Lindow Moss

 Location: Wilmslow, Cheshire

If you want to know what a liminal place was for the ancient Celtic people of this land, look no further than Lindow Moss, in Cheshire.

Located next to the well-healed commuter town of Wilmslow, where the 1% of Greater Manchester live, not a lot of the original moss is left.

However if you visit Lindow Common, on the outskirts of the town, preferably in the early morning, when the dog walkers are thinner on the ground, and ideally when a mist still hangs over the waters of the mere, you get some idea of what it was like here two thousand years ago. Seeing your reflection in the black water, the Otherworld of Celtic myth, a place of light and shadow, joy and terror, that lurks just beneath or below our world, can seem very real.

Most of the rest of the moss has now been drained, allowing the peat that has built up over the centuries to be dig up and used as an extremely unsustainable form of compost. In 1984 it was peat cutters who found the person who makes this area famous: Lindow Man, or, as the locals called him, Pete Marsh.

What they actually found first was the head of a woman. The police used the discovery to prompt a Mr Reyn-Bardt to confess to the murder of his wife in 1960, but it turned out the body was much more interesting, being nearly 2000 years old.

The next year the even better preserved body of Lindow Man was found. A healthy young man, who had done no hard labour prior to his death, he was naked and died either by strangulation by a  leather cord, a blow to the head, drowning, or possibly all three. He also had traces of mistletoe in his stomach, a plant sacred to the Druids. His 'triple death' mirrors that recorded in Celtic myth, and coupled with the liminal place in which he was found, suggests human sacrifice. We can't be sure, and don't know if he was genuinely posh, or just given a year or so of living like king in exchange for being given a ritual death.

Radio carbon dating places his death in approximately the first century AD, right about the time that the Romans were conquering this part of the known world. Could Lindow Man have been an offering to the Gods, asking them to turn back the seemingly unstoppable legions with their suspiciously straight roads?

When I first came to this area it was also to stop something. As anyone who visits the place will immediately notice, we are right next to Manchester airport here. In 1997 protesters were occupying land nearby to stop the construction of a second runway, living in primitive camps. I, like the notorious human mole Swampy, was busy digging myself into the clay soil, with the aim of making it more difficult for us to be evicted, and hoping I would not be sacrificing myself in the process.

In the end we were all removed by the forces of law and order, and just before the construction crews moved in, archaeologists were allowed to explore the area. Underneath our camp they found the remains of a bronze age village.

Did the people of this village know Pete Marsh, I wonder? And if so, what did they do when they
realised their magic had not worked? Did they continue to visit this liminal place, and to worship the old gods, or did their faith come to an end?

I didn't stop Manchester Airport's second trunway either, but I still visit the moss. On one day in April 2010 my faith was rewarded though. An Icelandic volcano had grounded flights, and I walked across the moss to an airport that was as silent as the woods I passed through. For a little while I could pretend we'd won. 

So this is a very special liminal place for me, one that links this world to the Otherworld, the present to the Celtic past and my life as it is now to the more carefree days of my youth.

Incidentally, ignore the grid reference for the location of the find given on Wikipedia, in the guide book and the various press releases. The actual spot is just off Moor Lane. Peat cutting has now finished here, so nobody knows if there are more bodies waiting to be discovered, including the unfortunately Mrs Reyn-Bardt.