A chara,
I hope you are well and are all prepared for Samhain.
My guess is that you are probably expecting me to write to you about lots of Irish ghost stories and I do have a few on my mind. However, the subject of the power held within Irish faerie forts has come up continuously recently by people who are not superstitious, but who have developed the Irish respectful fear. I knew that this was something you would like to mull over, especially as you have been wondering why the Irish don’t do a great job of developing tourism sites related to these. Explaining the Irish respectful fear to you might greatly help.
About three weeks ago after doing the brilliant Kilkenny ghost tour with family, we went to a somewhat secret, somewhat famous tavern called The Hole in the Wall. It has an incredible magnetic energy, having literally been built around an ancient standing stone. This pub is well known to locals and is the number one place to go to in Kilkenny in my humble opinion. It is owned by one of Ireland’s own cardiologists, Michael Conway, who you will often find behind the bar. Personally I find it quite understandable and interesting that a consultant cardiologist who works with the hearts electrical systems would of course be drawn to a place with such a high energy in Irish mythology.
While I was in there, Mr. Conway served us one at a time and told a few well-known Irish faerie stories to the Irish, the American and the Swedish tourists who were drinking there. You could hear a pin drop. They thought he was winding them up and they looked to us (the Irish locals) to confirm it. They didn’t expect the silence and knowing glances that what the cardiologist publican was saying had a ring of truth to it and they were thrown aback by it. They got to experience the Irish respectful fear in our body language.
A typical story you might hear about Irish faerie forts might go like this. By the way, this is a real story that I heard. “My uncle’s digger broke down as he approached a faerie fort to do work. Then he had to hire a new digger because his own one broke down. The replacement digger also broke down. Then the low-loader that came to collect the broken hired digger also broke down at the same location. He was going to be doing work right up to boundary of the faerie fort without touching the fort itself. After all of this happening he decided it was best not to do any work at all at that location. This person is not superstitious whatsoever, but to this day can't get his head around what happened.” This man now has the respectful fear.
The respectful fear in Ireland is someone saying something like, “I don’t believe in it, but I wouldn’t mess with it either”, when asked about the Irish fairies or touching faerie rings and comes from experiencing or knowing someone who experienced terrible misfortune after interfering in some way with a site. These underground sites include ancient monuments, burial mounds, faerie trees, faerie circles and other sacred places that dot our land. Due to a combination of fear and respect, people never meddled with these places, even to positively draw attention to them, as it was believed that disturbing them could bring bad luck or a curse. Even today, there’s not a village in the country that doesn’t have tales of locals who crossed the fairies.
An elderly lady recently told me that she believes “they” (the Irish fairies) have all gone back underground and that is why people see them less today and why these sites have developed stronger powers.
Again, the topic of machinery, the respectful fear and powers was on my mind to share with you because the other day I was also retold of someone else’s family story. It went a little like this.
“I used to fish with his brother as kids many years ago. We used to fly fish for salmon and tie flies on the fishing line. If he caught one, he would go down to the pub and sell it. In the 1960’s he got a very good job bringing electricity to each town in the area. He was great at it because he knew the land so well. One day a few years later he was up in the helicopter with the pilot and co-pilot surveying the land and he had them land the helicopter in his brother’s big field so he could pay an unexpected visit. Not long after, that same helicopter crashed not far from that field and both that pilot and co-pilot were killed.”
The storyteller trailed off here as it was understood by some in the group who are familiar with this field that there was a faerie ring in it which was bulldozed shortly before the helicopter visit. The respectful fearing Irish understand that some ancient sites have power and that the energy coming from them interferes with machinery. I have often heard of and saw broken down tractors in fields next to faerie forts.
Now that I have introduced the Irish respectful fear and the machinery concept to you as a mind hook, I will share more recent true stories for you next week so that everything can be explained with some structure and in little story steps that compound, rather than the murky rabbit hole that you are probably used to.
Mind yourself and I will write to you again next week.
Beir bua agus beannacht,
Róisín Hynes
Sliocht sleachta ar shliocht bhur sleachta.
I once heard a story that workers had been hired to clear some land. One problem, there was a holly bush in the way. All of them refused to touch the land for fear of invoking bad luck. But the work needed to be done. So they thought of a loophole. They would hire a young man to come and clear the land for them. They assumed a young person wouldn't hold the same superstitions so the land would get cleared and they wouldn't technically be the ones responsible for disrupting the holly bush. Sure enough, the young man agreed to clear the land and got to work. The other workers relaxed while he worked, relieved they found a solution to their problem. When the young man said he was done with the work, they went outside. All of the land was perfectly cleared, exactly as they had instructed. All of the land - except the holly bush. Which now stood on it's own in an otherwise cleared plot of land.
This reminds me of Hawaiian folklore. They have a similar respectful-fear of their ancient sites. There's often comes down to a "You might own the land, white man, but we won't touch the sacred stones on it. You'll have to get someone else to dig them out." I have heard of construction crews simply building around the sacred places or workers simply refusing to do anything with that part of the job. There are also tales of machines failing.