‘It was terrifying’: Ancient book’s journey from Tipperary bog to museum treasure
Discovered 15 years ago at Faddan More bog, Co. Tipperary, an early medieval Psalter. This picture shows the text emerge from the wet peat. National Museum of Ireland.
One summer’s day in Tipperary as peat was being dug from a bog, a button peered out from the freshly-cut earth. The find set off a five-year journey of conservation to retrieve and preserve what lay beyond: a 1,200-year-old psalm book in its original cover.
Bogs across Europe have thrown up all sorts of relics of the ancient past, from naturally preserved bodies to vessels containing butter more than a millennium old, but the 2006 discovery of an entire early medieval manuscript, entombed in a wet time capsule for so long, was unprecedented, said the National Museum of Ireland.
