Those who roll their eyes at suggestions that planning decisions should take taniwha into account should consider themselves lucky there are – as far as is known – no fairies to ponder in New Zealand.
A new Irish book documents numerous instances where the alleged favourite haunts of the little people have forced fields, roads and even highways to divert. It also, though less authoritatively, recounts the sometimes gruesome fates of people who have failed to respect the dictates of ancient lore.
In Irish Fairy Forts, writer and academic Jo Kerrigan provides aerial views of small circular formations of stones, peat, plants or earth, which locals have preserved, often for hundreds of years. Their protection is a heritage issue, but also reflects many people’s enduring belief in supernatural beings. Farmers plough and graze around them, roads bypass them and new buildings are often prevented from displacing them by fierce local advocacy.
Hard to date, some forts are believed to be pre-medieval. They’re held in folklore to be portals to the fairies’ underground domains. Some, it is said, are connected by tunnels miles long.
Archaeologists have various other hypotheses for such structures, but scepticism aside, Celtic folk stories are thrillingly dark, with a curiously modern political resonance.
What we now call fairies were, according to legend, the Tuatha Dé Danann, the original (and magical) inhabitants of Ireland. When the Celts invaded, the resultant war was settled when both sides agreed to divide the island.
In a canny switcheroo reminiscent of the European Union versus Brexit and the Unionist-Republican partition of Ireland, the Tuatha discovered too late that the deal assigned them the below-the-ground “half”.
Believers reckon the Celts’ trickery has been punished ever since by the Tuatha deploying vengeful “Sidhe” magic from below. Anyone entering, damaging or otherwise disrespecting a fort or fairy tree – chiefly rowan and hawthorn – invites financial, social or even mortal punishment.
For the craic, the Good People – or Gentry – also mess with people, appropriating and moving objects, diverting pathways and conjuring disorientating mists.
“No, you certainly wouldn’t want to offend the fairies,” says the proprietor of this writer’s local bookshop, quite matter-of-factly. “They can be very unpleasant.”
The book quotes a range of folk, including several senior health specialists and a member of the Oireachtas (Irish Parliament) as believing in fairies.
Irish-language TV soap Ros Na Rún ran a storyline last year in which a character culled some hawthorn after his workers refused to touch it, and developed a critical infection from a thorn prick. His wife has now left him and his children won’t speak to him, so even fictional fairies seem to play a long game.
The book provides a wealth of advice about how to avoid upsetting the Good People, and what to do if you think you have – including turning your coat inside out so they think you’re someone else.
It also, rather daringly, suggests how one might see fairies, or at least hear their music (which you won’t be able to remember next day).
Alas, the book is silent on how long one might have to wait after the Good People have “borrowed” things to have them returned. Again parking any querulous instincts, my list of sundry items that have vanished from our Dublin lodgings without any rational explanation is getting quite long. Still, it’s nice to think these wee folk do not discriminate against non-Celts.
On the plus side, I would swear in a court of law to having seen a pair of selkies – mythical seal creatures – in Cumbria. That could be for another column – though on reflection, you wouldn’t want to make them angry.
