Rachel Pugh was a young reporter on a free weekly paper in Wilmslow when she got the first tip-off of an archaeological discovery that made global headlines. Forty years on she is retelling the story she wasn’t credited for the first time around
'In amongst the shattered peat was a perfectly preserved human foot – brown and complete with toenails.
Wilmslow in 1984 was a medium-sized, old-fashioned town with its fair share of furrier and celebrities, plus a couple of pharmaceutical companies to keep it rooted in the 20th century – not the kind of place where anyone would have guessed the UK’s most significant archaeological discovery of the century would be made.
On that historic day, the editor, Stella Parker, and the chief reporter, Simon Stott, were occupied sending that week's newspaper to press. I was the trainee reporter, looking after the phones when the call came in from a policeman contact who kept us in touch with events in the town. His message: 'A human foot has been found at Country Kitchen Foods at Lindow Moss. The police are there. Get out there.'
I needed no encouragement. As a graduate trainee at the free newspaper owned by Cheshire County Newspaper and only months into my first job, I was kept firmly in my place covering golden weddings and the chemists' rota. I was soon cycling on my red racing bike out to what was to become the biggest story of my career.
My immediate thought, as I pedalled, was that this foot might provide the solution to an unsolved murder. A local man, Peter Reyn-Bardt, had been jailed only a few months before for life for the murder of his wife, Malika, He had made his confession two decades after she went missing after the discovery of a human skull, saying he had buried her at the bottom of his garden in Lindow Moss. That skull was later dated as being from the first century AD.
Malika’s body has never been found.
The police had left when I arrived in the yard at Country Kitchen Foods – a small business cutting peat from Lindow Moss for growing mushrooms and pot plants, but the two employees who greeted me were happy enough to take this rookie journalist into the large shed to show me where they had found the foot.
According to the peat diggers, the foot had been cut – as if by a blade. I wondered if there was a body out there missing a foot.
I was soon riding out, on a miniature train with temporary rails, onto the centre of the Moss to find out.
Peat is a spongy material formed by the partial decomposition of organic matter, primarily plant material, in wetlands such as swamps, bogs and fens. It is deposited in layers, each of which can take a century or more. Its extraction leaves the landscape stripped bare. Daniel Defoe in 1724 said of bogs: 'What nature meant by such a useless production, ’tis hard to imagine. But the land is entirely waste.' That quote describes perfectly my first impressions of the lunar landscape in which I found myself.
When we arrived at the desolate place where the foot had been found, my internal radar once more switched to alert, for reasons I could not articulate. I had goose pimples. Scrambling down the side of the trench gouged by a digger and gazing at the two-metre peat face left behind, I realised Malika Reyn-Bardt could not be buried here as there was no sign of disturbance in the layers.
I still remember that moment, my certainty that I was dealing with something ancient, and the conviction I had to do something to protect whatever it was, and fast.
On the way back to the sheds, I told the peat workers to stop the diggers for 24 hours, while I brought ‘an expert’ to look at the peat facer we’d just visited. With the arrogance of youth, I told them I would square it with their employers.
Somehow, I persuaded him to come over to Lindow Moss and to keep me informed on what he found. He also agreed the story should remain my exclusive. I’d already dismissed any link with Malika Reyn-Bardt, but my Wilmslow World colleagues had not. They were disparaging about my hunch; they wanted an answer to the unsolved murder.
When Rick rang again, two days later (Friday, August 3), I could tell from his voice that this academic was excited. He told me he’d walked as directed up to the peat face, had simply stuck in his trowel and a bone had fallen out, which he immediately identified as human. He was convinced the foot belonged to a body buried there, he’d reported his discovery to the police in Wilmslow, and had been given the weekend to assemble a team of archaeologists to remove the body intact from Lindow Moss.
Then Rick said these unforgettable words: “I’m not going on the record with this, but I think this is a very important find, and will prove to be ancient.' He was guessing at 2,000 years ancient.
My excitement was overwhelming, but my Wilmslow World colleagues were sure a post-mortem examination would prove me wrong, as were the police who clearly hoped to clear up the Reyn-Bardt murder mystery.
The slim possibility it might prove to be a crime scene denied me the chance to be part of the dig the following Monday, but I was at Macclesfield Hospital mortuary the next day alongside archaeologists from all over the country, including Romano- British expert Dr Ian Stead from the British Museum in London, to see Rick Turner emerge with the results of the first tests on the body now known as Lindow II.
Rick announced: 'The body in the peat block is not being treated as part of a modern police investigation.' X-rays had revealed no trace of dental metal in the body’s skull, therefore experts concluded it was more than 200 and possibly as many as 2,000 years old, and therefore not Malika Reyn-Bardt. The coroner agreed to the body being carbon-dated and Lindow Man's remains turned out to date from around AD 60 during the time of the Roman occupation in Britain. He was, possibly a Celtic prince from the Brigantes tribe, murdered in a ritual killing in which he was garrotted, strangled, had his spine broken and his skull smashed, This at least was what Rick Turner liked to think might have happened, when we worked together on a Lindow Man project, just before the archaeologist's death in 2018.
My world exclusive however turned out to be a single paragraph on an inside page of *Wilmslow World, without a byline. The editor was peeved it did not answer questions about the Reyn-Bardt case. I was sent for training a month later so was not party to any of the press conferences at the British Museum, or able to recount my part in the discovery.
* Wilmslow World was a weekly free newspaper that circulated round Wilmslow, Alderley Edge, Handforth and Mobberley. It opened in 1977 and closed a decade later.
After her time at the Wilmslow World, Rachel Pugh transferred to the Northwich Guardian to complete her training, before joining the Oxford Mail and Times. She has worked for the Manchester Evening News, the Guardian, the Times Ed, Medscape, the Independent and iNews, BBC radio and television, multinational companies and the NHS and has written two radio plays.
Bog Standard is Rachel Pugh's one-hour show about the tip-off that led her to one of the most important archaeological finds of the 20th Century. It’s also a story about a magical place called Lindow Moss near Wilmslow, two murders 1,500 years apart, and how an ancient bog man became a 21st-century eco-warrior.
Award-winning journalist and storyteller Rachel, and prize-winning harpist Lucy Nolan, weave words and music together to recreate the nail-biting days of 1984 when the rookie reporter fought to ensure Lindow Man did not end up in a bag of plant compost.
Transition Wilmslow has set up a friends group called Discover Lindow, which has created a walk called the Lindow Moss Heritage Trail and organised a series of events including Rachel's performance. There is also an autumn term course at Wilmslow Guild called Lindow Man: His people and his landscape, featuring experts from all over the country and a guided poetry walk. The Window on Lindow Art Trail, which is currently on the Moss, features artwork from five professional artists as well as work from 700 pupils from five primary schools in the area.
discoverlindow.org
This 40th-anniversary events celebrating the discovery of Lindow Man also mark the start of the restoration of Lindow Moss, allowing it to once again be a wild place that can store carbon rather than release it into the atmosphere.
The landscape – especially where the peat has been dug for centuries – is gradually being restored and a new group, the Lindow Moss Landscape Partnership, has been established to manage this. The Partnership is made up of organisations including Groundwork, Cheshire East, Wilmslow Town Council, Transition Wilmslow, Cheshire Wildlife Trust and Mersey Rivers Trust. A grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund is helping to make a start on restoration work.
