Churchyard mould & mole hill earth- some strange charms against faeries

Mole, by Melchior Lorch, 1548

Many substances repel faeries, as I have often described; amongst these are sprigs of rowan tree, items associated with the Christian faith, iron objects and, perhaps most understandably, stale urine. The urine (maistir) would be off-putting to anyone with a sense of smell; an aversion to crosses, blessings and pages from scripture make sense if we accept that the faeries not only stand outside the church but (in the view of people from the Middle Ages) were actively associated with the angels who were ejected from heaven along with Lucifer.

Two substances that have regularly been deployed as defences against the Good Folk are similar to each other and might, initially, seem rather puzzling. These are the earth taken from graveyards and from mole hills. Scattered about, they form an invisible but impassable barrier against our Good Neighbours. The earth operates in two ways: it can stop the faeries getting in and, just as effectively, it can stop faery beings escaping. There are several recorded stories from the Scottish Highlands in which captured mermaids or faery cattle (crodh sith) are contained by humans using earth. The cattle are valuable for their rich milk; a mermaid is a novelty and might perhaps become a bride. However, whilst these measures will work for a while, sooner or later (of course) someone forgets to renew the barrier- which generally has to be done everyday- and the captives escape.

The use of churchyard earth is rather easy to explain, I think. It is taken from consecrated ground and, as such, shares its magical power with any other Christian-related item. Any objects formed into a cross (metal scissors, for instance, for double protection) and any items linked to the faith will work, even if there appears to be some sacrilege involved in their use- hence, pages ripped from the Bible or prayer book and carried in the pocket will protect an individual, even though we might assume that the damage to the holy book was, at the least, inadvisable or disrespectful. We might instinctively feel a comparable reluctance to take soil from the location where relatives or fellow villagers are interred, but once again this does not seem to impair the magic inherent in the substance. Then again, perhaps it is that very quality of those ancestors- dead and buried underground- that makes their last resting place so potent. If the dead are related somehow to the faeries, strewing the soil in which they sleep might be deploying like against like.

Why earth from moles hills though? The reason is that moles turn out to have a special place in British folklore. They were once felt to be a cure for scrofula, the ‘King’s Evil,’ and, as such, equivalent to a touch from the hand of the monarch himself. Holding a mole in your hand until it died would imbue you with healing powers (akin to what may be received from faeries). The powdered skin and flesh of a mole would cure the ague (malaria). It was more than just a burrowing mammal therefore.

More significantly for our purposes, moles are obviously subterranean creatures, living in the darkness and seldom seen. As a result- and just like the faeries- they have been linked to ancient burial chambers and cairns. The reverend John Atkinson, in his account of Forty Years in a Moorland Parish in North Yorkshire, records a conversation with a faery in which the supernatural told a man that he and his kind lived underground for “t’moudiwarps dis, an’ wheea not fairies?” (the moles do, so why not the faeries?) It appears that their common habitation below ground created an association between moles and faes and somehow led to traces of one being effective against its ‘neighbour.’

Part of the status of moles may also derive from wider folklore attitudes to small animals. British folklore never seems to have viewed these creatures as just wild mammals. For example, hedgehogs were thought in England to suck milk from cows udders in the fields. They were also believed to act as witches’ familiars and to be able to run as fast as hares. In turn, hares themselves were viewed as unlucky, because they were either witches’ familiars or because they were actually the shapeshifted witches, out and about in disguise and up to no good. Sometimes, too, ghosts or other spirits might take hare form (and see my Beyond Faery for more details of faery hares and other such animals).

To conclude, the British countryside was full of magical beings and plants, whose powers and interactions were far greater and more complex than we appreciate today. Whether we class it as ‘sympathetic’ magic or we see it as a reflection of their shared realm, the earth through the moles passed, being the same realm as that dwelt in by the faeries, could exercise a strong, but poorly understood, control over them.

‘If you go down to the woods today…’- disguises and faery magic

Le grand et p’tit Colins by David Wyatt

In 1932 British big band leader Henry Hall composed the song The Teddy Bears’ Picnic, which advised children that “If you go down in the woods today, You’d better go in disguise…” The first teddy bears had appeared only thirty years previously, but Hall’s advice could easily have been written much earlier and aimed at much greater threats, for woodland is- of course- a notorious haunt of faery-kind and the need to be cautious- especially when you’re spying on them- is extremely well-established. Why, though, might being in disguise be helpful?

