Mythologies and other stories!

You hear some odd things when you are out and about.

The other day I went past some children leaping about catching floating dandelion seeds. When we were small my sisters and I used to pretend we believed these were fairies. Of course we knew exactly what they were but it is the job of a child to be cute and charming and to pretend to believe all sorts of nonsense. The mother of the children clearly also believed all sorts of nonsense as she squealed at the children not to touch them: "They're dandelion seeds. They're poisonous!"

I commented on this to my granddaughter, the oldest of the bunch, the one who keeps assuring us she is now an adult, and therefore the one who should know better than to reply as she did: "They do make you pee though!" Another myth. She spoke in all seriousness and quoted evidence: one of her friends at junior school was picking dandelions one day and when told about the "powers" of dandelions, promptly wet her pants. I know the girl concerned, always a bit disturbed and definitely open to suggestion.

Today as I walked hime along the Donkey Line, one of our local,bridle paths, I saw two women with a small girl. The little girl was carrying a fishing et and stopping hopefully every now and then to poke about in the muddy stream beside the path. As I got closer, one of the women went up to the water's edge and peered in. "I can't see any tadpoles," she declared, "I'm very disappointed". Also very late, I thought to myself but did not say out loud. Nobody likes a know-it-all, especially when you are out on a country walk with a hopeful child with a fishing net!

As regards fairies, I read recently that an Irishman, possibly a politician, has been blaming subsidence in a road near Kilarney on fairies. Well, little people do abound in Irish lore, don't they? But maybe in this case there is a grain of truth behind his claim. Here's a bit of explanatory journalism:

"As the 1937-39 Schools’ Collection of the National Folkore Archives makes abundantly clear every community in Ireland believed until recently in its local spirits, who lived in the surrounding bushes, banks and, in particular, the fairy forts.

After eons (potentially millennia) of living side-by-side with these spirits, aka the Little People, Gentry, the Good People or Síoga, and coping with their divilish interferences in our lives and landscapes we have now cast them aside over the course of a few paltry decades. It is the abrupt denial of fairies by the vast majority of society that is more pathological than Healy-Rae’s continued belief. After all, our first Uachtarán (Irish for President), Douglas Hyde, and two of our Nobel Laurates, WB Yeats and Samuel Beckett, all believed in fairies.

It is true that science has now proven that the fairy forts (also known as a ringfort, lios or rath) were not in fact the abode of spirits, or entrances to their underworld realms, but instead are the remains of the most common form of one-off housing and defensive outpost in Ireland from the late Iron Age right through the Bronze Age, Early Christianity and up to the Medieval era in some places. Yet that does not mean that these areas are not sacred - if for no other reason that they’ve been used as burial sites for unbaptised babies for centuries.

These circular embankments are all that remain of the defensive structures that would have surrounded the farmsteads and lookout forts of our pastoral ancestors. Think of the buildings as fortified ranches, surrounded by either one or more ditches and banks, which would have had been crowned by a wooden palisade to keep livestock in and wolves and raiders out.

Again, there is countless anecdotal evidence for Healy-Rae’s assertion that there are real-world repercussions for interfering with fairy forts. Why else would rational, sophisticated farmers still go to the trouble of leaving unproductive patches of weeds and wild nature in their meticulously manicured, expensively fertilised and pesticided fields? It is widely believed that the demise of Sean Quinn’s cement and insurance empire in Cavan and of John DeLorean’s sports car industry in Belfast were directly attributable to the conscious destruction of “sacred” ringforts.

For once, the Healy-Raes are not necessarily succumbing to out-dated begorrah-esque Oirrishism, but are reminding us of our strong bond to the land and customs of Ireland that we disconnect from at our peril."

There you go. Irishmen are stranger that Saddleworth folk!