Two skin capes, worn one over the other with the woolly side turned outward. Beneath them a woollen plaid skirt and a woollen plaid scarf, the scarf fastened at the throat with a pin made from a bird's bone. The capes are nothing so simple as hides thrown over the shoulders. The outer one measures 82 centimetres high and 170 wide and is built from five main rectangular pieces of skin with two small triangles set under the yoke — mostly dark sheepskin, with four panels of pale goatskin let into the fur side and, in a detail the textile researchers call unique, an upper front lining of dark sheepskin on the flesh side. The inner cape is slightly smaller, 80 by 150 centimetres, assembled from seven or eight primary sheepskin pieces and twenty-two secondary patches of sheep, goat and deer. Somebody cut and stitched all of that. Somebody kept mending it.

Everything a bog gives back comes out the same tobacco colour, which makes it easy to picture the Iron Age as a brown place. Chemical analysis of the dyes says otherwise. Her skirt was originally woven in a blue or purple plaid; her scarf was red plaid. Threads in at least five colours went into those patterns, produced with plant dyes and the mordants needed to fix them into wool — which is to say, with a body of practical chemistry that somebody had to learn, get right, and pass on. Impressions left on her skin, together with a few surviving degraded fibres, show that under the wool she wore a white garment of plant fibre reaching from her shoulders to below her knees. The fibre has not been identified. Comparable finds from the period suggest nettle.

Sewn into the inner cape was a pocket made from an animal bladder, and inside it were a horn comb, a leather thong and a hair band of woven wool. These are not grave goods arranged by mourners. They are the contents of somebody's pocket — the small ordinary objects a person carries around because they expect to want them later in the day. More than any measurement of the capes, that pocket is what makes her hard to look at as an exhibit.

In 2009 strontium isotope analysis was applied to her textiles, and the results complicated a tidy picture. The scarf's wool is local. The skirt's wool came from at least three different sources — one local, one with a signature compatible with northern Scandinavia, meaning Norway or Sweden. The plant-fibre garment appears to be non-local too. And so, on the same evidence, does she. If the readings hold, an Iron Age woman found in a Jutland bog may not have grown up in Jutland, and the cloth on her back had already travelled further than most reconstructions of the period allow. Textiles, the researchers concluded, were traded and carried as raw material over much longer distances than anyone had assumed.

What is established makes a short list, and it does not add up to an explanation. Her legs were bent behind her back. Her right arm was nearly severed, and the damage is thought to date from before she died. One leg had been broken and had healed long beforehand. Cuts on one foot, once blamed on the 1879 spade, are now considered more likely to have been inflicted around the time of her death. There was a rope around her neck, which suggests hanging or strangling — though it may simply have been a necklace. Radiography in 1990 found hair stubble on her scalp and the remains of her brain still inside the skull, her bones demineralised as bog bodies' bones are. In 1999 two samples from her gut showed that her last meal had been rye bread. Whether she was killed as an offering, executed, murdered, or died some other way and was placed in the peat, the evidence does not settle, and honest accounts of her stop there. Radiocarbon dating puts her death between 160 BC and AD 340. She lies today in the National Museum of Denmark, and reconstructions of her clothing travel to other museums — which is the part most visitors remember, and the reason it is worth saying plainly that the clothes were hers, and she was wearing them.