What exactly was/is the deal with "fairy forts" in Ireland?

briany

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118013462#Comment_118013462

Depending on how we are able to cope with the demand for energy over the next few decades, lamps and candles could be where we end back up at.

Church on Tuesday

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118011105#Comment_118011105

Good few near were I grew up. My grandfather in the 20s along with his mates would observe orbs flying around a fort at night down from the local shop were they brought cigs. This fort was just down the road from us.

A house was built on the site of the fort (the fort was more or less levelled) and it experienced paranormal activity for decades. The occupants of the house would lock the front door at night and it would be wide open in the morning. Every morning. Had to get priest in give a blessing when it got to the point in rural Ireland that you couldn't have a door unlocked much less wide open. Spectral figures would be seen outside the house at 4 in the morning... lots of odd stuff

So yeah, don't chance it if a fort is in your way of a build.

Lia_lia

They are everywhere. I often go looking around Google Earth to how many are around. I’ve a friend that was refused planning permission as there is one on her Dad’s farm land. Surprised he even let her apply for it with the superstitions.

chooseusername

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118013511#Comment_118013511

I linked to a map of them earlier, but the link didn't work,

think it's ok now;

https://maps.archaeology.ie/HistoricEnvironment/

briany

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118013508#Comment_118013508

Eddie Lenihan, noted folklorist, managed to get a road diverted around a fairy bush, although it wasn't as a result of a direct to the council who were building it. Some big papers around the world picked up on the story and the publicity got to be too much and the route of the road was changed. Otherwise they would have gone straight through.

To link back to your anecdote a bit, fairy bushes (whitethorn and blackthorn bushes standing alone in the middle of a field usually) are said to be the waypoints along the paths that fairies use for travel. There was a story relating to this where a house was built and the owner was driven demented at night with banging on the walls. Every night - BANG, BANG, BANG for a couple of hours. Eventually, suspecting the supernatural, Biddy Early was called upon to investigate and almost immediately she identified the problem - there was a fairy bush out in a field beyond the front of the house and another in the field beyond the back. The house had been built directly on a fairy path, and was blocking their travel, leading to angry banging on the walls as they were diverted from their route. The owner eventually had to shift the doors to be in line with these two bushes and leave them unlocked at night, and every morning he'd find them wide open from then on, but at least the angry banging stopped. Good yarn, if nothing else.

A cautionary tale from Eddie Lenihan about some young upstart ignoring his father’s advice about interfering with a fort on his land.

https://youtu.be/48qgmOzQCUg

FishOnABike

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118011105#Comment_118011105

I think the prospect of a very substantial fine for interfering with an archeological site might also have some bearing on their reluctance to touch a fairy fort.

https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/arid-20217604.html

Okay we get the idea, they were defense structures from less developed times.

That being the case, Yeats was just using "fairies" as what, an analogy?

For saying, "let's get fucked up on shrooms cause reality blows?".

He was just coming out of a time period where life expectancy was about less that 50% of it what it is currently though, around that time.

No health insurance, and hell even if there was health insurance the most cutting edge medical interventions were cauterizing wounds using hot steel.

I guess I could sympathize with the dude as, one could understand why folk sough escapism in the spirit world around that time period, essentially to raise their own "spirits" (synonym for "outlook", motivation etc), cause absence of technology and associated lifestyle limitations, you'd imagine things got pretty depressing.

silliussoddius

No point trying to back project new age woo into Irish folk lore, fairies were seen as a mischievous/malevolent force. They were blamed with kidnapping children, swapping them with changelings etc. God know what things like cot death, autism, mental conditions etc were attributed to this back in the day.

Isn't this where the term away with the fairies comes from?

