Visit Pete Marsh in the British Museum? – Not right now!
Pete Marsh is someone I do try to visit every so often, just to see how he’s getting on.
He’s about two thousand years old, so I like to make sure he’s okay.
But on a recent visit I found he’d upped sticks!
Pete Marsh is a well preserved male body (well, the upper half, anyway) found in a bog in Cheshire in 1984. The bog gave him his name – Peat Marsh, geddit?
He must have been some kind of sacrifice, having been killed in three ways – strangled, his throat cut, and knocked on the head as well. (Either that or he was an early football fan…)
And chemical analysis shows that although we believe the ancient Britons ran around covered in woad (which is blue), Pete was actually a little green man – painted with green vegetable dye before he was killed.
He is mysterious. Perhaps he was a Druid prince (the body showed no signs of hard labour – he’d lived the life of a scholar, or a noble, looked after by others). And he’s also rather gruesome in his little glass case.
But if you want to see him, you’ll have to take a trip to Manchester where he’s currently the star of his own exhibition - Lindow Man: A bog body mystery at the Manchester Museum. He won’t be back in the BM till April 2009.
Oh yes, Lindow Man is his official name. But I prefer Pete. It suits him, somehow.
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