Further details at Irish Central, and the Irish Times has a report of another similar discovery. The butter may have been "piseogary" (or a "pishogue').Joe explained "We were cutting turf and I found what looked like a huge piece of timber…We took it out with a spade and it turned out to be bog butter."... "It looked like a keg or an urn with two handles and a lid carved from a solid piece of wood." The container has carving marks around the edges with a removable lid with handles and holes, possibly for carrying. The wooden vessel measures a foot in diameter and is almost two feet tall. The 100 pound container was buried seven-feet down.
24 June 2011
More "bog butter" found
A recent report out of Ireland details the discovery of a small barrel of 5,000-year-old butter:
Irish bogs contains all sorts of goodies! I excavated some beautifully preserved falucht fiadh in a bog a few years ago. These are basically wooden troughs assocaiated with mounds of burnt stone.
ReplyDeleteThis is one of my favorite interpretations: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ6K03ovxCM&feature=related
Also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulacht_fiadh#Theories_of_function
There's a museum of butter in Cork, where they have a barrel of bog butter on display. Well worth a visit if you're in the city; butter was one of Cork's biggest exports when the city was a main stop on shipping routes from the UK to the US, making it one of the Republic's wealthiest cities at the time, and has cultural significance I hadn't even imagined before visiting the museum.
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