Skeleton service – Frank McNally on why horses’ heads (and the occasional saint) used to be buried under buildings

In any building, foundations are all important, whatever the cost. So it was that, on the island of Iona in 548AD, when St Colmcille discovered structural problems with a new church, he also diagnosed what was needed to fix them: the insertion of a human being underneath the walls.
Step forward St Oran (aka Odran), one of the 12 monks who had followed Colmcille from Ireland, and who would now prove himself the man in the gap. He volunteered to be buried alive, as any good early Christian monk would. The church was thereby stabilised.
But some days passed and, missing his friend’s company, Colmcille dug him up again. Oran emerged none the worse from his period underground – except, alas, that it had turned him into a raving heretic.
Climbing out of the grave, he declared conventional belief in the afterworld a delusion. “There is no Hell as you suppose, nor Heaven that people talk about,” he said. A horrified Colmcille hastily reburied him.
The story of Oran – whose feast day falls this coming Sunday – is a local variant of what seems to be an ancient and international folk tradition, the “foundation sacrifice”.
It turns up in Arthurian legend too, when the warlord Vortigern is advised to secure fortress by burying a fatherless child underneath.
Less drastically, it may also be behind a once-common practice in these islands: placing horses’ heads under the floorboards of certain buildings – although that seems to have served a secondary, more frivolous purpose: enhancing the acoustics of dance halls and music venues.
The horse-head phenomenon featured in a book published by Queen’s University Belfast some years ago: From Corrib to Cultra, a series of essays on Irish folk life.
One writer in it quoted the Scandinavian custom that skulls were buried under threshing floors to increase the echoes of industry and, in effect, show off to the neighbours. But behind this and the musical motivations, it was argued, lurked a deeper and older belief: that some sort of sacrifice was required in a building to keep evil at bay.
Whatever the reason, when a house in Wales was being rebuilt in 1870, on a site that had once been a dance hall, 40 horses’ skulls were uncovered in the foundations.
And the Queen’s book also quoted the case of a woman underneath whose house five horse skulls were found. She professed not to believe in superstition, but nevertheless left them where they were, just to be on the safe side.
Evidence of equine sacrifice has turned up under much farther-flung and more ancient buildings too, however.
In a 1934 travelogue on the Holy Land, for example, the English writer HV Morton described a visit to the great Egyptologist Sir Flinders Petrie, then excavating a site in Gaza: “We went out on the hill and looked at the ruins of three palaces, built one on top of the other,” wrote Morton. “The first was built in 3100BC, the second in 2500BC, and the third – with a horse’s skeleton marking a foundation sacrifice – in 2200BC.”
And yet the horse was not the most interesting thing Petrie had found there. In his very next sentence, Morton mentions another of the archaeologist’s recent discoveries that had caused a sensation in Ireland and elsewhere: “What astonished me even more than a bathroom built in 3100BC, and perfectly preserved mud doorways through which Abraham might have walked, were Celtic earrings of Irish gold exactly like the prehistoric […] ornaments in the Dublin museum.”
Petrie’s apparent find, and his explanation, made headlines around the world. “Irish earrings in Gaza laid to Phoenicians” declared the New York Times in June 1932.
The Irish Times, meanwhile, quoted the archaeologist saying: “Long before the days of Moses, Ireland was the greatest source of gold in Europe.”
Of a supposed ancient trade between this island and the Middle East, the paper rhapsodised: “Irish gold enriched the thrones of Pharaohs, may have shone in [the Trojan] Helen’s hair and may have adorned the pillars of Solomon’s Temple.”
Alas, Prof Petrie’s conclusions about the earrings he had found were built on shakier foundations than those ancient palaces.
Later scientific research would suggest that their lookalikes in Dublin were of African origin (and from later than first thought), as presumably were the ones in Gaza.
When Sir Flinders died in 1942, in Jerusalem, his body was interred in the local Protestant cemetery. Most of his body anyway. In recognition of the scientific interest in it, he had bequeathed his head to the Royal College of Surgeons in London.
It’s not true, as popular belief once had it, that Petrie’s widow brought the head back to England in a hatbox. But after a delay caused by the war, it travelled back somehow. For years thereafter, in a no doubt accidental variant of the foundation sacrifice, it was stored in a jar in the college basement.