorn that that produces flowers before leaves. The Mayflower, Bialtana, that'll tenu this is when Bialtana is here, uh, and then the fruits, etc. All of them very, very important. And then, of course, we have Brehen laws around trees. You have different tiers of trees based on their importance. You're the noble, the lords of the woods, you're the commoner of the woods, you're the the lesser ones, the bushes. They were so important that if you cut down a tree or damaged a tree, you paid a fine in cows. I mean, like a s a tree could be worth three cows. Think of the price of three cows today. And then you had the billa, these were the sacred trees, and there's a story how the first trees came to Ireland when Tre Fulmithre Oker brought a branch and he gave seeds to Fiontamakhbokra, who lived five thousand years by the way. And he planted them, and we had the five billa, these were the five sacred trees of Ireland. And from that you had each community had its own villa, and that was a sacred tree where meetings were held, inaugurations were held, and that represented the integrity and the strength of a community. So much so that an invading territory would come in, and what they would do was go to destroy the billa, to destroy their power. That is how important they were. And then when you even look now, like science now tells us, you know, about trees being sentient beings, how they send healing to each other, how they communicate each other through the mycelian networks, I think our ancestors knew all of that without being able to articulate it, but knew that they were really important to the integrity of the land and people around them.

SPEAKER_05 15:57

What is becoming clear to me is that our Iron Age ancestors saw nature in a way that feels almost impossible, well, certainly for me to grasp now, with all our science and technology and creature comforts. For them, though, nature wasn't a backdrop, it was life or death. The sun, the moon, the stars, they weren't distant objects, but powerful deities that could decide whether the world provided for you or even turned against you. Aaman Kelly's theory about Iron Age Kings marrying and pleasing the goddess of the land, which we heard about in episode two, makes a lot of sense in this context. And Danmar agrees that this idea of a kind of sacred pact between kings and the gods does actually hold water.

SPEAKER_00 16:51

You know, you've lived a high life for so long, and now it's time to pay the price. Being put in the bog is is very, very interesting because you're you're in a state of stasis there, they're preserved. They would have known that that was an anaerobic kind of environment um that things put in the bog would not decay at the same rate as they would if they were buried in dry land. So it's almost like these uh these bog bodies were you know murdered and then put in this kind of state of stasis, perhaps as an offering in some way to the land, perhaps to appease what they saw maybe as as Mother Earth.

SPEAKER_05 17:29

Is there any evidence or any thought in your mind that by becoming chieftain of their respective Tua or or you know the clan chief, that they knew that this was the deal they signed up for? They either delivered good harvest, prosperity for their people, or else, and then in so doing, when a bad year came, they knew, well, this is just the price I have to pay.

SPEAKER_00 17:54

Absolutely, yeah. I mean, we can't apply our own ethic onto that society. They could they more than likely had a very different worldview. And even looking back at some of the mythological stories, you can see our our greatest heroes were were guys who went out and you know killed hundreds of people in battle. So they probably had a very different view of the world, and perhaps they they were fully aware of that.

SPEAKER_05 18:20

If Clony Cavan Man and Old Crohan Man were sacrificed in a ritual to the goddess of the land, then who set it in motion? I mean, who carried out the ritual and oversaw something that really was very brutal? It's reasonable to think that it may have been the Druids. They were important figures in Iron Age society, they were deeply respected for their knowledge of spiritual belief, lore, medicine, and the law. I wanted to know more about these men and women, and I wanted to understand what role they might have played, if any, in the fate of Old Crohan Man and Clony Cabin Man. So who better to ask than a modern druid herself? Here's Emer Burke.

SPEAKER_03 19:02

They knew their landscape. They were sharp readers of it, they could divine for the flight of birds or weather and patterns. There are stories of, you know, raising mists and drying up rivers and making trees happen. Lots of stories around that, using their magical powers to protect the clan against, we'll say, enemies. They feature in stories that were there as diviners, for example. So when a child of uh a king or a chieftain was born, the local druid would be asked to divine the child's future. Uh, there are stories where uh Kaffa, Conor Magnus's druid, is looking for Kukulan, for example, and he uses Ohm staves to divine where he is. Those kind of things uh to make prophecies and also to maintain, I suppose they were there as peacekeepers, advisors to the kings, they maintained, I suppose, a certain kind of order, ensuring that the king maintained sovereignty. So when there was abundance and the climate was good, the crops were good, it was a peaceful time, it meant he was honouring the goddess of the land and maintaining sovereignty. And I think the druids their role was as advisors, and they had the power to elevate uh a king or a chief or uh demote him, depending on his behavior.

SPEAKER_05 20:16

The Druids played a role in enforcing laws, like I mean, so they could ostensibly be deciding matters of life and death.

