“Much of the Irish landscape is dominated by peat bogs; the anaerobic and acidic conditions in the densely packed earth mean that the past in Ireland can be subject to macabre resurrection. Peat cutters occasionally churn up ancient mandibles, clavicles, or entire cadavers that have been preserved for millennia. The bodies date as far back as the Bronze Age, and often show signs of ritual sacrifice and violent death. These victims, cast out of their communities and buried, have surfaced vividly intact, from their hair to their leathery skin. The poet Seamus Heaney, who harvested peat as a boy on his family’s farm, once described the bogs of Ireland as “a landscape that remembered everything that had happened in and to it.” TroublesNorthern IrelandBelfast Book:Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland Source: Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
“There was a discomfiting sense in Belfast that there was no place where you were truly secure: you would run inside to get away from a gun battle, only to run outside again for fear of a bomb.” WarNorthern IrelandBelfastThe Troubles Book:Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland Source: Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland