Almost 14% of Ireland is bog: vast swathes of moss-carpeted land, below which layers of ancient history have been compounded into mulch-black turf. Captivated by their otherworldly beauty, Seamus Heaney wrote some of his finest poetry about bogs – and the bodies discovered, perfectly preserved, in their eerie depths.
Sheila Armstrong’s exquisite second novel, The Red Mouth, also centres around two bog discoveries: the “monstrous, bog-black antler” of a great Irish elk, and the mutilated body of a girl who comes to be known as Belroe Woman. From here we follow the intersecting lives of those haunted, both literally and figuratively, by these excavations and the uncanny landscape that yielded them.