Here I’m going to bring together some folklore accounts that I’ve mentioned before, but I’ll frame them in a new context. There appears to be a thread of knowledge in some traditional stories that indicates a curious relationship between the faeries and human clothing. We’ll start with a curiously inconclusive- feeling story from Walter Evans Wentz’ Fairy Faith in the Celtic Countries.  It’s set at Barra Head on the Isle of Barra in the Western Hebrides, and it tells how:

“a fairy woman used to come to a man’s window almost every night as though looking to see if the family was home. The man grew suspicious, and decided the fairy woman was watching for her chance to steal his wife, so he proposed a plan. It was then (and still is) the custom after thatching a house to rope it across with heather-spun ropes, and, at the time, the man was busy spinning some of them; so he told his wife to take his place that night to spin the heather-rope, and said he would take her place at the spinning-wheel. They were thus placed when the fairy woman made the usual look in at the window, and she seeing that her intention was understood, said to the man, ‘You are yourself at the spinning-wheel and your wife is spinning the heather-rope’.”

Fairy Faith, p.104.

It’s not at all clear from this brief account why the changes of place and work in the cottage foiled the fairy woman so successfully, but the change of roles- and clothes- appears to be central.  A story told by Edgar MacCulloch about a fairy incident on Guernsey (Guernsey Folklore, 215-7) would appear to confirm this guess.  The story concerns the baking activities of Le Grand and Le Petit Colin, two household faeries known on the island.  A poor couple lived in cottage at St. Brioc, earning their living in a variety of ways.  The woman made money from spinning and would sit up late at her spinning wheel. She discovered that the two faeries regularly entered the house to bake bread in the oven during the night. When she told her husband, he wanted to witness the visits too, so he decided to sit at the wheel, disguised in her clothes and pretending to spin, when the expected visitors came. The faeries spotted the deception, complaining “Tonight, there’s a beard/ When the other night there was none.” They left the house as if in anger, and never visited again. Once again, we have a role reversal, with the man undertaking a female task, and further compounding this action by wearing his wife’s clothes; the result is that the faeries are repelled or defeated in their objective.  What’s the significance of these two narratives?

I suspect that the major issue is the change of clothes and that assuming disguises (however crude) can defeat or frustrate the faeries.  There certainly are a few clues that faeries have some kind of aversion to or dislike for human clothing. Consider the case of a little girl from Dartmoor who was carried off by the pixies and left stripped of all her clothes, unharmed and happily playing, but naked. This incident is echoed by a case from Argyllshire. A man’s wife had been abducted by the faeries, but over a period of two months she kept returning nightly to tidy the house and care for their children, although her husband never saw her. Then, one day, he was walking in a wood when he heard her voice calling his name. The woman was hidden in a hazel bush, saying that she wanted to come home but couldn’t because she had no clothes to wear. He had to bring her an item of clothing so that she could be freed and could return to her family. Both cases strongly suggest that the faeries object to human clothes; there was no apparent, practical need for the captives to be stripped, but their garments had to go. This may be because of their mortal origin and what they symbolised- as is implied by the adverse reaction of many brownies to being given garments- but other issues may also be at play. Divesting the captive of their clothing may give the faes greater control of their abductees; it may also make it harder for the the victim to give their captors the slip.

We know that one of the solutions to being pixie-led is to turn your coat or another garment; this turning can be either turning inside out or turning a hat back to front. These are easy strategies, but they have a potency beyond their simplicity that we don’t quite understand.  The faery-lore expert Katharine Briggs proposed that turning the clothes works as a change of identity, thereby freeing the individual from the fairy enchantment- and it may simultaneously somehow confuse them.  This theory apparently was at play in the Scottish Highlands when boys were protected against being abducted by the fairies by means of disguising them in girl’s dresses (see Barbara Fairweather, Folklore of Glencoe and North Lorn, 1974).  Once again, we have a change of clothing tricking the faeries or defeating their magic- and, of course, it’s also an example of the same cross-dressing seen in the first two examples: a double change of identity. 

