Who would suspect Braes hold such a sinister secret?

Aug 15 2006 Paisley Daily Express

THE Gleniffer Braes above Paisley are beautiful just now when summer merges into autumn.

Moorlands mantled with heather and bog asphodels carpet the landscape with floral robes of purple and gold.

The haunting trill of curlews bubbles across rush-mantled pastures while the wistful wail of peewits orchestrates a melancholic moorland melody.

These rustic scenes were familiar to Paisley’s weavers during their time-honoured treks to the Peesweep Inn until its closure 70 years ago.

Yet the glorious Gleniffers hold terrible secrets of vile murders committed around 2000 years ago on remote hill-tops and in lonely valleys.

Archaeologists across the British Isles and northern Europe have discovered the well-preserved remains of prehistoric corpses in peat bogs similar to those on the Gleniffer Braes – and all show signs of violent death.

The archaeologists believe the victims – including Lindow Man in Cheshire, Tollund Man in Denmark and Clonycavan Man in Ireland – were ritually strangled, beheaded or had their throats cut.

One theory is that the murdered men were ancient Celts sacrificed to Pagan gods – or slain and buried to mark the boundaries of tribal lands or royal realms.

A more sinister theory is that the bog burial victims were criminals executed then thrown into moorland morasses where the peaty soil prevented their bodies from decomposing and preserved them for all time in a watery limbo.

This meant the men's trapped souls couldn’t be reincarnated into higher spheres of existence or migrate to Tir-Nan-Og , the Celtic heaven. It was a fate worse than death.

The moors above Paisley are studded with Celtic Iron Age forts like Walls Hill, where prehistoric people were born, lived and died around 2000 years ago.

Their bodies were buried in underground chambers, cremated or laid on wooden platforms or placed in trees to be torn to bits by cult birds such as ravens.

This strange process – known as excarnation – was believed to free the souls of the dead and allow them to join their ancestors in the Celtic Otherworld.

But some were doomed to become the Bog Men of the Braes – those ritually-slain outcasts or human sacrifices whose bodies and souls are entombed in black watery graves where the melancholic mourning calls of peewits and curlews are requiems for marsh men destined to be trapped eternally in time.

Derek Parker