Meet the Ancestors? Faeries & ancient sites

Mitchell’s Fold, from the Visit Shropshire Hills website

The writer and blogger Neil Rushton has very recently posted an article on his Dead but Dreaming blog which discusses ‘The Connection between Faeries & Prehistoric Sites.’ As regular readers of British Fairies will know, this is a subject which has long intrigued me as well.

I’ve provided a link to the piece, but I’ll pick out a few themes and remarks here for comment. Neil begins by observing that “There is a deep connection between the faeries and prehistoric sites throughout Britain, Ireland and Western Europe. This connection is recorded in the folkloric record and in modern testimonies, suggesting a metaphysical linkage that may provide a deeper understanding of the faerie phenomenon.” This connection has been the basis for much of my own thinking on the subject, as most recently set out in my 2022 book Spirits of the Land and in my posting on the name Albion.

Neil discusses the earliest documented story linking faeries with a prehistoric burial mound, Willy Howe in East Yorkshire, and remarks on the impressive fact that a site identified for its fae character in the 1100s still retained those associations in the early twentieth century. As I’ve frequently remarked, the strongest connections are with long barrows, monuments from which faery music is often known to emanate, but any distinctive hill might be chosen as a faery residence or as a portal to the underground realm of Faery. That said, many ancient sites, including stone circles and menhirs, have fae associations- sites such as the Rollright stone circle in Oxfordshire or the Mitchell’s Fold circle in Shropshire. A valuable index of these sites can be found in a gazetteer by Leslie Grinsell. Simon Young of the Fairy Investigation Society has helpfully put the book’s English, Welsh and Scottish/ Manx chapters on the Academia website, and Neil provides a link.

As the case of Willy Howe just showed, people continue to have faery experiences or contacts at ancient sites to this day. Neil gives some examples and the aforementioned Simon Young has included others in the Fairy Census.

To conclude, Neil explores what the meaning and importance of these longstanding links may be. The faeries’ regular presence at burial mounds tends to reinforce their links with our dead ancestors; Neil summarises this nicely when he states that “The folklore that portrays the faeries as inhabiting the land of the dead shows them as representatives of the past and what is gone.” Ancient monuments might therefore be understood as “interface with the transcendent world of the dead.” The prehistoric sites may also be viewed as access points to the faes’ “own standalone non-physical reality,” places where we might have experiences of altered states of consciousness which induce encounters with the otherworld. Neil also suggests that the faeries might be understood as manifestations of ancient indigenous beliefs, or part of a collective consciousness that can be contacted at certain charged spots in the landscape. When I have proposed that we approach them as spirits of the land, as genii loci or ‘the soul of Britain,’ I think I’ve been trying to find expression for similar ideas.