Glaciers and Irish bogs make perfect 'time capsules'

A trip to Italy for Richard Collins and grandchildren included a visit to Ötzi the Iceman and his copper axe, animal-skin coat and primitive medical kit

An interpretation of how Ötzi the Iceman may have looked. His remains are preserved at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology

‘Some day I will go to Aarhus, To see his peat-brown head' — The Tollund Man by Seamus Heaney.

"I scared of Whootsie and Jesus," declared Laoise Collins, aged six, in Bolzano last week. She had seen Ötzi the Iceman in the archaeology museum and a graphic Ecce Homo in a local church.