Bog Butter found in Donegal

Apparently, the Celtic Gods Liked Their Bodies Buttered 

By Brenna Briggs
 

My New Year's Resolution for 2009 was to become an expert on "bog butter."

For starters (no pun intended), I have already heard of bog butter. This is very important if you are going to become an expert on any subject. And even more importantly, I think the bog butter topic is actually interesting. There are miles and miles of brown bog land on top of the Ox Mountains behind my house, so I already know what bog looks like, which is essential if you are going to become a bog butter expert. I will develop interesting theories and ideas about butter found in the bog as I work my way up the expert ladder. There's no big rush. Some of it has been buried in the bog for thousands of years already.

If the truth were to be told though, I am not sure I would ever want to actually taste bog butter. It's not that it looks particularly unappealing. In photos, it could be white cheddar cheese and sometimes it resembles paraffin wax. The information I have seen posted at museum bog butter displays, says that bog butter is often found packed in wood such as wicker, or animal skin containers, which are sometimes dug up when turf or peat is being harvested for fuel. The school of thought, is that when this butter was made, it was put into a hole down in the bog to preserve it and maybe even flavor it. 

The first time I saw bog butter was in the tiny Co. Sligo Museum. I observed what appeared to be a big butter churn in a glass case. Upon inspection, I discovered that it was actually petrified bog butter that weighed 123 pounds! It is thought that the ancient Celts used to offer big butter balls to their gods by burying them in the bogs as sacrificial offerings, often on borderlands between rival clans. Sometimes they offered human sacrifices too, and well-preserved bog bodies do turn up near bog butter from time to time. Apparently, the Celtic gods liked their bodies buttered.

I never liked chemistry very much, so I will let institutions such as The Royal Society of Chemistry in Scotland and the University of Bristol in the UK interpret the bog body experiments that a Prof. Evershed has already conducted at these places. 

Apparently, this professor buried modern fatty foods to find out how long the bog butter stuff takes to form. The obvious problem I see with this kind of experiment is that the results will not be available for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years from now. In my opinion, this seems pointless. Who wants to perform experiments if you don't get to find out how they turn out because you would already be long dead?

A local farmer here in Co. Sligo dug up bog butter in 2007 when he was cutting turf on his property. He took it to a Connacht Gold creamery, which is where a brand of butter is made locally, and they later determined that that his bog butter was only 52% fat content compared with an 82% fat content in today's standard butter. 30% less fat! Why is that? Were cows skinnier a long time ago? This is a serious question for a future bog butter expert like me to contemplate.

Like bottled water, perhaps bog butter could become the butter of choice in 2009 for the discerning, health-conscious individual? It would certainly, unlike some of the pork here in Ireland lately, be dioxin-free. And as far as entrepreneurship goes, if you think about it, this stuff is a gold mine. First, like spring water, it is already there. And, like spring water, it just has to be dug up. 

Of course it is a totally hit-or-miss kind of thing because there is no way of telling where bog butter is buried without actually bumping into it. Also, you cannot just go around digging in bogs looking for bog butter because bogs are protected by the Irish government. Maybe bog-butter sniffing dogs could be trained to smell it hundreds of feet under the turf? And then there are all the spin-off industries this ancient bog butter could create. I cannot think of any at this time, but I am sure someone will eventually.

Bog butter marketing would be tricky. Selling the idea of eating something that is at least hundreds, and possibly thousands of years old, would require some really sophisticated advertising. Certainly no taste tests, as the oldest bog butter goes back to the Bronze Age, 3,000 years ago. Taking into account the fact that milk products were the main source of food for the Irish until the flight of the Earls and the collapse of the Gaelic order around 1700, butter was quite likely buried all over the bogs up until the end of the 17th century.

Just to let you know, I will be available for lectures and conferences as soon as my research is completed and I have been declared a bog butter expert by somebody somewhere. After that, you can contact me any time to schedule a bog butter talk. Please give me a few weeks notice though, because I have to read a few more articles about bog butter first. 
 
 
 

Editor’s Note:  Brenna Briggs is the author of the Liffey Rivers Irish Dancer Mystery Series, http://www.liffeyrivers.com/. She lives in Sligo with her family and bog dog Cooga.