PeaSea

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118013500#Comment_118013500

I know of a solitary Chinese hawthorn, er, near me. Would this apply to it as well or just the native hawthorn ? Asking for a friend.

briany

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118014382#Comment_118014382

There was a good reason not to interfere with things associated with the fairies that went beyond simple superstition. Back in the old days, stillborn babies, beggars and even strangers to a community could not be buried in the consecrated ground of a graveyard, and would instead need their own separate place, and sometimes this could be within a cordoned-off area of a graveyard that was un-consecrated, or another site that was a landmark, and this often could be within a fort or under a fairy bush. So the historical hesitance to interfere with things like fairy forts and bushes may be manifold, stemming from very old pagan beliefs in the beginning, then to respect for ancient things, then to respect for the dead buried within and under, be it recent or not so recent.

whisky_galore

Are you a witch or are you a fairy

Or are you the wife of Michael Cleary?

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/offbeat/the-story-of-the-last-witch-burned-alive-in-ireland-1.2880691

Wibbs

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118014837#Comment_118014837

You'll be attacked by Chinese fairies and considering the distance they'll have to travel they'll be mightily pissed off.

Wibbs

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118014740#Comment_118014740

Could well be. And yep, magic of various forms was to blame for things people didn't understand, and that was a lot of things, especially for the poor peasant classes in society. Most of whom could barely read if at all and exposure to science and learning was in the hands of very few.Things like the Renaissance and the Enlightenment would have touched the common man very much at a distance. Long held oral traditions held far more sway, as did religions.

Woo has a long history too. IE post industrial, mostly urban societies looking to some "wise" past to help, even explain the disconnect with urban living. Popular among the intelligentsia too as there were always some mysteries out there. In Yeats' time the woo was about more culturally local stuff for the most part. Fairies, druids, Wicca etc, much of it processed and invented by and for the late 19th century urban mind. With wider travel and exposure to even more "primitive" societies throughout the 20th century people looked around for the mother lode and after some diversion towards the mysterious East(the European mind always had a gra for the Orient) with a sideorder of Egyptian stuff(the discoveries there had a big impact) shamanistic and hunter gatherer societies were often seen as the "purist" in such things and they were after all about the oldest belief systems on the planet and the more anthropoligists recorded and transmitted these beliefs to a wider audience the more it became woo for some. Then the 60's happened and the counterculture went around looking for a pill for their ills and a way to touch godhead and all that. Without having to spend decades in deep meditation and the like. A shortcut to godhead as it were.

the_pen_turner

Not sure about it myself but lots of people are very serious about them

I know one farmer that is scared shirtless about them .

I did work for him and went down to an outside farm . The farm lane leading to the farm went around the fort. There were 2 trees that fell across the lane. A neighbour asked if he could cut them and started on the first. Got the bar stuck in tree and had to leave it there and use another to cut it out. Cut along until be got to the boundary with the fort where he got a heart attack and died. Second tress us still there untouched and growing even though its sideways, timber from first tree still were it fell along with the bar and chain still stuck .

Farmer fenced around the trees and built the lane out around everything.

briany

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118015164#Comment_118015164

In a similar vein, there's a story I heard about an old farmer and his son. The elder man was a widower in his 80s and the son in his 40s, but the son was hanging around as the farm would be his inheritance. The old man, however remained healthy and able to work the farm well, but the son became too impatient and delivered an ultimatum. Either sign over half the farm or the son would be away to try his luck in England on the building sites. The old man, being terrified of being left alone, reluctantly agreed to this, and the son got half the farm signed over, although the elder continued to work his own half. A short time later, a storm came down. A violently windy one, and it partially uprooted a fairy bush in one of the fields now belonging to the son. The son, being of a more modern mind, saw this as his opportunity to do things his own way - he would clear that dying bush. The father strongly advised against it, of course, but the son wouldn't listen. The son got a tractor and a steel rope, fastening one end to the bush and the other to the tow bar on the tractor, then started up the tractor and set about pulling the push away. Well, the bush proved much more difficult to more than he had anticipated. The tractor's engine strained as he revved it and the tractor crept forward as he felt the bush give way a little. He revved a bit more with the steel wire completely taught. Eventually the wire snapped and whipped violently back through the glass window on the back of the tractor, cleanly decapitating the son.

