In Ireland, or at least in rural Ireland, many stories circulate that suggest a belief in ‘the little people’ or in magical forces that pre-date Catholicism, even if they are expressed within a Catholic tradition. St Brigid’s Well in County Clare is named after a Catholic saint but also a pre-Christian goddess.It is an ancient pagan sacred well and also a Catholic shrine. It is a damp and gloomy place of mouldering rags and mildewed photographs among the ferns, sad symbols of the desperation of people hoping against rationality for intercession to save the life of someone that they love. I’ve been there and I know about that. Elsewhere there are thorn trees on the roadsides adorned with rags, prayer cards and trinkets, or wells where the water is believed to cure madness.
In some places the sacred fairy thorn trees are said to have caused the diversion of motorways, when the navvies refused to damage them for fear of the curses of the fairies. In other places where the motorway obliterated the sacred thorn people will tell you of the slew of accidents that resulted. Sure if they’d gone round the bush the road would have been safer, they will tell you.
I heard a radio programme some years ago about these beliefs, recorded in an area of County Clare called the Burren. This is a limestone plateau, famous for its rare flowering plants, many of which shelter in the fissures in the limestone. It’s a strange place where the cattle only graze the mountains in the winter, and where history is so muddled with the present that prehistoric buildings form parts of modern farms, farms that were iron-age farms still when the rest of the world had moved on. In heavy rains the water level on the limestone plateau rises silently until close-cropped grassy hollows fill with clear water. There’s an Irish word for this which I’ve forgotten, and which all too soon everyone else will have forgotten.
When interviewed these people of the Burren told strange hesitant stories about the little people. ‘There’s a place over yonder where the old people put food and drink out for them on St Brigid’s Day’, they might say. ‘Of course I don’t believe in all that’ …. ‘But sure it’s a funny thing, the food and drink was always gone in the morning’…. ‘And when they stopped doing it they never saved a decent crop of hay in that field after…’
There are many places where the fairies are believed to live or where there is a sense of a connection to another world. Often at these places there are ancient gnarly thorn trees or cairns of rocks, or maybe prehistoric tombs or barrows, all of them crossing the divide between the underground and the world above ground. It is as if some features that break through the surface of the land mark spots where another world can be accessed. Someone more intellectual than I might talk of liminality, but I will spare you that. People will come to these places from miles around looking for peace or healing or maybe magic, and perhaps they will report seeing the fairies or being beguiled into a seachrán sí, a fairy straying, led a merry dance by fairy magic, lost in a parallel countryside or maybe just a slow coming home from the pub, waking up in the morning with their jacket inside out. The word ‘belief’ is not adequate as a descriptor of these stories, and there is a risk, as in confusing a ‘fairy straying’ with a coming home from the pub, of getting into the quaint charm of the Irish, itself maybe a quaint and charming myth. For these are ordinary country people. And yet they are not like the ordinary country people hereabouts, if you can find any still here in this quaint and charming village deep in Herefordshire, full of commuters and retired city folk.
In this village there are now three farmers. Most of them have the connection with the land they get from walking the dog, apart from the three farmers. And the difference between the Irish country people and the farmers here is that they are peasants and the farmers here are…. well, farmers. Originally farmer meant a sort of tax collector. The king ‘farmed out’ the taxes of a region to a ‘tax farmer’. The tax farmer paid the king or the government for the tax collection rights and he then tried to get his money back from the people of the region, and the more he extorted the bigger his profit. When the peasants of England were dispossessed by the enclosure movement onwards from the late 1700s, control of the land passed to the rich and powerful, and communal landholding was replaced by farms. The parallel is clear – the farmer paid the rent and tried to get as much money back out of the land as possible, just like the tax farmer. I suggest this point in English history marked the loss of any deep personal and community connection with the land, a move away from any ability to see the magic of the natural world, and towards an exploitative mentality. When the poet John Clare, who lived through the enclosures, wrote ‘Each little tyrant with his little sign Shows where man claims earth glows no more divine’, he is lamenting this new commercialisation of the very biosphere.
