From Victorian poison bottles and uranium glass to two mysterious boats found in the Boyne

Published: 11:35 EDT, 22 September 2026 | Updated: 11:42 EDT, 22 September 2026

It was heavier than it should have been. That was the first thing Johanna Keane, now 43 and living in Arklow, noticed. She was crouched on the back strand at Bray, Co Wicklow, turning over something caked so thick in mud she couldn’t tell if it was glass, stone or nothing at all.

She brought it home anyway and ran it under the tap. It was forest green, mouth-blown into a mould, its rim applied by hand rather than machine-formed – she realised it was the unmistakable shape of a Victorian poison bottle.

Down the side, still legible after more than a century in the mud, were four words: NOT TO BE TAKEN.

Most people would have walked straight past it but Johanna didn’t.

Johanna Keane mudlarking in Wicklow. Picture: Fran Veale

Across Ireland, a small but growing number of people have started looking down – at low tide, on riverbanks, on beaches scraped bare by winter storms – for whatever the water has thrown up.

It’s called mudlarking, a name borrowed from Victorian London, where children once picked through the Thames mud for anything they could sell.

These days, people across Ireland are doing it too, uncovering fragments of the lives lived before them. Johanna’s own collection has grown well beyond the poison bottle.

There’s a shard of uranium glass that glows an eerie green under UV light – it is the find that really hooked her after she moved to Ireland from England in 2015.

There are old Irish coins, pulled from the tidal stretch of the river in Wicklow town, dark with age and river silt.

Again and again, there are dolls. ‘You’d see like a tiny hand sticking out of the soil,’ she says.

Some are plastic and modern, many are older, made of bisque, with painted glass eyes that can be slightly unnerving even when you know what you’re looking at.

‘I think my family think they might be haunted,’ she says, matter-of-factly.

It is, she seems to suggest, just another part of the hobby. One day you’re pulling an old coin from the mud, the next, you’re finding a tiny doll’s hand sticking out of the ground.

Her strangest find isn’t glamorous at all – pairs of women’s tights, buried for decades and preserved almost perfectly by the nylon they were made from.

‘Some of them, you could almost still wear them,’ she says.

Fascinating discoveries are made by mudlarkers such as this hot water bottle

The poison bottle, she estimates, is worth around €150. But it could easily have ended up in the bin. ‘It’s something people might just walk past, or kick out of the way,’ she says.

Ronald van Dijk, 49, spends his working days ferrying medicines between chemists, nursing homes and hospitals across Galway.

At low tide, his attention turns to something else. Mudlarking is what he does with his time off, but unlike Johanna, he is less interested in the objects themselves than in the strangers who once carried them, lost them or left them behind.

‘Just a pair of good eyes and a pair of wellies,’ he says when asked what equipment it takes. No metal detector, no specialist gear, nothing that costs money.

Originally from Holland and in Ireland for 25 years, he took up the hobby on a whim after a friend showed him mudlarking videos filmed on the Thames foreshore.

One low tide at Galway Bay produced pipe stems and bottles from the 1920s and 30s, and he was hooked.

‘Every time we found something, it was just a thrill,’ he says.

‘‘You’re focused on the ground, under the seaweed and between the rocks. It’s like fishing. Some days you catch nothing, other days you fill a bag.’

Sometimes he brings his dog and Hunter has picked up the habit by watching him – nosing along the shoreline at Galway Bay until he turns up an old lemonade bottle from the 1950s.

‘Thank you, Hunter,’ Ronald tells him. ‘Well done, boy.’ Another time it was the worn wooden handle of a Victorian handsaw, with a small metal escutcheon that he cleaned up to reveal the maker’s name – an Irishman who’d set up his own business in the 1870s.

‘It’s worth nothing,’ Ronald says, ‘but it’s just nice to find a bit of old, old history.’

One of his stranger finds – a tiny copper ‘oiler’, once used for oiling a rifle – he traced, after a Google image search, to an arms factory near Birmingham.

It’s the mystery of it that gets him. ‘Somebody carried it, years ago, at some stage,’ he says. ‘You wonder who.’

His Facebook group, Mudlarking Ireland, now has more than 5,500 members, all doing the same thing on their own patch of coast, wondering about the people behind the objects they find.

Eve McDonnell pictured on Ballymoney Beach, Co Wexford. Picture: Tom Honan

For Eve McDonnell, a 54-year-old children’s author living in north Wexford, the real treasure is the story an object can tell.

She doesn’t even call herself a mudlarker. She prefers her own word – ‘wonderlarker’. ‘It’s the art of noticing,’ she says.

‘You see something different, you pick it up, and then you start questioning, who owned it, how old is it?’

The proof is a small ivory chess piece, found on Ballymoney Beach with her three-year-old twins.

‘The kids were looking at me saying, “what’s that doing here? People don’t play chess on the beach,”’ she recalls.

That night, as she tucked them into bed, she made up a story on the spot – and the chess piece became Needle, the hero of her novel Elsetime, a boy who can hold any object in his hand and sense its whole history.

She worries, gently, that children are losing that capacity to daydream on their own – ‘it’s really heartbreaking’, she says – but insists it’s still there, closer to the surface than adults assume.

‘When they do switch on their imagination, they’re still wild,’ she says. ‘It’s humbling, their imagination.’

Her own proudest find doesn’t need much imagining – a gold bangle with tiny serpent heads, jutting straight out of the sand at Brittas Bay.

‘I imagine it came from Egypt, across the sea,’ she says. ‘Maybe it was Cleopatra’s. I don’t know.’

