“They often lurk in quite normal, familiar places. Just a little mound in a field which you pass every day, nothing particularly eldritch about it, no marker stones to warn you off. It might of course be an ancient burial mound, but on the other hand it might be a simple natural hillock. But if you lie down and press your ear to the ground, you hear faint music … Then one day it is standing open, and there They are. They are the Hidden People, the Underground Folk, the Good People, the Good Neighbours. Maybe they’ve come to do you a favour, or to ask for one. There’s no need to be frightened, is there?
Is there?

There have been many theories as to what the true home of the elfin races is like, and where it may be found - if indeed they have a home, for they might simply be alien nomads, creating the illusion of a fairyland in any territory they invade. One can’t properly describe this ‘Fairyland’, for it is full of human dreams and nightmares, which keep on changing. But in its true nature, before the illusions begin, it is a land which somehow does not feel like a real place. There is no sun in the sky. The woods are full of dimness and shadows, and no birds sing. Nothing grows older there, because nothing grows at all.
 ’Time passes slower the deeper you go into the place. Years pass like days. You may found your way back after a couple of months, maybe. A couple of months there, where time is slow and heavy. But when you come back into the mortal
world, everyone you know will be old and dead. That would not be the worst of it, neither. Live in dreams for too long and you go mad, you can never wake up properly, you can never get the hang of reality again …’


‘And see ye not yon bonny road,
That winds about the fernie brae?
That is the road to fair Elfland,
Where thou and I this night maun gae.’

O they rade on, and farther on,
And they waded rivers abune the knee,
And they saw neither sun nor moon,
But they heard the roaring of the sea.

It was mirk, mirk night, there was nae starlight,
They waded thro’ red blude to the knee;
For a’ the blude that’s shed on earth
Runs through the springs o’ that countrie.

Yet long after the ‘enlightened’ and well-educated generations had lost their faith and fear, after the wild elves had been safely reduced to Peaseblossoms, an occasional artist recaptured the older image. The crazed painter Richard Dadd did so in his sinister picture The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke, which he worked on from 1855 to 1864, while living in an asylum. So did the composer Rutland Boughton in the key aria of his opera The Immortal Hour (1914), based on a poem by Fiona Mcleod:

How beautiful they are,
The lordly ones
Who dwell in the hills,
In the hollow hills.
Their limbs are more white
Than shafts of moonshine.
They are more fleet
Than the north wind.
They laugh and are glad
And are terrible.
When their lances shake and glitter
Every green reed quivers.
How beautiful they are,
How beautiful,
The lordly ones
In the hollow hills.

Beautiful, yes. And terrible.”