J. F. Campbell Collection > Popular tales of the West Highlands > Volume 2

THE SMITH AND THE FAIRIES. 5 I
well-known popular tales in collections from Ireland, Scotland,
Wales, and, I think, Brittany. The man carried into the hill and
there remaining for a long time, is also an incident common to
many races, including the Jews, and one which I have heard in
the Highlands ever since I can remember, though I do not
remember to have heard any of the peasantry tell it as a story.
The belief that " the hill " opened on a certain night, and
that a light shone from the inside, where little people might be
seen dancing, was too deeply grounded some years ago to be
lightly spoken of; even now, on this subject, my kind friend Mrs.
MacTavish writes — " You may perhaps remember an old servant
we had at the manse who was much offended if any one doubted
these stories— (^I remember her 2)erfectly). I used to ask her the
reason why such wonders do not occur in our day, to which she
replied, that religious knowledge having increased, people's faith
was stronger than it was in the olden time. In the glebe of Kil-
brandon in Lorn is a hill called Crocan Corr — the good or beau-
tiful hill where the fairies even in my young days were often seen
dancing around their fiie. I sometimes went out with others to
look, but never succeeded in seeing them at their gambols.
" Are you aware that 's mother was carried away by the
fairies — (i know well). So convinced were many of this
absurdity, which I remember perfectly well, that it was with diffi-
culty they got a nurse for his brother ■ , who being a deli-
cate child, was believed to have been conveyed away along with
his mother, and a fairy left instead of him duiing his father's
absence « * * The child however throve when he got a
good nurse, and grew up to be a man, which, I suppose, convinced
them of their folly. Mr. minister of had some diffi-
culty in convincing a man whose wife was removed in a similar
manner (she died in childbed), that his son, a boy twelve years of
age, must have been under some hallucination when he main-
tained that his mother had come to him, saying she was taken by
fairies to a certain hill in Muckairn, known to he the residence of
the fairies.
" If any one is so unfortunate as to go into one of these hills,
which are open at night, they never get out unless some one goes
in quest of them, who uses the precaution of leaving a gun or
8W0RD across the opening, which the fairies cannot remove. A