A late summer holiday took me back to the Scilly Isles, the largely unspoiled and nearly traffic-free archipelago in the far south west of Britain. Here, beaches are often deserted and human noise rarely drowns the sounds of nature. As a result, perhaps, we twice heard, on one beach, a strange and eerie crying noise. The first time, the source was mysterious; the second I saw that there were two seals floating on one side of the bay. Standing in the surf, one swam ever nearer towards me on the shore whilst its companion continued to drift in the sunlit water. Their presence seemed the only proximate cause for the haunting wails; not a mermaid, but perhaps a selkie, curious about the people on the beach. The sound was so weird though, that you could readily understand how people would have had to conclude that sirens sang out at sea on rocks.
Perhaps my susceptibility to such imaginings was heightened by the fact that, whilst I was away, I reread Ithell Colquhoun‘s Living Stones- Cornwall (published in 1957). I feel sure she would have sympathised with my conviction that the selkies were singing to us, for- as I have described in my Spirits of the Land– her Cornwall was permeated with supernatural power, whether that emerged through the very rocks and vegetation of the ancient landscape or emanated from the water sprites or guardians of the peninsula’s many wells. Colquhoun was acutely sensitive to these presences- not just at locations such as the Carn Euny well, but even beside the stream that ran past her studio/ home in the Lamorna Valley. As for my own recent trip, on the island of St Agnes we visited St Warna’s Well, set in the cliffs overlooking a small bay facing the Atlantic. Sadly, it was run rather dry and offered only a muddy puddle within its stone enclosure; as Colquhoun would have said, the site needed someone “who would cultivate its hidden guardian… I hoped that it too might have already, or would soon attain, its invisible guardian.” She mentions too a faery well called the Pin Well or Pin Mill, which was formerly known above the fishing village of Newlyn in west Penwith (before someone destroyed it and took the basin as a birdbath for their garden). Here, on Good Fridays, the practice was once for little girls to visit the site with their dolls. A pin would be dropped in the well and water would be poured on the doll, at the same time as giving it a new name. What the ancient origins of this baptismal rite may have been may only be speculated, but this sadly-vanished well plainly resembles Venton Bebibell, up on the moors near the Men an Tol, which I described previously.
On a closely related point, I might add that on the largest Scilly island of St Mary’s, on the edge of the main settlement of Hugh Town, there is Buzza Hill. This is said once to have been a primary haunt of the Scilly faeries. The hill is also crowned by a megalithic tomb, a coincidence that struck me forcefully when I climbed the hill one evening to see the sunset. As I’ve described before, the known presence of the faeries at a burial site for the ancestors cannot be merely fortuitous. They are seen as inextricably associated, the faeries drawn by those ancient spirits to frequent the site.
The scraps of folklore that Colquhoun picked up in the 1940s and ’50s were indicative of how much might have been lost, as well as confirming the remnants that we still possess. So, for example, after a visit to Helston she recorded that “green is seldom worn; it is still considered an unlucky colour for a dress in Cornwall. An assistant in a shop once told me that always had difficulty selling a green garment- unless it was bought by a visitor- as many of their regular customers felt that wearing one might presage a death in the family.” We know that the South Devonshire pixies were said to be highly protective of the colour green: a saying noted down in 1916 at Beesands, near Dartmouth in the south of the county, was that- if a human wears green- they’ll soon be wearing mourning. Clearly, this was information known about the neighbouring pixies that had once been of much broader distribution; Colquhoun, during the 1950s, may have picked up on one of the last traces of this age-old knowledge.
British Fairies 
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