Away with the fairies
How mysterious death of a Scottish minister fascinated by the ‘Little People’ led to discovery of his book about their world... and turned it into an instant classic
In a Hebridean village where I lived for some years there was a sweet, soft-spoken chap called Alaig Og. It means ‘Young Alex,’ and he had probably had an older brother of the same name, for Alaig Og was about 80.
He lived alone, quietly, and he believed in fairies. He used to see them in the glen at the junction where a little burn trickled by the back of the hotel and into the Minch.
He talked about them with serene calm – save for the night when they relieved him of a half-bottle of whisky. That made Alaig Og rather cross. This was around 2001 and he was neither senile, simple nor delusional.
He would have been greatly tickled with an ebullient Perthshire minister who, hundreds of years ago, wrote what remains Scotland’s definitive text on the ‘Little People’ – one so explosive it would not be published till more than a century after his death.
The Rev Robert Kirk was born in the manse of Aberfoyle in 1644, seventh son of the local minister. It was a poor household in a poor district, but the boy was granted a bursary by the Presbytery of Dunblane, studied theology at St Andrews and duly completed a Master’s degree at Edinburgh University.
He was ordained to the remote and demanding charge of Balquhidder and in time succeeded his father as the minister of Aberfoyle. These were not our Trossachs, all picnic lay-bys and Wallace Arnold coach tours, but wild country, where Gaelic was spoken well within living memory (on the braes of Balquhidder, into my own lifetime.)
In the 17th century, few locals spoke anything else. Roads were minimal to nonexistent and the 1600s were excessively exciting for Scotland – especially its clergy, as successive Stuart monarchs wrestled with the Kirk and did their best to impose an Episcopal order.
Robert Kirk flip-flopped from one to the other, depending upon who was in power, and so survived as minister of Aberfoyle.
BODY-SnATcHInG was a problem. Two iron ‘mort-safes’ survive in the mossy old graveyard of his derelict church. There was also prevalent hysteria about witches. People convinced themselves they were everywhere and it was as late as 1727, at Dornoch, when the last unfortunate crone was burned at the stake.
Pulpit and pastoral duties apart, Robert Kirk devoted himself to scholarship. He began the first translation of the Scottish Metrical Psalms into Gaelic – and, when he learned that rivals in Argyll were also at it, redoubled his efforts and beat them to it.
He organised the first printing of the Irish Bible in Roman type and compiled a Gaelic dictionary. Then, one morning in 1691, the folk of Aberfoyle found their minister, clad only in his nightgown, dead on the dewy grass of Doon Hill, just above his manse.
Locals had another name for it, though – Dùn an t-Sìthean, the ‘Hill of the Fairies’ – a folk in whom, they knew, their late minister had taken considerable interest.
Yet it was not till about 1814 that a very long, unpublished manuscript, scarcely completed before Kirk died, came into the hands of Sir Walter Scott, no less.
Sir Walter knew Aberfoyle well. Indeed, he was staying in its old manse when he wrote perhaps his best poem, The Lady of the Lake.
He immediately set in train his discovery’s publication. Kirk’s day was not one noted for brevity – Highland sermons still are not – but The Secret commonwealth, or an Essay on the nature and Actions of the Subterranean (and for the most part) Invisible People heretofore going under the names
of Fauns and Fairies, or the like, among the Low country Scots as described by those who have Second Sight, duly thundered off the presses in 1815.
It became an instant classic. There have been repeated new editions, most recently in new York in 2006, and scholars have described The Secret commonwealth as ‘one of the most important and authoritative works on fairy folk beliefs’.
Would Kirk himself have dared to publish? It is evident from its opening paragraphs that he wholly believed in fairies and thought they should be the subject of study and scholarship like everything else in creation – a position that would have landed him in trouble with the Presbytery of Dunblane.
This was, after all, an era when ministers had to watch their step. The career of one of Kirk’s colleagues, in Morvern, did not long survive his authorship of A Proposal to Increase the Population of the Highlands and Islands By Means of Fornication.
Kirk certainly thought of himself as a scientist, and with a benevolent aim – to prove, against the scepticism of atheists and scoffers, there really was a supernatural world and, by roundabout route, vindicate the christian faith itself.
In truth, he was what we would today call an ethnographical anthologist. The value of his work is its research, not just locally but in the wider sphere of Gaeldom, and he thus put down on paper a treasure of folklore which would otherwise have been lost for ever.
The Secret commonwealth’s power is its relation not just of pick ’n’ mix tales of pixies, brownies, bogles and banshees but of its portrayal of an entire, parallel and largely secret society, co-existing alongside people in the Highland landscape – and who on occasion could gift their preternatural powers. ‘This intercourse betwixt the two kinds of rational inhabitants of the same earth,’ Kirk writes, ‘may be not only believed shortly but as freely entertained and as well known as… the discoveries of microscopes which were sometimes as great a wonder and as hard to be believed.’
THERE is immediate, modern resonance in the phenomenon that is Harry Potter. In JK Rowling’s novels, the ‘witches’ – flawed, human and engaging – live alongside the rest of us, rarely noticed and never in conflict.
It all may be rooted in distant history. We know the Highlands were once the land of the Picts and that, in time, as the Gaels swept in from Ireland and the norse centuries later began their own colonisation, the Picts simply disappeared. One can imagine
that in their last century or so they were a feeble, frightened folk, trying to evade detection, living wherever they could scrape some shelter, largely active by night – and how, following extinction, they became the myth of the ‘Little People’.
In Aberfoyle, strange tales circulated about their minister’s end. Why was he up Doon Hill? Had he been spying on the fairies? Had they foreseen he was about to blow open all their secrets and done away with him?
You can still visit the old kirkyard and see Kirk’s headstone. But they say his anguished spirit is locked in the ‘Minister’s Tree’ atop Doon Hill on which some, even today, still hang white rags and make a wish – and that, on that clerical funeral in 1691, ministers knowingly buried an empty coffin.
But this kindly country parson appeals to us today for his ‘spirit of active wonder,’ observed one commentator recently, ‘at once protoscientific and more than scientific. He is also engagingly singular – a different voice and a fascinatingly unusual companion, confiding in us across the centuries…’
My late great-grandfather, too, was a seventh son, to whom the ailing and the vulnerable came to seek his touch, or bottle water in which he had washed his hands, or proffer a silver sixpence for him to rub and them to keep.
A redoubtable Presbyterian, he died only in 1971.