This was evidently, gruesomely, a human skull-missing its jaw but still possessing skin, some hair, and one baleful eyeball that stared at them. Curious as to what the object might be, they washed it. “Perhaps,” they joked, “this is a dinosaur egg.” They pulled it off the belt and took it to Ken Harewood, manager of the peat works. On May 13, 1983, Andy Mould and Stephen Dooley were standing by the mill’s conveyor, watching for anything that might foul the operations, when they spotted a lump that reminded Mould of a small, black leather soccer ball. Afterward it is sent to a processing mill, checked for chunks of bark and branches large enough to jam the machinery, ground up into a fine compost, and then sold to mushroom growers around the country. Now peat is scooped up by mechanical diggers and placed in loose stacks, where it is left to dry. Workers would cut peat into blocks by hand and lay them in stacked rows to dry in the wan English sun, turning them repeatedly over a two-year period before they were ready for use.īut by the 1980s the Industrial Revolution had reached even this bucolic operation, and the whole process had been mechanized.
The industry continued well into the 20th century, operating much as it always had. In the 15th and 16th centuries landless poor eked out a precarious living here on society’s margins, cutting and drying peat from the bog to sell as fuel for stoves and soil for crops. For the less well off, Lindow Moss had long offered a more spartan home. Today the picturesque bog lies on the outskirts of Wilmslow, a verdant town that once offered Victorian Manchester’s wealthy industrialists an escape from the city’s smoky haze. Lindow Moss, as the bog came to be known, stretched for 1,500 acres across what is now the county of Cheshire, encompassing a mosaic of habitats: woodland, scrub, and mossland. At the end of the most recent ice age, around 11,000 years ago, melting ice formed a bog in North West England.
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