History Cold Case | Windypit Murders

On the North Yorkshire Moors around the year 100 AD a man was ritually sacrificed and offered to the Gods of the underworld.

The ceremonially slaughtered man was delivered to the Gods down a portal to their realm. This was a chimney like hole in the ground which tunnelled sixteen metres beneath the surface. So deep that when you stand at the entrance on a cold harsh day you can feel the warm air, like a substantial breeze, blow across your face.

These places are nowadays referred to as Windypits but in the Iron Age they were seen as places of exchange between the living and the dead. This is the consensus reached – sometimes by hitherto cynical academics – by the archaeologists, historians and forensic scientists brought together to examine the earthly remains of some of our ancestors by the BBC History Cold Case team. They also believed that the man was scalped after death – the evidence of this butchery – knife marks remaining on the skull – was the last discovery made by the team; the clincher.

Location of Windypits in North Yorkshire - image via Wikipedia

In all 22 bodies have been discovered in several of these pits but the experimental and forensic archaeologists chose to examine four bodies from this one Windy Pit. A man, a woman and two teenage sons. Were they a family? Unfortunately the DNA was too contaminated to reveal this secret but there were marks and much historic circumstantial evidence which pointed to the sacrifice conclusion.

Some evidence came from bodies preserved in bogs – bogs were seen as other “limital” places or a location which was seen to act as a doorway from and to the underworld. Drugged then battered around the head, garrotted and finally stabbed through the artery in the neck. Blood would have spurted out dramatically to the cheers and claps of the audience. It has been postulated that these sacrifices took place during times of great unrest and carried out to appease the Gods and have them return their world to prosperity. When things went badly get ready for a sacrifice.

A Bog Body died 300 BC - image via Wikipedia

How were the individuals chosen? We’ll probably never know but one of the bog bodies was shown to be of high status. His moustache trimmed with scissors and his hands and nails showing that he had never undertaken manual work. Perhaps he was born and kept to be sacrificed when the time was right… or wrong