SPEAKER_03 20:23

Yeah, so they would have had a judicial role, so that if there was a dispute, they would be brought before somebody who held that role like a Brehen, and they would determine the punishment.

SPEAKER_05 20:38

Given their near-total reliance on it, it's hardly surprising that everything came back to the land. Your survival, your family's future, the well-being of your whole clan. It all depended on keeping the land content and productive. Now, in some ways, the king's job was pretty straightforward: happy land, happy people. And seen through that lens, the deaths of Clony Cabin Man and Old Crohan Man make total sense. As clan chieftains, if they failed in their duty to keep the land bountiful, the punishment was death. And it wasn't just folklore, it was effectively laid down in law. But that still doesn't explain why they were killed so violently. Both men were bound, they were stabbed, and they were struck multiple times, their bodies left in a state that suggests extreme ritual intent. One explanation may lie in another key part of their belief system, something tied to what is called the thinning of the veil.

SPEAKER_00 21:34

The thinning of the veil is often seen at these solstices, equinoxes, and cross quarter days. Um, it refers to the belief that the veil between this reality and the other world, which is a prominent uh feature in Irish mythology, um, it thins. And so it's kind of a liminal space or place or time where. People can either communicate with the other side, or spirits or entities can cross over from that. So, in the kind of pre-Celtic ancient Irish belief, it's quite probable that people fully recognize that and engaged with it in some meaningful way to either connect with their ancestors or to pray in some sense. If we look at Sawan, for example, and the practice of dressing up as in a kind of horrific fashion or as monsters or demons, like that, that could easily be interpreted as an embodiment of that. The other, let's say, or even if we look at the wren boys or the straw boys, they kind of form this archetype in a way for society to let them maybe relate life and death in a way that's more manageable for them.

SPEAKER_05 22:51

At these moments where the veil is thin between this world and the other world, are these moments marked by fear and trepidation or celebration?

SPEAKER_00 23:02

Interesting. Yeah, it seems to be kind of a juxtaposition of both, actually. Oftentimes they're marked, like Lunisa, for example, or Bjaltina up on the hill of Ishnak is a giant fire and a great celebration. Thousands of people go to that event every year, but there certainly is an element of the unknown in there. And I guess it's just more about how you relate to that yourself in some sense. It could certainly bring fear, it could certainly bring trepidation, but you know, maybe that's part of it. Maybe, maybe that's it. Like death has always probably been a mystery, and we can see by looking at other cultures that they they celebrated and marked it in similar but different ways. So maybe it's a way of acknowledging that fear and trepidation through celebration of it, much like the Irish wake, for example. Like that's kind of a uniquely Irish thing where you know they bring the body into the house and they celebrate the dead, for they wake the dead in some sense for three, four days. Um it's probably both, Fion.

SPEAKER_05 24:14

This belief that death was not the end of your life, just the end of your life in this world, is not an unfamiliar one. Virtually every culture that has ever existed has some version of the other world, a realm that sits alongside ours, where ancestors linger, spirits live, gods meddle, or the dead continue their journey. The Greeks had Hades, the Norse had the nine realms. Many indigenous cultures hold to rich spirit worlds. Even in Christian Europe, the older belief in fairies, angels, and liminal places has never really gone away. For Eamon Kelly, the Iron Age belief in an other world helps explain why O'Cronman and Cloney Kavanaugh were so extensively and methodically disfigured before being placed in the bog.

SPEAKER_02 24:59

The fact that both the bodies had this cutting of the nipples suggested that they were related in terms of social status. And uh I found a reference in the writings of St. Patrick that seemed to unlock what was going on there. Because uh in his Confesio, Patrick tells how he ran away from his slave master and uh he got to the to the seashore at a distance from where he was kept, and he had a negotiation with a sea captain who was in a position to take him away from Ireland and escape from slavery. And the captain told Patrick that he must uh suck his nipples, and Patrick refused to do that because that was an Irish pagan practice to show submission. And when I looked further into that, this is associated with something called milk kinship, which is uh to do with the kinship which is uh established uh with fosterage when babies are being suckled by women who aren't their biological mothers. And we know that that was a really big aspect of of ancient Ireland and the relationship between foster children uh uh and their foster parents was very often much, much stronger than between children and their natural parents. And indeed, the the concept of milk kinship was very extensive all over ancient Europe. So this practice of sucking the nipples is something that comes out of those customs, establishing relationship through fosterage.

SPEAKER_05 26:52

So there's a couple of interesting avenues I want to go down here. So the first one is this so similar to in later times, if I wanted to show submission to the king, I might kneel down or kiss his hand. That the equivalent in the ancient world was that I would get down suck his nipples as a way of saying you are my Legion master or whatever. Like I submit to you.

