We knew that in effect, everything was there, and we find
in the Irish Army records that they had to try to dig down
a few meters into the bog and managed to retrieve some paperwork.
But because it was the wettest November on record,
like every November in Ireland's the wettest on record, they give up and they left because
all they knew they were going to drown the soldiers or they'd die of hypothermia.
So it meant then that we knew
we were likely to find everything from metal
and the the harnesses that we had to really make sure
that we were on our A-game in terms of having that complete range
of archeological experience and retrieval equipment
and all the bagging to make sure that we could get stuff away.
Paperwork might be in there
because we knew that because it was in the peat bog
and that the state of preservation would be brilliant.
And then we sort of did our widest case scenario
where there's going to be bullets, right?
Well, we're going to need
to have the army bomb squad if the first aid kits in there,
that's likely to be lotions, potions and various grades of morphine.
And we'll need to cater for that either on the day or at the border
when we travel.
So it really set then and sprang from that from
being a bit of an Airfix Spitfire knowledgeable person.
I suddenly needed to know every nut and bolt, everything that was in them.
Everything that could be archeologically preserved,
then been able to relate that back to the team.
We got our detection equipment.
We went out to the spot
and we were able to produce a 3D visualization of practically
a complete Spitfire, buried 33 ft down in a bog.
From the scan
we could see that there was a vertical column of wreckage going down.
Ultimately 33 ft.
There was a peat surface with some fragments underneath
and then a sort of a....
Ten foot column of compacted Spitfire and then a gap
and then a big brute down at the bottom, which we suspected was going to be
the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, but then left and right of that
we could see six javelin like objects
spike down on various depths
If I just use this...
But we could see that the and
the spikes that were on this side on the port wing,
we're down deeper than the ones in this side so we were able to sort of guess that
if the plane has gone in, it's gone in slightly port wing first .
And as a result, that wing has struck with the greatest force, and it has fired
all its machine guns deeper into the peat than this side.
So we carefully scraped back and we knew from the Irish Army records
that the outermost Spitfire machine guns on each wing had been recovered,
so we knew that we were dealing with six.
And sure enough, our scan was showing the six.
So we dug left and right and retrieved the six
Browning machine guns and the Irish Army were there.
The deal was the guns actually were licensed to me on the day
they were
there to and they just decommissioned them.
We're going to take them away, clean them
and then I would collect them at the border
myself and Captain Lamb who headed a team we expected to be going.
There's a bit of a barrel, there's a bit of a breach.
You know, there's something that might have been part of a gun.
The first machine gun camera and we all saw it.
We all thought, Wow.
This... and for a minute, we thought, and Captain Lamb said
this looks like the sort of thing that was buried yesterday
and we all got a wee bit more worried, like how do we find the terrorist arms cache?
But the dates were clearly on them 1938, 1939.
And they all come out absolutely immaculate
and there's like 300 people sitting up on the moor.
You're watching this.
The army were bringing them out and showing people how to decommission them,
and the dads are standing with their sons and the sons how to go about doing it.
So it was a great learning day
and then we got the magazines with each of those guns as well.
Now the port ones were all broken into bits, but
as we got to the outermost guns on the wings of the on the starboard side, we left.
We were lifting the intire magazines out with a 300 rounds of ammunition lovingly
all snaked up in the air and the box, and that's when we really started to think.
This is going to be something special.
You don't you don't see that
this is going to be a true time capsule of what happens to a Spitfire
If the Earth just you said, come on, caught
you and just pulled it down under the earth and buries it.