SOURCE: "A Soft Grip on the Sick Place: The Bogland Poetry of Seamus Heaney," in The Dublin Magazine, Vol. 10, No. 3, Autumn-Winter, 1973-1974, pp. 86-90.

In the following essay, Bidwell draws a connection between Heaney's metaphor of the bog and Irish republicanism.

In the spring of 1781 Lord Moira, a landlord with vast holdings in County Down, was approached by his rather sheepish estate agent with a story which led to the first documented find of what are now referred to as the bog-people. He presented Lord Moira with a plait of hair which had been found on a human skull—a skull belonging to a woman buried in the bog nearly 1800 years before.

The details of the discovery can be found in Lady Moira's account published in a contemporary London archaeological journal. While cutting turf the previous autumn in a small peat bog on Drumkeragh Mountain, one of Lord...