Sidhe, the Fairy Mounds and the People Inside Them

What sets belief in the sidhe apart from a great deal of comparable European fairy lore is how directly it is tied to real, visible places. The mounds themselves are frequently genuine archaeological monuments, Neolithic and Bronze Age burial sites and ringforts scattered across the Irish countryside, and generations of farmers left them unploughed, left the hawthorn growing on and near them unfelled, and avoided building on or too near them, not out of antiquarian preservation instinct but out of ordinary practical caution about the sidhe. When Evans-Wentz traveled Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany at the turn of the twentieth century collecting testimony for his study, he found the belief still functioning as a live explanatory system: unexplained illness in livestock, a child who sickened suddenly, a person found disoriented and unable to account for missing time, all could be attributed to the sidhe, and specific mounds and trees near his informants' own homes were named as the reason certain fields were left alone. Literary tradition reaching back to medieval Irish manuscripts complicates the folk picture by identifying the sidhe with the Tuatha Dé Danann, a race of god-like beings said to have ruled Ireland in mythic times before being driven underground by the invading Milesians, so that the fairy folk of the mounds become, in this reading, diminished and hidden gods rather than a separate order of being entirely. Folklorists remain divided on how much weight to put on that literary layer against the independent testimony of belief collected directly from rural communities, and this atlas records both without resolving the question, since the sources themselves do not resolve it either.