For my birthday a little while ago, I was given a copy of the book, The Living Stones- Cornwall, by the surrealist painter Ithell Colquhoun. Colquhoun was not just an artist, she was fascinated by the occult (being a member of Aleister Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis as well as the original Fairy Investigation Society). She practiced magic herself and was intrigued about the links between Cornwall’s ancient, megalithic sites (so many of which were to be found near her Cornish home at Lamorna) and folklore.
The book, therefore, is full of interesting observations and notes on the stone circles and other ancient sites such as holy wells, of Cornwall and, particularly, of the Penwith region (accordingly, I’ve discussed her work at some length in my recent Spirits of the Land). Whenever there was faery lore linked to a location, Colquhoun recorded it. She has some interesting observations on a few Cornish water spirits that I thought it worthwhile featuring.
Describing the Hobby Horse ceremony of Padstow, she noted how Robert Hunt had suggested that “it was originally a water-horse or kelpie and states that at one time the rite was consummated by submerging him in the sea as a protection against cattle murrain.” I’d missed this and went back to Hunt’s Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall. The text records how the practice was to ride the ‘horse’ to water and, at the end of the festivities, to submerge him in the sea. Hunt then commented that the water horse is a “truly Celtic tradition.” I’ve written in previous posts about the water horses (each uisge) and the kelpie of the Highlands of Scotland. It’s a very big geographical link to tie them too closely to the Cornish hobby horse, but it’s nonetheless a fascinating and thought provoking idea.
A little later in the book, Colquhoun describes what was called ‘Nicky Nan Night’ in West Cornwall, a time of freedom and mischief for children on the night before Shrove Tuesday. Pranks such as lifting gates off their hinges would be carried out with the licence of the season. This seasonal rite at Easter wasn’t just some worship of the sun, Colquhoun perceptively suggested. In fact what was “perpetuated by Nicky Nan, as the name suggests, [is] a strain of water worship.” She then observed that the well at Colan near Newquay is dedicated to “Our Lady Nant- Nantosuelta, White Lady or water nix- and at Lamorna it may be the genius of the stream to whom we owe this survival [of the Easter mischief night].” Colquhoun knows her stuff and is perfectly right here: on the Welsh border with England a water sprite Nicky Nacky Nye is recorded; we’re looking here at the surviving remnants of some very old British traditions.
Lastly, Colquhoun commented on the tradition of giving nicknames to the inhabitants of Cornish villages- Wendron goats, Madron bulls, St Agnes cuckoos and so on. She describes these as animal totems, which could well be corrected, but she then remarks that St Keverne, a village on the Lizard peninsula, is linked not to an animal but to the bucca. As the artist rightly comments: “this last is in a different category from the others in that a bucca is not an animal but a species of Cornish fairy. Unlike the pisky, who frequents the surface of the ground, or the knocker, who is a ‘swart fairy of the mine,’ he is amphibious, with something in common with the Gaelic kelpie. Within living memory, offerings of fish were made to the bucca on a certain stone at the top of Newlyn Hill [near Penzance]. Why St Keverne people should have adopted them as their totem I cannot say.”
I’d say the bucca was more like a merman than a kelpie (see the descriptions in my Beyond Faery (2020)), but his influence over the shoals of fish and the ability of people to catch them could explain the decision of a village, which must partly have been dependent on the sea, to dedicate itself to the being.
British Fairies 
2 thoughts on “Some Cornish water sprites”