The red Moss Skull
Sometimes the past tries really hard to hide itself. Or maybe it’s the other way round – maybe we chose to forget, to ignore it, to pretend it didn’t happen. The retail park and the stadium at Middlebrook are one case in point. And the little matter of the dead woman’s severed head – we’ll come back to that.
Now I bet most Boltonians have been to Middlebrook at some time or other, to a match or a gig, to shop, get petrol or to go to work. With those vast modern steel-framed buildings, efficient roads whisking you from motorway to trolley park, even its own new railway station complete with park n ride, Middlebrook’s past hid itself so successfully it nearly got shovelled away with the landfill and forgotten forever. Along with the dead woman’s severed head.
Tucked away between the M61, the old Horwich Loco Works and the anonymous outskirts of modern Middlebrook, Red Moss isn’t a landscape with that instant wow factor. Flattish with a low hill on its east side, the wider area’s been used for peat-cutting, tipping, and even a smallpox hospital, and much of the remaining unused land was earmarked as a waste disposal site in the 1990s. The planners of the time were doing their best to deal with the mountains of waste being generated in Bolton, but they were also markedly ignoring the Case Of The Woman’s Severed Head.
Red Moss has been quietly developing as a peaty marsh since the end of the last Ice Age. Look at the Ordnance Survey map and you can pick out how the contour lines leave a blank, a kind of cup bounded by Anderton, Blackrod, Park Hall Farm, Horwich and Middlebrook. The Middle Brook itself, called the River Croal closer to Bolton town centre, seems to have its source somewhere round Red Moss.
So around 8000 BC, as humans started creeping back into the slowly warming Lancashire landscape, and as trees started growing again, a shallow muddy lake formed in this spot. Over the 10,000 years separating then from now, the lake slowly turned to a peat bog. To people in ancient times it may have been a marker between territories, or held sacred meaning, or both.
‘Moss’ is a much-used word in Lancashire. As a word it’s got its own back-story. It was introduced into our modern English language by Viking-Age settlers. These people spoke Old Norse, the parent language of modern Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. And even in modern Danish ‘møse’ means a bog. Shock-horror headlines from Ye Dailye Scrolle of the year 950 AD: ‘Marauding Vikings Rename Our Mires’……
So, back to the little business of the womanless head. The accounts vary. Sometime in the 1940s, a workman recovered a skull, randomly, while digging on Red Moss. Imagine if you will: you are in what was then a very lonely spot. There was no motorway. You may or may not have been given the right permission to dig where you were digging. Maybe you were digging some peat for your pot plants, or even to dry and burn on your fire. Just a normal, possibly slightly illicit, day’s work. And you turn up a human skull.
Options might occur to you. Would you feel shock? Slightly guilty? (wasn’t me guv…) Chuck it back in the hole, and make sure anyone curious knows you seen nuffin? Body-dumps by criminals weren’t invented for the CSI series.
Or might you scrape about a little more to see if the head owned a nice gold chain?
Or would you do what our man did in the 1940s, which is to present his find to the local museum, or police, or maybe the police who then presented it to the museum, it’s all a bit vague. If anyone can throw more light on the actual circumstances of the discovery, they would be serving posterity by sharing them.
After the skull was handed over to ‘the authorities’ someone who knew enough about forensics and human anatomy made three important observations. The skull belonged to a young woman. It had been cut with a bladed instrument from the highest cervical vertebra, or in simple terms, she’d been beheaded. And it was very old. Too old to be of interest in police matters, but old enough to be interesting to museum folk, who deemed it to be Bronze Age or perhaps Iron Age.
That’s a big guess, covering from 2300 BC to 45 AD. That makes our Red Moss Lass the oldest known Boltonian which is why I’d very much like to meet her. This could be a teensy problemette though, as 'the authorities' have lost her.
She’s travelled a bit after her discovery. As far as I can make out, she was handed in to the police laboratories at Chorley, which later became the regional forensic centre. This was closed down during cutbacks around 2010 (not sure of the date exactly). However at some point before this, the Red Moss Skull 'may' have been transferred with other cold case evidence to the medical school at Aston University Birmingham.