SPEAKER_02 27:16

Sounds very strange, but uh that's that's what was going on. I mean it's an effective way of of implying submission, I'd imagine.

SPEAKER_05 27:26

And then the second thing is this so what do you think is the significance of a post-mortem slicing of the nipples?

SPEAKER_02 27:38

Yeah, well it it it decommissions the king as a king because in under under the Irish law, a king had to be without blemish. So a king with cut nipples he couldn't function as king. He wouldn't be in a position to accept submission.

SPEAKER_05 27:56

So hang on, he could obviously he couldn't function as king because he was dead, but he couldn't function as king even in the afterlife.

SPEAKER_02 28:03

Exactly. It's uh decommissioning him in this world and the next.

SPEAKER_05 28:08

Of all the damage inflicted on Clony Cabin Man and Old Crohan Man, it's the cutting of the nipples that feels especially brutal to us today. It feels so wantonly cruel, but when you think of it in those terms, it all makes a lot more sense. Whoever killed our kings knew that by cutting their nipples they were condemning them to a kind of eternal damnation. They weren't just stopped from being rulers in this realm, but in the next one too, and that is some punishment. It's almost impossible to imagine what that final day must have been like for them, knowing their fate was already sealed. Did they stand before a druid or a Brehen who formally pronounced the judgment? Did they kneel before their appointed executioner, accepting the punishment that came with failing to appease the goddess of the land to whom they absolutely were bound as kings? Were they scared, or did they meet their fate with some calm acceptance as they prepared to cross into the next world? It's not ridiculous to think that they may have felt both an acceptance and understanding of the role, but when the blades were drawn, they may have had a very human response to. Obviously, we can't know for sure. What we do know, though, is that once they'd been killed, they were deliberately placed in the bog. Theories abound as to why they were put there, from marking territorial boundaries to the preferred way of disposing of outcasts. But for Jacqueline, it was all about rituals and beliefs.

SPEAKER_04 30:11

Perhaps they came back to revisit them. Perhaps they were visible all that time in the bog. Perhaps there was, you know, reconvening of ceremonies around these individuals who would have been so well preserved in the bog. We think of them as being covered up. Perhaps they weren't. Perhaps their resting place was a known pool in that bog where people returned.

SPEAKER_05 30:41

Here at Loch Crew, the celebrations had more or less ended by eleven o'clock, and as the hill was quieter, I went back up just to kind of have a moment to myself. When you look at the cairn, it's spectacular in its own right. And then just outside, you've got like these standing stones that they're like rows of crooked teeth kind of jutting into the ground. And all the while, like you're just thinking, like, men and women left their mark here 5,000 years ago. Like more than 50 centuries ago, they left their mark here. And uh I mean, it's hard not to be moved when you imagine the sun kind of rising and then it slowly illuminating the passage right into the middle of the cairn, and then you've got the standing stone, the the carved stone at the back of the cairn, which has all these engravings on it, and the sun just illuminating that, and all these things come into your mind, like like people did this, people did it on purpose, and how beautiful these stones are, and how just how magical the whole experience is. It's a special place, and I think do you know what stays with you most? It's the history, sure, but it's the quiet as well. If you're up here and you can just sit here, let the wind blow, and imagine that something has been looking out or looking after this land for thousands of years, and and these are the stones that are that reminder, and that's why Loch Crew is so wonderful. I'm not the only one that gets this feeling on the hill. It's the same for Dan Maher and the many, many other people who've been discovering some kind of connection to sacred and historical sites like this all over Ireland.

SPEAKER_00 32:46

Certainly for me, Loch Crew is a place I'll visit any time of year. If I've got something on my mind, if there's something bugging me, I'll just go for a lovely walk out in the Irish countryside to a sacred site. And and oftentimes I'll come down off that hill and I'll feel a lot better. Now, that could just be something as simple as getting out in nature no matter what the weather, just dressing for it, just getting out there. You know, it could just be the physical activity of walking, it could just be the sunshine or the woods. I feel like it's something more. I feel like there is a tradition, an ancient tradition, attached to these places that people, our people, have come here for thousands of years. We know this, like for thousands of years they've come here, and whatever they were up to, maybe, maybe there's a trace of that left in the land. Maybe there's something there for you in that.

SPEAKER_05 33:36

Next time on the Discovery series, The Bog Bodies, we pull together everything we've uncovered so far and ask the big question. Taking what we know now about these men and the world that they lived in, what actually happened to them?

SPEAKER_01 33:52

You took on kingship, knowing full well that at some point, whether you've transgressed or not, something's gonna catch up on you, and you can be not just dispatched, but dispatched in a particularly gruesome way.

SPEAKER_05 34:12

Ireland has plenty of ancient sites that you can explore from the Neolithic Age right to the early Christian period. To find out more, go to discoverareland.ie.