Ria McCullough was fascinated by the story of sea glass

At 44, Ria McCullough found something that changed how she saw herself. A single mother based on the Antrim coast, she was on a beach day in Holywood, Co Down, with her daughter Emily – nicknamed ‘Coppertop’ for her bright red hair – when she picked up what looked like a smooth pebble.

‘It was glass,’ she says. ‘I went on the internet, did a deep dive, and I was just so fascinated by the story of what sea glass was.’

It is, in her words, rubbish thrown away decades ago, tumbled by the ocean until sharp discarded glass becomes something more like a jewel.

A family trip to Glenarm produced her first proper haul.

‘Emily was so excited because suddenly we were finding blues and really bright colours,’ she says. ‘I thought, has this been here this whole time and we haven’t seen it?’

Among the rarer finds is uranium-flecked ‘Vaseline glass’ from the early 20th century, production of which dropped sharply once the war effort diverted uranium supplies elsewhere.

She taught herself jewellery-making from Pinterest tutorials, late at night, and Copper Rainbow, her business, grew from it.

Ria’s finds are the basis for her jewellery business Copper Rainbow

‘I think it’s quite common with new mums where you lose your name as well,’ she says. ‘You’re just Emily’s mum for a while.’

Making something from what she found on the beach, she says, helped her find that part of herself again. Her favourite single find is a marble from Cushendall, streaked pink and purple and blue.

‘Whenever I find a marble on a beach, it always sort of reminds me of thinking about decades ago there were kids playing here, just like my daughter,’ she says.

Some of the finds that will become Copper Rainbow products

There’s also what collectors call pirate glass – thick, near-black shards from the heavy bottles once used to store rum aboard ships centuries ago.

‘That kind of journey,’ she says. ‘It’s amazing.’

Andrew Doherty, 61, has spent a lifetime searching one stretch of Irish coast. A former commercial fisherman from a seafaring family in Cheekpoint, Co Waterford, he now runs Tides & Tales, documenting the area’s maritime history.

Among the objects he’s turned up on the foreshore is a battered Royal Navy pocket knife. ‘My grandfather had one of those,’ he says. ‘He was in the British merchant marine, and he used it for cleaning his tobacco bowl.’

Andrew also remembers his grandfather using the same kind of knife to remove a splinter from his finger when he was a boy. ‘I was screaming in fear about what he was going to do to me at all,’ he laughs.

Decades later, he found a near-identical knife on the shore, rusted and lost by someone he would never know.

‘It just brought up so many memories,’ he says.

His best story, though, has nothing to do with mud. It concerns the Earl of Sandwich, a ship bound for London in the 1760s carrying a fortune, whose crew mutinied, murdered everyone else aboard and tried to scuttle her without trace.

Four of the mutineers rowed ashore near Wexford, giving up their silver dollars in a doomed bid to save their own necks – the spot is still known today as Dollar Bay.

‘They were all hung and displayed in gibbets around Dublin Harbour,’ Andrew says of the gallows-like structure.

For him, it’s evidence that this coastline has been giving up pieces of its history for centuries. The sea, he says, doesn’t forget anything. That’s where the fun stops and the rules start.

‘In Ireland, digging or using a metal detector to search for archaeological objects requires appropriate consent, and is otherwise illegal,’ says Dr Rory Connolly, of Trinity College Dublin’s Centre for Environmental Humanities.

His advice for anyone who makes a genuine chance find is simple: leave it undisturbed, photograph it, and contact the National Museum of Ireland.

Dr Connolly does see real value in what these amateur eyes are doing, particularly as climate change accelerates coastal erosion.

Ireland’s coastline has been a site of human activity for thousands of years, and rising seas and worsening storms are exposing more of it than ever, often faster than archaeologists can record it.

‘People who regularly walk the same coastline can be a great help in noticing erosion or newly- exposed remains,’ he says.

‘Those observations are a valuable contribution to protecting coastal heritage.’

Anthony Murphy, Brigid Finnegan and Dr Niall Gregory near the site of the ancient dugout boats

In April this year, the self- described ‘wannabe mudlarker’ Brigid Finnegan – she has a background in archaeology – noticed a suspicious piece of timber near the North Strand in Drogheda, exposed by low tide after heavy winter storms.

She contacted local historian Anthony Murphy, of Mythical Ireland. When archaeologist Dr Niall Gregory came to examine the site, he made an extraordinary discovery.

What Brigid had thought was a piece of timber was actually a boat – and behind it, hidden from view, was another.

Two ancient dugout boats, lying side by side in the River Boyne. Both have now been logged in the national registry of Irish riverine discoveries, as numbers 445 and 446. Initial assessment suggests they are medieval, although further examination is still needed to confirm their precise age.

One appears to have been used as a cargo boat, while the smaller boat behind it is thought to have been used for fishing.

Murphy has suggested the boats may have been dislodged from further upstream by winter flooding, possibly from as far away as Slane or Navan, before being carried down the Boyne and deposited near Drogheda.

Brigid had gone down to the river thinking she was looking at driftwood. Instead, beneath the mud and water, she had stumbled upon two medieval boats, preserved for centuries in the Boyne and suddenly exposed to view.

Most people out on Ireland’s coast this weekend won’t find a medieval boat; most will come home with mud on their boots and nothing much to show for it. Ronald knows the feeling.

‘You do your research and you think, oh, there could be stuff in the river,’ he says. ‘And we found absolutely nothing.’

But that’s the nature of mudlarking. You never know what the water has been hiding.

Most of us walk the beach looking out to sea, mudlarkers look down and sometimes, the past looks back.

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