A Massive, 2,000-Year-Old Chunk of Butter Has Been Unearthed from a Bog

Many a wide-eyed dreamer has set out on an adventure in the quest for untold treasure. Whether we're talking about the fabled Amber Room or just a whole bunch of haunted Nazi gold, there are as many lost relics as there are those foolhardy enough to search for them.

But for one peat cutter in County Meath, Ireland, his bewildering discovery of long-forgotten treasure will almost certainly give birth to the following phrase: I Can't Believe It's Not Ancient Bog Butter!

One Jack Conway—a turf or peat cutter—made a startling discovery in Emlagh bog earlier this month whilst cutting some turf. As Atlas Obscura reports, Conway found a 22-pound chunk of butter that is estimated by Cavan County Museum to be over 2,000 years old.

What he found was bog butter, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: cow's milk that's been buried in a bog for so long, it attains an almost cheese-like consistency.

While some believe that bog butter may have originated as an offering to the gods, it's more widely believed to have simply been a method of preservation. Unlike most traditional preservation methods, almost all bog butter that has been found has had no salt in it.

Archaeologist Caroline Earwood has written extensively on the subject and says that the earliest discovery of bog butter dates to the Iron Age, although it may have existed before then. In her article, "Bog Butter: A Two Thousand Year History," Earwood says, "It is usually found as a whitish, solid mass of fatty material with a distinctive, pungent and slightly offensive smell. It is found either as a lump, or in containers which are most often made of wood but include baskets and skins."

Bogs are pretty much swamps with cold water, so they do a good job of keeping food fresh—even without the addition of salt to the food. Researchers at the University of Michigan found that meat abandoned in a bog was preserved as well as frozen meat, according to a 1995 study.

That's because the peat found in bogs is made up of compressed plant matter, which is cool, acidic, and contains little oxygen.

Maybe that's why "bog bodies"—the bodies of dead people—are so well-preserved. The recently found bog butter is quite possibly still edible. Kevin Thornton, a well-known celebrity chef in Ireland, claims to have tasted a bit of 4,000-year-old bog. "I was really excited about it. We tasted it," he told the Irish Independent in 2014. "There's fermentation but it's not fermentation because it's gone way beyond that. Then you get this taste coming down or right up through your nose."

Sounds pretty damn good to us. Now if only we could find ourselves so bog bread, things would really be kicking up.