-Well, that's my job.

 

-Well, this does at least tell us somebody comes from Northern Europe here with this material in quite considerable amounts.

 

-Well, somebody may not have come. Somebody may have been handing it on and they have come through many different hands before it reaches Ireland. What we do know is that a lot of it came and a lot of it has been preserved because of this tendency to deposit these hoards in bogs. 

 

There is a surface landscape which offers immediate clues to our past. And there is the Irish story concealed beneath our bog land. One sixth of Ireland, more than any other European country, lies under bog formed after early farmers began to clear the upland forest 2,500 years Before Christ (B.C.). 

 

This is a patch of bog in North Kerry that's been dug by my family for fuel for the fire for several generations. The poet Seamus Heaney described the men who worked the bogs as “our pioneers driving inwards and downwards”. Every layer they strip seems camped on before. And as today's farmers have dug deeper, they've found evidence of our earliest ancestors and links with a wider world.

 

This is Clonycavan Man, a 2000-year-old Irishman whose body was preserved by the unique chemistry of the bogs. 

 

-Then do we know anything about this man: who he was? Where he came from?

 

-Well, we know he was found in a bog on the West Meath border. We know that he was killed ritually more than 2,000 years ago. 

 

-How was he killed?

 

-He was struck first in the face, which broke his nose, and when he fell down, his head was split with an axe. His stomach was cut across. He was probably disemboweled as well.

 

-Why would they have done that?

 

-We think that this man was probably a king who was killed and a number of means of execution were employed because the goddess to whom he was being sacrificed appears in a number of forms, so they had to sacrifice in all her forms.