15/08/2026
In July 2006 a digger bucket in a Tipperary bog pulled up something twelve hundred years old.
The driver, Eddie Fogarty, was cutting peat near the village of Faddan More when he spotted something dark and stiff sitting in the bucket. It was a book. A book of psalms, written around 800 AD, that had lain hidden in that bog for over a millennium.
When it was first opened, the pages fell apart to reveal three Latin words still legible after all that time, in valle lacrimarum, in the valley of tears. The manuscript had been found standing upright in the peat, which some historians believe means it was deliberately buried there by someone fleeing danger, meant to be dug up again and never was.
The real surprise came later, during conservation. Inside the leather cover, conservators found a lining made of papyrus, a material that had to travel from Egypt or the Mediterranean to reach an Irish monastery over a thousand years ago. It was the first evidence of its kind ever found anywhere in the world, proof that Irish monks were in direct contact with the Coptic Church of North Africa centuries before anyone assumed such a connection was possible.
It took five years of careful conservation before the Faddan More Psalter could go on public display at the National Museum of Ireland in 2011. The museum's director called the day it arrived the most important since the Ardagh Chalice came in back in 1868.
A farmer's bog and a digger bucket, and suddenly the map of the early medieval world got a little bigger.
What do you think happened to the person who buried it there?