On the actual subject of occultism;

Ever venture around those parts (woody backwaters, fairy fort'esque locations etc) and run into some crazies doing their rain dance?

It happens.

I believe somehow or other it tends to wind up with ritualistic sex.

.....

Bang bang bang.

buried

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118013508#Comment_118013508

Very interesting. The same ringfort that I was speaking of, 2 houses were built beside the structure in the early 2000's. The one right beside it has a very disturbing story, supposedly the lady of the house was alone one particular night, she heard her infant child upstairs in her room talking on the baby monitor, so the mother goes up to get the child back to sleep, she entered the room went over to the cot where the infant was standing up facing another part of the room, the mother looks over to where the child was looking and the mother sees the figure of a person standing right there in the room. The mother freaks it, grabs the child and runs straight out the house to the car. She rang the Gardai, the entire neighborhood seen the squad cars with the lights and sirens blaring rushing to the house. The Gards found nothing. But that is what happened to that woman. I never heard any other stories because I haven't been there in a good while.

buried

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118014382#Comment_118014382

Yeah that is true, there are huge fines for removing the most substantial ones, but I think the whole mindset and culture of 'leaving them alone' definitely predates the current laws of the state. They have lasted on the landscape for hundred's and hundred's of years, possibly thousands. Not even the planters would touch them when they arrived here and levelled most other woods and fields for agriculture production, which is very interesting.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118013355#Comment_118013355

You say "at some point it was a practical structure with no spiritual or 'fairy' links". But I don't think this is right. For this culture, there was no contrast between "practical" and "spiritual"; everything had both a practical and a spiritual dimension and, if this structure had an important practical signficance, then that argues for, rather than against, its also having spiritual significance. If, as you reasonably speculate, it was the location of a beacon, then the beacon would have had both practical and spiritual significance. And so forth.

WrenBoy

Fairy Fort near where I grew up and our parents/uncles/aunts used to tell us about this family friend who owned the land it was on, he for some reason got the idea to tidy up around the edges of the fort. Cutting it back a little just to stop it growing bigger and taking over more of his field. The next morning he was working in the mart and got the top off his finger cut off. He never went near the Fairy Fort again. Co-incidence or not it only cemented their belief in the superstition.

MY BAD

ringfort_distribution_150_black-854x1024.png

Superstitions a side, ring forts are protected and should never be interfered with according to the law. Very few are megalithics built by the neolithic people. It is these sites which are surrounded by the most the folklore. These people almost completely disappeared with the arrival of the bell beaker people at the start of the bronze age. You'll still get plenty of bronze age ring forts but the vast majority we see today date back from the iron age to the early medieval age.

I've attached a map of every recorded fairy forts in the Republic of Ireland. As you can see they are most prominent in the west, maybe because in the better agricultural land of the east and south they have been destroyed?

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118017688#Comment_118017688

Picture of severed finger or it never happened.

WrenBoy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118018673#Comment_118018673

Ah Jesus man I don't even know if the fella is still alive. 😂

Sgt Hartman

There was a fairy fort one of the fields across from my childhood home in Limerick. My parents and neighbors would always warn us to stay well away from it. I never heeded the warning though. Sadly it's now gone thanks to a bypass road which cut right through it. There's another one about a ten minute cycle up the road from my house as well as some 6000 year old ruined passage tombs along the coast.

It's really sad and infuriating when I see these forts and tombs bulldozed away just so a greedy farmer can gain a few miserable square metres to grow crops. It's equally as sad when they are destroyed in the name of "progress" in order to cut a road through or for the sake of property development. It shows how selfish and soulless people can be. Save Irish Fairy Forts is a great Facebook group which I encourage anyone with an interest in fairy forts and passage tombs to join.

looksee

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118017355#Comment_118017355

Either point of view is arguable. I happen to think that the spiritual argument goes too far in many cases, I am not sure that everything had a spiritual angle, especially something like a signal fire/beacon. However it is just my opinion which is no more provable than the view that everything did have a spiritual aspect.