I say 'may' because a skull claimed to be the Red Moss Skull was collected from there in the 1980s by some of the good folk who found the Chorley Archaeological Society. The skull they collected was kept for a time by the Manchester Museum at Oxford Road, who photographed it. I've seen the photo. It's of a Peruvian mummy, with vertebrae visible all the way down to C6. In simple terms, all of the neck is present down to where your collar-bones start. You don't behead a viction at this thick wider part of the neck, you go for the delicate thinner part just below the skull. The photos show no obvious cut-marks to demonstrate beheading, as per the original description, but rather show all the signs of this being a dessicated Peruvian whose head has been twisted from the torso by grave-robbers, or really crap archaeologists.
This head has never spent time in a Lancashire peat bog. It's dessicated. it's the wrong head. The wrong bloody head.
I asked to see the Manchester Museums' inventory for objects coming into and out of its care for the date concerned. This is important, because it's a tenet of the basic standards of museum curatorship that they promised to perform, in return for government funding. Turns out, they didn't keep records for the time. Manchester Museum staff have refused to discuss this any further with me, which smacks of a guilty conscience. Call me an obsessive, I'll hold my hands up. But they helped lose the Red Moss Skull, which is annoying. A bit of transparency in the matter would make me less annoyed.
Since the discovery of Red Moss Lass many other discoveries of ‘bog bodies’ have been made in the north west of England, most famously at Lindow Moss near Sale. It’s also become clear that chucking things into lakes and bogs was a thing done quite regularly in prehistoric Britain. There’s a good bit of information about the Lindow discovery on the Bogology website (http://bogology.org/2014/01/31/severed-heads-and-shattered-skulls-the-darker-side-of-bogology/) and it would be good to be able to bring together as much detail about our Bolton’s own Bog Lady.
I’m glad Red Moss is now a Site of Special Scientific Interest, because that means it can’t become a landfill site, a carpark or a superstore. We only know a fraction of the tale it has to tell.
An ancient lake filled this spot when the ice sheets melted and elk, wolves and bears roamed the land. The lake became a lonely quagmire sheltering newts, dragonflies and birds, and the humans that passed by came to include not just hunters but farmers with their herds and fighters armed with metal spears and knives. On one day, at one time, a young woman’s severed head was thrown into the watery mire. The head sank into the deep soggy mud, the bubbles gradually stopped rising, and the people who knew what this all meant passed from memory.
Something to think about when we next buy one, get one free and petrol up for the week ahead.
Now I bet most Boltonians have been to Middlebrook at some time or other, to a match or a gig, to shop, get petrol or to go to work. With those vast modern steel-framed buildings, efficient roads whisking you from motorway to trolley park, even its own new railway station complete with park n ride, Middlebrook’s past hid itself so successfully it nearly got shovelled away with the landfill and forgotten forever. Along with the dead woman’s severed head.
Tucked away between the M61, the old Horwich Loco Works and the anonymous outskirts of modern Middlebrook, Red Moss isn’t a landscape with that instant wow factor. Flattish with a low hill on its east side, the wider area’s been used for peat-cutting, tipping, and even a smallpox hospital, and much of the remaining unused land was earmarked as a waste disposal site in the 1990s. The planners of the time were doing their best to deal with the mountains of waste being generated in Bolton, but they were also markedly ignoring the Case Of The Woman’s Severed Head.
Red Moss has been quietly developing as a peaty marsh since the end of the last Ice Age. Look at the Ordnance Survey map and you can pick out how the contour lines leave a blank, a kind of cup bounded by Anderton, Blackrod, Park Hall Farm, Horwich and Middlebrook. The Middle Brook itself, called the River Croal closer to Bolton town centre, seems to have its source somewhere round Red Moss.
So around 8000 BC, as humans started creeping back into the slowly warming Lancashire landscape, and as trees started growing again, a shallow muddy lake formed in this spot. Over the 10,000 years separating then from now, the lake slowly turned to a peat bog. To people in ancient times it may have been a marker between territories, or held sacred meaning, or both.
‘Moss’ is a much-used word in Lancashire. As a word it’s got its own back-story. It was introduced into our modern English language by Viking-Age settlers. These people spoke Old Norse, the parent language of modern Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. And even in modern Danish ‘møse’ means a bog. Shock-horror headlines from Ye Dailye Scrolle of the year 950 AD: ‘Marauding Vikings Rename Our Mires’……
So, back to the little business of the womanless head. The accounts vary. Sometime in the 1940s, a workman recovered a skull, randomly, while digging on Red Moss. Imagine if you will: you are in what was then a very lonely spot. There was no motorway. You may or may not have been given the right permission to dig where you were digging. Maybe you were digging some peat for your pot plants, or even to dry and burn on your fire. Just a normal, possibly slightly illicit, day’s work. And you turn up a human skull.
