Clodagh Finn: For peat’s sake, don’t turf out thousands of years of heritage

Just as Cop26 will hear about the 'code-red threat to humanity' posed by the climate change emergency, it will also hear there is still time to act

Excavation director Caitríona Moore and archaeologist Niall Jones lifting a block wheel from the base of a late Bronze Age trackway at Edercloon, Co Longford. 

The beautifully manicured hands get me every time. The whorled patterns on his fingertips, a man who stood 6ft 6in in life, are so perfectly preserved that you feel a human instinct to touch one. Index finger to index finger, bridging over 2,000 years in the process.

That’s how it affects me anyway. Every time I see ‘Croghan Man’ at the National Museum in Dublin, I’m struck by the almost sacred fact that you can come so close to a person who lived in the Irish Iron Age (between 400BC and 200BC).