Out on the bog, it is always Halloween.
The ground shifts beneath our feet as we tramp across what feels like no man’s land, a wide expanse of bog on the border between east Tyrone and Donegal.
It is as bleak as the bog of nightmares: dark, cold and damp, with pools full of bubbling gas that open and close again, apparently on a whim, as the “walking bog” slowly trudges its way down the hillside.
It feels like the sort of place where a hand might rise up from beneath, grab hold of an ankle and drag the unwary down into the depths.
RM Block
“At this time of year, watch out,” warns tour guide Martin Bradley, only half in jest. “Don’t lean too far in, because Morrigan is down below and she’ll pull you in.”
For the Bronze Age and Celtic peoples of Ireland, this was “a portal to the underworld”, he explains. “The legend is that Morrigan, the goddess of war and winter, came out of these bog pools and then all hell broke loose. At Halloween, Morrigan would rise, but for me, it’s a metaphor for winter.”
The bog is the highlight of Bradley’s alternative “Halloween Origins” tour, which explores the scientific and spiritual roots of the Celtic festival of Samhain by visiting the “ritual landscapes” of the Foyle river system and the Sperrin mountains.
This year, it is among the new additions to Derry’s Halloween festivities, where at least 120,000 people are expected – most of them in Halloween costumes – for a four-day celebration billed as Europe’s largest Halloween event.
Ghosts, banshees and mystical Celtic creatures revel in a night-time carnival on the city’s 400-year-old walls, accompanied by light shows, acrobats and circus performers, all culminating in a spectacular fireworks display on Halloween night.
[ ‘At the height of the Troubles, Halloween took hold in Derry like nowhere else’Opens in new window ]
An environmental scientist and paleo-ecologist who is a former countryside officer with Strabane District Council, Bradley has turned his passion for archaeology and the natural world into a business called Foyle Trails. Though he “might take a look at the fireworks”, his Halloween will be spent guiding his small group tours around the bogs and standing stones, the cure wells and the sacred trees of the northwest and explaining how they have influenced the Halloween traditions of today.
“Some of the traditions and practices we remember today at Halloween, they’re a folk memory,” explains Bradley. “I see what’s happening in Derry with Halloween as actually a Celtic revival, coming from the ground roots in Derry.
“People who in the 19th century came in from Donegal and Tyrone and started working in the factories in Derry, they brought that culture with them, and that’s only going back maybe four or five generations, so it’s subliminal, it’s in them.”
Out on the bog, Bradley sinks rod after rod into the ground to demonstrate the depth of the pools, and the gas that bubbles up once they are withdrawn. These pools, he explains, were the site of human sacrifice, where people were ritually killed to try to appease Morrigan, but its unique properties meant they were preserved, and some recovered as bog bodies.
Bog bodies in Denmark famously “inspired Seamus Heaney and his poetry, and then they found one in Bellaghy”, says Bradley. Prodding the ground beneath our feet, he speculates that others remain: “There could be bodies down here.”
Bodies or not, there is much else to be seen in this ancient landscape. In Raphoe, Co Donegal, sculptures of stone heads are “evidence of a head cult”, with heads seized as trophies in battle; the Broighter hoard of gold artefacts, now in the National Museum in Dublin, was found on reclaimed land in Co Derry and “was probably an early Celtic offering to the god of the sea, Manannán mac Lir”.
Other stops on the tour include a fairy tree, its branches hung with bright red rags, and a cure well that promises help for people with addictions.
At an old churchyard near Lifford, Co Donegal, Bradley identifies the “toxic” yew tree and explains how it influenced the Harry Potter books. “Voldemort, the baddest of all baddies, his wand is made from yew.”
He stands in the clearing below its drooping branches and demonstrates how “this would have been treated as a ritual and a sacred site”. The only plant that can survive beneath it is the elder, “the other witchy tree . . . that’s what you would make your broomstick with”.
For Bradley, the success of his tours demonstrates a growing interest in not only the natural world, but also how it has influenced culture and heritage.
“I get everything from the goths and the green witches and people interested in the spooky side” to people who are interested in indigenous cultures, ecology and sustainability.
“It’s heritage, it’s culture, but also, 98 per cent of people I take out are environmentally aware as well.”
The bogs are a success story, he says. They capture carbon from the atmosphere “and it stays in situ for thousands of years, whereas if you plant a tree, it might last 50 years, 100 years. The bogs lock it in, long term.”
As darkness falls, we leave the bog. “This is where Halloween survived,” says Bradley. “It’s these kind of habitats, remote places, where these things survive.”