What exactly is going on in these accounts is not entirely clear. I think we can rule out objections by the faeries to clothing as such, because we have plentiful reports of what they wear themselves; instead it looks as though there’s something about human forms of dress that can be unfamiliar or confusing to our Good Neighbours. What we taken for granted- you change your coat but you’re still the same person- for some as yet unfathomed reason completely throws some of the Good Folk. For them, perhaps, it’s as if that individual has disappeared, wielding their own powerful magic, and this leads to bafflement and (perhaps) fear on their part…

Charles Hutton Lear, A Glimpse of the Fairies

‘Dancing with the Good Folk’- in Watkins ‘Mind, Body, Spirit’ Magazine

Towards the end of last year, I was invited to speak at Watkins Bookshop in central London. The talk was recorded and a transcript has just been published in issue 76 for their Mind, Body, Spirit magazine for winter 2024. It’s available on Watkins’ video channel if you’d like to pretend you were there in the basement with us- personally, I can’t bare to watch it, but that’s because I’m embarrassed hearing and watching myself! 

In the talk, I explain how I rediscovered my longstanding fascination with faeries, about eight years ago, and what motivated me to start this blog. At the core of British Fairies, I’d say, is a respect for the folklore record- and for the uniqueness of different faery traditions. Even within the British Isles, there’s a spectrum of faery customs and types, and my feeling has always been to resist straying too far beyond those physical boundaries and mixing up elements from different situations and different cultures. If we are eclectic, we risk losing the distinguishing details and forgetting the authentic native traditions, accumulated over centuries of witness experiences, instead producing a homogenised ‘international faery’ lacking roots and connections to a landscape and its population. 

Regular readers won’t be surprised to learn that I have some harsh things to say about Disney-fied, girly-fied faeries, about pink tutus, sparkly tiaras and wands. As I’ve repeatedly set out here, the faeries of British tradition can be pretty tough, selfish and cruel and I think its dishonest to that accumulated knowledge to pretend otherwise. The faeries of British tradition are not intended to be the subject of a pretty ‘fairy tales’ (although traditional fairy tales can, once again, be quite brutal and unsentimental); rather they are about adult themes for adults, because adult mortals were constantly battling and interacting with adult faeries. Faerylore is about sex, violence, theft, competition, jealousy and all those other powerful and, often, unattractive emotions and motivations that drive people (whether mortal or supernatural). Over history, the relationship between humans and faes has probably felt most like an uneasy truce, with occasional bursts of warfare and occasional fraternisation. Of course, even those intimate contacts with faeries could be perilous, for the leanan-sith and other such faery lovers tend to be fickle, possessive and dangerously addictive beings.

I was quite flattered to find that Watkins have described me in the magazine as a “folklorist, mythologist, social and cultural historian.” I quite like those labels- and they’re not inappropriate. The latter part of my talk concerns the way in which faery lore has inspired British culture- through painting, book illustrations, music, literature and more. I’ve written about these here and elsewhere quite a lot and I think that these manifestations represent one of the most important and fertile aspects of our still developing relationship with the Good Folk. Just as important as our dealings with them are what we make of them afterwards: faery-lore is an important body of literature in itself, but the other stories we tell ourselves- through songs, nursery rhymes, pictures and, even, place names– are all part of a rich and dynamic history.

Taken by the Faeries- two stories by Sheridan Le Fanu

One of my Christmas presents this year was a collection of the ‘weird’ stories of Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-73). He specialised in supernatural and ghost stories, full of horror, his Carmilla (1871) being amongst the most famous; it’s a lesbian vampire tale, though very subtle and respectable- given its date.

Two stories caught my attention; neither is typical of Le Fanu in that they are concerned with faeries rather than more sinister and ghastly spirits. The first story is Laura Silver Bell of 1872, which takes place in the English Lake District/ Cumbria. This is one of several dialect tales that Le Fanu set in the area; Madam Crowl’s Ghost (1870) is another, which mentions the scary reputation of “a bo or a freet” (a bogle or a frightening entity); in Laura Silver Bell our heroine denies seeing a “freetin”- anything frightening- but then, as well shall see, she is closing her mind to the threat she faces.

The name of the main character of Le Fanu’s story is immediately evocative: Laura is an orphan whose family is unknown. She’s called silver bell because this was an ornament worn by her anonymous mother, who died in child birth. Her name is so like Philip Pulman’s Lara Silver Tongue that I can’t help wonder if he had once read Le Fanu and remembered the name. Pulman is certainly aware of Robert Kirk’s Secret Commonwealth- he uses the name for volume two of his Book of Dust series.

