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.
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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. You’ll kill the fairies.”
Marcus Salter, then the head of Genesis Properties, described the incident to The Times of London: “Then we got a series of phone calls, saying we were disturbing the fairies. I thought they were joking. It didn’t go down very well.”
No, indeed. As Salter would soon discover, fairies are serious business. The local community council was flooded with complaints, and construction ground to a halt. Genesis Properties was forced to redesign their housing estate around a small park, at the center of which stands the fairy rock.
This is hardly the only time that local fairies have impeded building projects. Famously in 1999, the construction of a motorway in County Clare, Ireland was re-routed to avoid disturbing a fairy bush. In 2014, protesters stopped the construction of a new road through the Álftanes peninsula near Reykjavík so as to not disturb the elves, whom many locals believed to be living among the rocks.
In 2022, the U.K.’s National Trust dismantled a footbridge in the salt marshes along Stiffkey, a village in Norfolk. The organization was concerned about the bridge’s safety, but it proceeded with demolition without consulting the village, much to the dismay of Stiffkey’s residents. Months later, a small footbridge (above) materialized in its place. Officials from the National Trust took it down, only for it to reappear in the same place in a few weeks. Locals refused to come forward with who had built it. They claimed it was a fairy bridge. (A new, safer bridge has since replaced it.)
When a contemporary person hears the word “fairy,” they imagine a diaphanous, minuscule creature: a few inches tall, butterfly wings, usually female, mostly helpless. The flower fairy was a construction of Victorian and Edwardian imaginations, thanks to writers like J.M. Barrie (the creator of Peter Pan), artists like the iconic Cicely Mary Barker, and famous hoaxes like the Cottingley fairies. But in the pre-industrial world, fairies posed a real threat in the minds of rural peasants, and belief in their existence could be found even among the clergy and the learned classes. (Robert Kirk, an Episcopalian minister who lived in the Scottish Highlands during the late seventeenth century, is a prime example. We will revisit him later in this series.)
I’ve written about fairies before in the Gazette, including a survey of Cicely Mary Barker’s art and an exploration of abduction narratives in both fairy lore and modern tales of aliens. The fairies of my childhood were very much in Barker’s tradition—tiny winged creatures who posed no threat to my safety, and only served to enchant. As a little girl, my friends and I would search for fairies among the flowerbeds of my mother’s garden. My classmates and I made leprechaun traps in the lead-up to Saint Patrick’s Day. Surely, fairies were nothing to fear.
Like most children, I forgot about the fairies as I grew older. (Sorry, Tinker Bell!) That is, until I read Susanna Clarke’s doorstopper fantasy novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (2004). Clarke’s novel is an alternate history set during the Napoleonic Wars, in which two English magicians come forward to aid the British army in defeating the French. What ensues is a rivalry between two schools of English magic—Mr. Norrell’s “respectable,” post-Enlightenment wizardry, and Jonathan Strange’s wild, medieval mysticism. When I first read the book as a teenager, what stood out to me was Clarke’s depiction of fairies. Her fairy characters were human-sized, ancient, and decidedly devious. They lived in a perpetual present and were largely incapable of empathy. Most of all, they possessed god-like powers over the natural world.
I was entranced. Who were these fairies? From where did Clarke derive her inspiration?
That reading experience led me to the rich, eccentric world of fairy folklore that flourished in prior centuries: a domain of oral storytelling, local traditions, and the intriguing interplay of established religious doctrine colliding with popular Christianity. It also introduced me to our own modern myth-making, and how our knowledge of Victorian imperialists and missionaries can cloud our understanding of medieval conversions. This has led to Internet-driven fantasies of covert, pagan worship extending centuries after Ireland and the U.K.’s Christianization in an attempt to explain fairy lore; these beliefs are often fueled by a fundamental misunderstanding of medieval Christianity and the nuances of popular faith.
In this series, we will explore it all: the roots of “godlings” or “small gods” in British folklore, the development of fairy myths in Celtic communities, and the rise of the post-industrial flower fairy. We will read accounts of rural residents, ministers, and skeptics. We’ll also meet the Spiritualists who kept the fairy-faith alive in the Victorian period, and the pre-Raphaelite artists who brought fairy enchantment to their paintings.
Most of all, we’ll venture into the colorful world of fairy myths—into the mounds, through the hills, on the other side of the mist. By the end of our journey, we’ll see why this world was so convincing to so many, and how our evolving relationship with nature influenced these beliefs. Readers may even come to empathize with the residents of St. Fillans. When in doubt, it’s best to leave the fairies alone.
