Fairy Forts and Hawthorn Trees
Tony’s stepfather, Denis is a real Irish character. On the night of the christening, he sang songs and told stories and yesterday took us on a tour around his farm and immediate area. We visited his old stone cottages which were 400 years old, now used as storage for feed and peat. He showed us a hawthorn tree growing on its own in a field and as legend has it, a hawthorn tree growing out on its own is where the fairies live and mustn’t be touched. They are in paddocks where farmers plough around them. If they fall down, the locals won’t touch them and people from outside the district have to come and take the timber away. He showed us the bog where peat is being cut out of the face, about 3 metres high, layered with increasingly darker layers until the best peat is at the bottom, blue-black. It is stacked in small piles to dry like little Japanese pagodas.
Then there was the fairy fort. It is a perfect circular mound about 50 metres across covered in hawthorn and hazelnut trees in fruit and stands about 8-10 metres tall. No one touches the timber or removes any of the stones that cover the site. The fairies live here and on the 31 October, Halloween, they come out and meet the human world. His stories are terrific, told in a great accent with a smile and a twinkle in his eye.