Bog oak is wood that has sat at the bottom of cold and oxygenless water, usually buried in thick muck, and started the slow process toward fossilization. In a 100-million years it will be petrified wood. Oak bogs, with their water full of tannins were the most suitable places for this to happened. These bogs often turned into peat bogs over millennia and the tree trunks, branches, and other things that fell or were placed in the bogs slowly dried out in remarkable preservation. Even animals and people buried in these bogs did not decay. They just got tanned hides and brown skin. They are often so perfect, that early bog people discoveries were thought to be recent homicides.
I have a bunch of bog oak from a Texas gravel pit. It is carbon dated 8000 years. It is heavily mineralized, silver-black, and has silver-white streaks of silica down the grain. It is also a bit fibrous and splintery. It needs to be stabilized for handle use. It polishes very well.
Other material I use is from the Czech Republic. It dates at 4500 years. It is grey-black and reasonably tight grain. I have used it both stabilized and unstabilized. Stabilized is far better.
I have a small private stash that was supposed to be from Scotland (unnamed location), but my suspicion is that it is Irish since the seller had previously sold a good bit of Irish bog oak that looked identical. It also is a bit too black, and my suspicion is it has been dyed. It does make a nice sgian dubh handle unstabilized.
It is supposedly 3000 years old. I never had it tested.
I have purchased sinker logs/wood that are between 100 and 300 years old. The wood has started to carbonize, but has a long way to go before you could really call it bog oak.
Around 50 years ago, I went in on a share of an ebony log dredged up from the harbor on the Ogooue river in Gabon. It was where the logs were floated down river and loaded on ships to Europe in the 1700's. Sadly, there were many other ships loading another ebony-colored product for transport to the new world.
Ebony is so dense it barely floats. Some will sink after a while.
The log was believed to have been in the muck for 100 to 150 years. It was carefully dried at a wood importer for around 10 years, then sawn up into flitches, which were dried 5 more years the kiln dried to almost no moisture. My "share" was about 20 board feet of what may have been the rarest ebony ever. The wood was so dense and black it almost looked like plastic when polished. I wish I was making knives and not furniture then. I used it all up on pretty things, and don't have a single piece left. I became aware that one of the other pieces of the original lot is up for sale by a descendant of the first owner ... for $1000. It is about 5 board feet and has some bad cracks on the ends. I have seen it, and it temps me. I have used self-control so far.
My favorite piece of "old" wood is a huge redwood sinker burl. I purchased it many years ago with the help of Mark at Burl Source, who put me in contact with the owner.
It spent somewhere between 100 and 250 years in the muck in an Oregon river. It was hauled out by log divers and sold to the owners for woodturning. It was dried for about 30 years, and te owner decided it was too big a project ... and it came to live with me. It looked like a Duran had an affair with a hickory nut and they had a 40-pound 24" long spiky brown baby. I dried it for three more years and sawed it in half. It was filled with slightly sticky golden brown resin pockets that resembled copal amber (uncured "new" amber). I have dried the halves for ten more years in a warm dry location, and the resin is now rock hard. I plan on leaving the burl spike covered outside as close to untouched as possible and carving out the middle of each half as a large table bowl. The inside should end up covered with amber eyelets. I figure they could bring $5K each when done. I wish there was a good way to remove the middle wood as large enough pieces to make some handles from. A woodworking friend and I are working on an idea to do that, but it will still be a while before we try. I'll be sure to take lots of photos when I get started ... someday.
