A magical gesture by fairy godfather

A friend on mine, Kevin Hanley who, appropriately, sports a long, white beard, told me that some weeks ago when he was walking his dogs in Reen Wood near Castletownshend, west Cork, he came upon four of the mysterious ‘fairy houses’ as reported in the Irish Examiner.

Perhaps they are still there. They were 30cm tall, built into hollow tree trunks, with roofs and windows — some with a cat sitting inside — and front doors with knockers and letterboxes. They were, Hanley said, works of art. Praise to whoever had the imagination and love of children to create them.

On the Sunday following the Examiner story, Reen woods were full of parents with children. I can imagine how my daughters, and indeed, my sons, would have responded to these ‘fairy’ houses when they were children. I wished that I had a small grandchild or two handy so that we could go exploring, perhaps early in the morning or evening when there was nobody else about.

When we got close to the spot, I would let them run ahead of me, and they would come running back, breathless and full of wonderment, to tell me what they had found. What magic! How wonderful it would be to see their faces, full of joy that the fairy stories we had told them were true.

Children, when they are very young, believe all things are possible. They don’t know the world and, if they have been loved, they believe the best of everybody and everything, and if a pig took wing they would not be surprised.

On that Sunday when families made excursions to Reen Woods to see the ‘fairy’ houses, Hanley came upon a man shepherding four grandchildren along the woodland paths. Clearly, he was a man not prepared for sylvan excursions. As Kevin put it, he wore a stylish crombie overcoat, collar and tie, polished town shoes and “priest’s trousers”. It had been raining the night before and the paths were slippery. While the grandchildren were obviously enchanted, the poor man looked pained, his smart shoes and trouser-ends encrusted with mud.

One sunny Sunday morning many years ago, I walked with a party of boys and girls, my youngest children and their friends, up the sloping fields behind a lovely old farmhouse we were renting in the Borlin valley, west of Bantry. It was spring and the leaves were on the birches and alders tracing the courses of the many streams descending from the Cork and Kerry mountains above. It was wild country, the home of our nearest neighbour a quarter of a mile away.

The children ran ahead, excited. Then, led by my daughter who, at 10 years old, was the eldest, they took the notion to run down a steep slope to a wooded cleft in the land below. I didn’t follow. I had walked on for, perhaps, five minutes, when I heard my daughter calling. I stopped and she rushed up the slope, followed by the others, all with flushed faces and excitement in their eyes, “Dad, we’ve found an Indian camp,” she cried, “Come, come, and look!” and off they belted down the slope and I followed.

The sight I came upon was as perfect as a piece of art — an ‘installation’, I think one might call it. On a bend where the stream curved around a small, low salient, wooded with birch trees, there was a ‘camp’ indeed, a poteen-still standing in its pristine glory, everything as clean and shipshape as if it had been abandoned five minutes before. There was the barrel of mash; there was the cooker, a half barrel resting above a scaffold pole, bored with holes, with a hose leading from a gas bottle beneath. There was the water to cool the ‘worm’, a canal cleverly cut across the ‘kitchen floor’ to allow a constant, controlled flow from the stream above the bend into the stream below. What artistry.

No fairy camp but equal magic, equal alchemy. And what effort — to carry barrels, pipes, gas bottles across fields half a mile from the nearest road. We didn’t have cameras. But I still have the photos in my mind’s eye.