At the time that Le Fanu’s story takes place, Laura is a very attractive young woman in her late teens. She catches the eye of a faery man, who decides to abduct her. He tries to do so first of all by staging a party, a picnic with dancing, to try to lure her to join him. Laura sees finely dressed people, laughing and drinking from gold cups, and is sorely tempted to join them. However, she is shy and cautious, and fails to take the step over a small stream necessary to enter the throng. Laura’s confidante, Mall Clarke, who is the local ‘wise woman,’ tells her that she had a lucky escape: “Those fine folk, what were they? I’ll tell ye: dobies and fairies… they’ll tak ye and ye’ll never git out o’ their hands again while grass grows.” Laura still refuses to accept that her handsome suitor is a dangerous faery and Mall repeats “If ye gaa wi’ the people, ye’ll never come back. Ye munna (must not) talk wi’ them, nor eat wi’ them, nor drink wi’ them, nor tak a pin’s worth by way o’ gift fra’ them… or ye’re lost.”

Of course, Laura ignores this sage advice and is abducted by the good-looking stranger. After more than a year, during which Laura has not been seen, one of Mall Clarke’s goats dies. To determine whether it was witch or faery that had done this, one night she burns the heart of a dead animal stuck with pins in her fire; the next person to cross her threshold will be the culprit. This spell is notable because, in Dorset, faeries were prevented from getting into human homes down their chimneys by hanging a bullock’s heart there. The efficacy of this charm was improved if the heart was studded with pins, nails or what are called ‘maiden thorns,’ those that have grown in the same year they are picked.

Following the incineration of the heart, there then is a knock at Mall’s door: a coach with footmen has pulled up and a tall, dark gentleman stands outside, asking for her skills as a midwife to assist Lady Lairdale, who is in labour at their castle home. Promised a generous reward, Mall goes with him. On the way, she falls asleep and, when she awakes, she finds she is not in a fine coach at all but on a rough hurdle (sledge) being dragged along by a starved nag; Lord Lairdale has become an ugly, dirty faery man. The castle is only a ruined hut and Lady Lairdale is- of course- Laura, who is now herself dirty and starved. She gives birth to an imp “with long pointed ears, flat nose and enormous restless eyes and mouth. It instantly began to yell and talk in some unknown language…” Mall is offered as much gold as she wishes for her work, but Laura warns her to take only her usual fee, otherwise she too will never escape from the faeries’ clutches.

Regular readers will spot how many common themes of British faery lore are used here by Le Fanu: the protective nature of running water, the perils of faery food, the taking of a human female to be mother of faery children, the use of glamour to disguise faery homes and the need for human midwives. You may recall, as well, that the dobie or dobbie is an alternative northern name for the brownie.

The second story I’ll discuss is, in fact, the earlier of the two. The Child That Went with the Fairies (1870) takes place in the west of Ireland, Le Fanu’s native land, and very closely resembles Laura Silver Bell. It too is set in a desolate bog in a mountainous area; the figure of Mall Clarke is replaced by widow Mary Ryan. She has four children, whom she protects against the dangers of the Good People living in the nearby hill (sithean) by means of horseshoes on the door and mountain ash (or rowan) trees ringing the cottage.

Despite this, a beautiful grand lady in a rich coach takes one of her young sons, five year old Billy. She lifts the little boy up and the carriage disappears in an eddy of dust, heading west towards the hill of Lisnavoura. Mary Ryan never sees her youngest son again, but he sometimes appears to his brother and sisters, silent but with an arch smile, beckoning to them to follow him. This happens for about eight months after his abduction, but his visits cease after one final sighting when, looking starved, dirty and cold, he creeps into the cottage at night, seeking warmth by the hearth. After that, Billy never returns and neither the priest nor the local ‘faery doctors’ can recover him from the faery hill.

The Child That Went with the Fairies is much shorter and simpler than the tale of Laura but, once again, it contains elements that may be familiar: the power of iron and rowan against the faery folk; their urge to steal attractive infants and, of course, their abode under a hill, which is to the west of Mary Ryan’s home- a direction that is associated with the faeries in the folklore of the Gaelic speaking Highlands of Scotland.

I’ve given links so that you can read both stories- once again, enjoy them!

Noel Paton, The Fairy Raid- Carrying off a Changeling, Midsummer Eve