Bog Butter Barrels and Ireland’s 3000-Year-Old Refrigerators
Wooden Bog Butter Barrels are possibly the most beautiful things you can find in a bog. But why did people throw their butter into bogs?
Archaeological illustrations of a barrel used to store "bog butter," (3) and a churn (1).
Bogs are Ireland’s original refrigerators. And they are pretty good—even 3,000 year-old bog butter is edible. We know this because archeologists tended to eat it. But is refrigeration the only reason that people threw dairy products into the soggy, marshy, peatland known as bogs?
In 1859 Edward Clibborn and James O’Laverty wrote with great excitement that for the first time an almost perfect wooden butter container had been found in a bog, and the contents tasted “somewhat like cheese.” Their contemporary Edward Clibborn, Curator of the Royal Irish Academy, tasted his findings too. “I have tasted,” he wrote, “Every specimen of bog-butter to which I have had access… although I found them all rancid or acid (except one, which I may say is fossilized).” That these men lived to write about their culinary habit means that the bog kept the wooden container from rotting and the bog butter from spoiling for a long time… a very, very long time.
About 150 years later, radiocarbon tests dated bog butter findings from the seventeenth century BC (Bronze Age) to the eighteenth century AD. That’s 3,500 years! The secret is the anaerobic nature of the bog. Without oxygen, neither the butter nor its wooden container decompose....MORE