Options might occur to you. Would you feel shock? Slightly guilty? (wasn’t me guv…) Chuck it back in the hole, and make sure anyone curious knows you seen nuffin? Body-dumps by criminals weren’t invented for the CSI series.
Or might you scrape about a little more to see if the head owned a nice gold chain?
Or would you do what our man did in the 1940s, which is to present his find to the local museum, or police, or maybe the police who then presented it to the museum, it’s all a bit vague. If anyone can throw more light on the actual circumstances of the discovery, they would be serving posterity by sharing them.
After the skull was handed over to ‘the authorities’ someone who knew enough about forensics and human anatomy made three important observations. The skull belonged to a young woman. It had been cut with a bladed instrument from the highest cervical vertebra, or in simple terms, she’d been beheaded. And it was very old. Too old to be of interest in police matters, but old enough to be interesting to museum folk, who deemed it to be Bronze Age or perhaps Iron Age.
That’s a big guess, covering from 2300 BC to 45 AD. That makes our Red Moss Lass the oldest known Boltonian which is why I’d very much like to meet her. This could be a teensy problemette though, as 'the authorities' have lost her.
She’s travelled a bit after her discovery. As far as I can make out, she was handed in to the police laboratories at Chorley, which later became the regional forensic centre. This was closed down during cutbacks around 2010 (not sure of the date exactly). However at some point before this, the Red Moss Skull 'may' have been transferred with other cold case evidence to the medical school at Aston University Birmingham.
I say 'may' because a skull claimed to be the Red Moss Skull was collected from there in the 1980s by some of the good folk who found the Chorley Archaeological Society. The skull they collected was kept for a time by the Manchester Museum at Oxford Road, who photographed it. I've seen the photo. It's of a Peruvian mummy, with vertebrae visible all the way down to C6. In simple terms, all of the neck is present down to where your collar-bones start. You don't behead a viction at this thick wider part of the neck, you go for the delicate thinner part just below the skull. The photos show no obvious cut-marks to demonstrate beheading, as per the original description, but rather show all the signs of this being a dessicated Peruvian whose head has been twisted from the torso by grave-robbers, or really crap archaeologists.
This head has never spent time in a Lancashire peat bog. It's dessicated. it's the wrong head. The wrong bloody head.
I asked to see the Manchester Museums' inventory for objects coming into and out of its care for the date concerned. This is important, because it's a tenet of the basic standards of museum curatorship that they promised to perform, in return for government funding. Turns out, they didn't keep records for the time. Manchester Museum staff have refused to discuss this any further with me, which smacks of a guilty conscience. Call me an obsessive, I'll hold my hands up. But they helped lose the Red Moss Skull, which is annoying. A bit of transparency in the matter would make me less annoyed.
Since the discovery of Red Moss Lass many other discoveries of ‘bog bodies’ have been made in the north west of England, most famously at Lindow Moss near Sale. It’s also become clear that chucking things into lakes and bogs was a thing done quite regularly in prehistoric Britain. There’s a good bit of information about the Lindow discovery on the Bogology website (http://bogology.org/2014/01/31/severed-heads-and-shattered-skulls-the-darker-side-of-bogology/) and it would be good to be able to bring together as much detail about our Bolton’s own Bog Lady.
I’m glad Red Moss is now a Site of Special Scientific Interest, because that means it can’t become a landfill site, a carpark or a superstore. We only know a fraction of the tale it has to tell.
An ancient lake filled this spot when the ice sheets melted and elk, wolves and bears roamed the land. The lake became a lonely quagmire sheltering newts, dragonflies and birds, and the humans that passed by came to include not just hunters but farmers with their herds and fighters armed with metal spears and knives. On one day, at one time, a young woman’s severed head was thrown into the watery mire. The head sank into the deep soggy mud, the bubbles gradually stopped rising, and the people who knew what this all meant passed from memory.
Something to think about when we next buy one, get one free and petrol up for the week ahead.