Belief in Fairies was common enough
for people in the past although in more
recent times such opinions are considered idiosyncratic. In country areas
however belief in them and in other fey entities such as elves, goblins and
boggarts persisted well into the 19th century.
Some months ago I was having a chat
with an elderly former quarry worker from Cauldon Lowe who was telling me
entertaining stories about his childhood including encounters with gypsies he
called “ roadsters”. I touched on a legend I had heard of the area “The Fairies
of Caldon Lowe” well enough known story
to have a 19th century writer Mary Howitt produce a poem on the
subject in the 1840s. (She was the first English translator of the children stories
of Hans Christian Andersen) The old man told me that he had heard accounts of
fairy’s dancing on an ancient burial mound on certain nights of the year.
The Leek priest and folklorist of
the 1950s WP Wincutt researched a number of other places in the Moorlands that
fairy traditions attached to them including Long Low close to Castern Hill
where pixies danced inside a hill on Christmas Eve. Wincutt believed that a
common denominator in most of these local stories was that incidents happened
at sites of great antiquity.
In another account a writer in 1901 described
at Longnor a flickering light “seen moving as one moves . . . it has given rise
to many tales of belated travellers having been beguiled by it and led into the
swamp, where their bodies remain, and from whence their “boggarts” arise at
night to caper and dance all over the countryside, to the terror of the
inhabitants.”
Fairy lore has a tradition of
thousands of years going back to before pre Christian times. Mischievous fairies
have been said to abduct human babies and substituting them with their own
children or “changelings”. They are accused of inflicting amnesia on their victims,
drugging their victims and taking them to other worldly places filled with
light. Medieval tales are full of encounters between humans and fairies where
people when wandering back home find that life has radically changed.
One example from the Welsh border
refers to a King called Herla who is invited by an Elf King to attend a feast.
He and his entourage are let into a magnificent hall under a cliff where they
are wined and dined until the meal ends and they fall asleep. On returning to
the surface find that they have been gone 300 years and all has changed.
If we could remove the mythological
aspect from fairy abductions and dress them a little differently, these
folklore reports would be virtually indistinguishable from present UFO
abduction reports which is an interesting conclusion to arrive at.
The ability of fairies to cause
mischief even into the 20th century is illustrated by the fooling of
the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle who was taken in by two
young girls in 1920s Yorkshire photographed posing
with fairies. Many years later Elsie and Frances confessed that they had faked
the pictures with paper cut outs.