They were originally fortified dwellings so when they were built the farmer/head of household that built it presumably did not consider it a fairy fort or place of spiritual activity, it was a place where he and his family and animals lived. It was only subsequently that the connection with fairies came about, it would be interesting to know when this connection started to be made.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118021414#Comment_118021414

Again, you need to explain why, if this is where a farmer lived with his household and animals, it follows that he "did not consider it . . . a place of spiritual activity". Everything we know about pre-Christian religious and spiritual traditions in Ireland suggest that homesteads and settlements were precisely the kind of place that would be regarded as having spiritual significance and a connection with spiritual beings.

The question is not "when did this connection start being made?" so much as "when did it stop being made?". And the answer is, quite recently.

looksee

I think I can see where the disagreement arises. You are talking about pre-Christian ring forts, of which there are some and I would not deny that the spiritual aspect may be significant there, though I am not convinced. There has long been a custom in archaeology to ascribe anything unknown to 'possibly of religious/spiritual significance' and I think this is what has happened with fairy forts.

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.

...

Most are thought to have been constructed between the 6th and 10th centuries. (my emphasis) (article from Irish Times 2017)

There is also an article on Jstor Ringforts or Fairy Homes: Oral Understandings and the Practice of Archaeology in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Ireland which I think may be relevant to my view but I can no longer access it.

Can you show me any evidence that homesteads and farms in prehistory or later, were considered sacred/ spiritual? Many traditions have a shrine in a dwelling, that does not make the whole dwelling sacred.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118022361#Comment_118022361

My point is that you're assuming a (modern) distinction between the worldly, the practical, the material on the one hand and the spiritual, the unworldly, the immaterial on the other. If we have reason to believe that something had a practical use, you immediately assume that this means it had no spiritual significance, or that this was bolted on afterwards, possibly after the practical use had ceased.

My point is that this is not what we know of pre-Christian (and indeed Christian) Irish spirituality. They had no natural/supernatural distinction; it was one world to them, not two worlds. The gods or spirits were just as connected to the land or to place as people were; they shared the world with us. Just because we lived in a place did not mean that spirits did not also live there — indeed, it made it more likely that they would; the factors which made it desirable or suitable for us - shelter, fertility, security, prominence, whatever - would weigh with them also. Fairy-folk could be mischievous or malicious precisely because their interests overlapped with ours; they would react to land-grabbing, say, much as your human neighbours would. Banshees howled at human deaths because they were keening; they were affected by grief for humans just as much as humans were; and so forth. Violation of moral laws could have practical consequences (e.g. you commit a crime and as a result the cows abort, or fruit rots on the tree) and violation of physical laws could have spiritual consequences (you plant or reap at the wrong time and moral disorders result, e.g. family disruption or conflict with neighbours) because, in this understanding, physical/material laws and moral/spiritul laws are all part of the one system of laws.

The modern understanding is completely the opposite. We have a very dualist understanding of things. To us, the law of gravity, say, is something completely different from a law that says "thou shalt not kill". But in the early Irish worldview, these were both part of a single system of laws describing how the world was. So the whole notion of spiritual things being separate and apart from worldly things, a natural/supernatural distinction, would have been completely foreign to them. To them, spiritual things and material things were all part of a unified world, intimately intertwined with one another. So, a place that was significant to you - because it was your home, say - would also be signficant to the spirits that interested themselves in you or that were connected to you, and for the same reason. They would be connected to that place just as you would be connected, say, to the place where your ancestors had lived and were buried.

maestroamado

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118013556#Comment_118013556

Thanks for the link as i find this topic interesting... Does anyone actually know what they were created for.... i assume it was a way of relaying information but i really haven't a clue...

I know where there is one where the land was divided by land commission 60 years ago... they put the fence right through the center of the fort which i think was unusual... the fort is shown on the link...

Hawthorn... a few years i had a digger man doing a bit of work and i asked him to remove a single tree and he refused but said if i wanted i could use the digger for that few mins .... Thankfully he put me right and the tree is still there...