Free Republic

VILLAGERS who protested that a new housing estate would “harm the fairies” living in their midst have forced a property company to scrap its building plans and start again. Marcus Salter, head of Genesis Properties, estimates that the small colony of fairies believed to live beneath a rock in St Fillans, Perthshire, has cost him £15,000. His first notice of the residential sensibilities of the netherworld came as his diggers moved on to a site on the outskirts of the village, which crowns the easterly shore of Loch Earn. He said: “A neighbour came over shouting, ‘Don’t move that rock....

IF YOU had asked your great-great-grandmother if she believed in fairies, she would have looked at you askance. Believe in fairies? Of course she did! Ninety-five per cent of Scots continued to believe in fairies right up until the middle of the 19th century. These were not the diminutive, be-winged fairies of 1800s children's books. No, these were strange folk who bewitched you, killed your cattle and kidnapped your wives and daughters. Fairy lore flowed through the centuries, their presence acknowledged in ballads, poems and stories. They came in all shapes and sizes and different parts of Scotland had different...