In Ireland many of the people who work the land come from an unbroken line of peasants and have inherited a peasant view of land. There are also farmers. Many of the early farmers in Ireland were English, people that the poet Aodhagán Ó Rathaille (d.1726) excoriated for their boorish and exploitative attitude to the land that they bought or were granted in return for services to the king of England. He felt such contempt for them that he perfected a poetic form, the Aisling, as a vehicle for his feelings about these newcomers. The peasants, by contrast, were actually or culturally the descendants of people who had lived in Ireland since pre-histoty. The land contained for them their communal and personal histories and beliefs, an oral cultural history embedded in the very place-names, and in customs dating back into prehistory, such as the festival of Lughnasa. The land was to them sacred and magical, not somewhere to exploit in the manner of the incoming English farmers.
Peasants are reticent about how they express ideas about the spiritual, the supernal or the transcendent, though the Irish language undoubtedly carries that potential. Peasants may not always feel comfortable with that class of talk. Like anglers who would never dream of doing yoga or meditation, but enter trance states while staring at their floats out in the canal, peasants express their sense of the magical and the spiritual more easily by telling and half believing stories about how their land is shared with mythical beings who carry for them their sense that the land is an enchanted place, a place with other dimensions than the commercial. To them, maybe as with indigenous peoples elsewhere, the land is to be treated with respect and care, a world of many layers inherited from ancestors and passed on to children, a world where customs and celebrations mark defining moments in people’s lives that they may express through ritual because words fail them. And so belief in stories of the little people also carries for them and expresses for them something of the sacred magical nature of the land, The fear of angering the fairies by removing their sacred thorn trees can prevent sacrilegious damage to the magical landscape.
Because of course they are essentially right that this is a magical landscape. That their green island should lie among the rocks and beaches of the sea on a tiny blue-green planet out in the middle of an eternity of bugger all but space and rock, a planet that could host blue whales in a once pristine ocean while swinging through the voids of space and time, is pure magic. That there are fungi stringing out their communication systems below ground between each other and their companionable trees, exchanging nutrients and maybe even information, is pure magic. That you can lie among the passing bumble bees in pure joy in the long grass with your beloved, and if you so wish can make another being you may love and who may hold your hand as you are dying, is pure magic. The stories of the little people carry all this meaning and much more. You may research all you like, and come to understand small details of the physics or biology of the interconnections of the world, but behind that lies an immensity of wonderful incomprehension that you may as well call magic. Even if you understood it all it would still be magic. We can still delight in a pixilated rainbow glittering in the spray of a waterfall, or a circular rainbow in the mist above a mountain ridge, although Newton and our physics teachers long since explained it. The extraordinary discoveries we have made just add to the magic.
Round here, in the next parish, the famous diarist Rev. Kilvert recorded that the country people believed that the little people used like to dance in the wooden mill chute of Rhosgoch Mill, where the elm boards resonated to their dancing boots. They were last heard of living in the crags of Gareg Lwyd above Painscastle. By the late 19th century the country people had decided, not that they no longer believed in fairies, but that the fairies had recently become extinct. I interpret this as a quiet recognition that the landscape and the biosphere were no longer seen here as in any way sacred or magical but just as a money-making opportunity, which is how too much of the farming industry sees it still.
Maybe those new ‘regenerative’ farmers can show us how to combine respect for the creation with an acceptable level of food production. I hope so. I’m looking for some of them, but round here they are not yet as numerous as fairies.
Something that I have often wondered about in this (historical) connexion is the farmer/peasant's anxiety about the need to wrest enough food from his plot to feed his family for the next twelve months. This must have engendered a lot of superstition/experience about what did and didn't work in different seasons, when the farmer/peasant's health was poor and so on. To feel protective of his land and whatever creatures moved around on it was an almost religious approach to the hope that this year would turn out all right...