wasnt ned's head put up on the red keep/city walls? or was the whole thing w joff making sansa look at it only in the show. its been too long since ive read the books
no, you are correct! ned's head was tarred and put on a spike for a while. and joff did bring sansa up to look at it (sansa bravely decides that she will look but she will not see, and joff is disappointed at her lack of reaction. this sets up her coping strategy for kl going forward)
the crows could've gotten to his eyes while his head was on the spike, but the rest of his body wouldn't have rotted away to just bones in that time. HOWEVER, @branwinged points put that de-fleshing corpses for transportation was a medeival practice:
well we know his head was put on a spike at the end of agot and iirc tyrion ordered to have it taken down in acok. i can't find anything on this so this is just speculation - i think for practical reasons they excarnate all bodies which have to be transported over a long distance (there are two mentions of the corpse cleaning beetles in the series - for gregor's bones, sent to dorne and barristan re quentyn's corpse in meereen; and ned also says "only lyanna's bones" had returned from dorne, i don't think she had been dead for very long either. so.)
mostly based on this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mos_Teutonicus
"Mos Teutonicus was a postmortem funerary custom used in Europe in the Middle Ages as a means of transporting, and solemnly disposing of, the bodies of high-status individuals. Nobles would often undergo Mos Teutonicus if their burial plots were located far away from their place of death. The process involved the removal of the flesh from the body, so that the bones of the deceased could be transported hygienically from distant lands back home"
tbh i had always assumed that lyanna, lady, and ned's "bones" returning to winterfell was just an expression! a more poetic way to say their corpses were returned. but i was wrong!!! the bodies were actually de-fleshed!!
i love death rites and funerary customs and had never heard of this practice, that's so cool!! and adds a neat new piece of understanding (for me!) wrt the silent sisters and westerosi death culture
