On the Other Side of the Mist

Fairy folklore has enchanted audiences for centuries. In this series, we'll explore how the fairy has evolved over time, and what this says about our ever-shifting relationship to the natural world.

This essay is the first in our latest patron series, On the Origin of Fairies. To read the upcoming essays in this series, become a paid subscriber below:

Titania Sleeping, Richard Dadd ca. 1841. Via Wikimedia Commons.

In the autumn of 2005, Genesis Properties was set to begin construction of a housing estate in St. Fillans, a little village that lies on Loch Earn in the Scottish Highlands. The construction plans involved removing a large rock on the outskirts of the village to make way for a new neighborhood.

St. Fillans sits beneath Dundurn (or Dún Duirn, otherwise known as St. Fillan’s Hill), the site of an Iron Age hillfort constructed by the Picts. The eighth-century Irish monk Fillan settled in this region in his efforts to convert the pagan Picts to Christianity.

It is also, allegedly, fairy-haunted.

For when the bulldozers rolled onto the field where the property development was to be built, a resident ran onto the scene and demanded that construction stop: “Don’t move that rock…