An excellent short post about “The Britishness of British Faeries”. Despite its click-baity title that article doesn’t sum up the characteristics of Britishness and then tally them with fairy-lore and fairy-traits. Though that might make for an interesting future post at the venerable British Fairies blog.

The article is actually about how the idea of ‘fairy’ can be brought before the more rational mind. In this case by situating the fairies as the ineffable genii loci of a place, especially in the British context of our ‘deep time’ landscape and places. No diminutive Tinkerbell or neo-pagan confabulation is then required to get the basic idea across to the musing young walker.

The concise article sums this up very well. But I’d like to add a few points, around the idea that its not all about an ‘immediate emotional response’ to a place.

At worst that sort of response can simply stop short, easily slipping into a purely nostalgic and preservationist view of a place. The preservationist ends up ‘pickling the fairies’ of a place, as if in a jar of pickling vinegar.

The ‘immediate emotional response’ assumption can also overlook the contributions made by the rational thinking mind, in terms of ‘landscape place-making’ (from path-makers to tree tenders to grand folly-makers to wall-builders), and also ‘landscape place-discovering’ (folklorists and antiquarians through to modern metal-detectorists, from child den-makers to footpath naturalists). It’s not just about cultivating a hazy awareness that some distant ancestors may have once ‘dwelt’ here long ago, but rather that an active chain of creators helped to subtly shape and ‘make’ this place while respecting all the past contributions. In which case today’s beholder of the place could become a part of that chain, one of the many local stewards and makers whose work of centuries eventually enables one to say…

“Whether they’ve made the land, or the land’s made them, it’s hard to say” (Samwise Gamgee)

Although cultivating such an awareness would then risk opening the place up to unwanted ‘tinkering and improvements’, of the sort which may do more harm than good. Rather than ‘pickling the fairies’, in this case it would be ‘suffocating the fairies’ in a cloud of cringe-inducing naffness. I’m thinking here of hasty bits of ‘improvement’ of a place. Such as:

* a massive shiny new DIY shed which instantly destroys the lovely ambience on the corner of an allotments;

* some old rain-bedraggled ‘yarn-bombing’ or ‘inspirational’ message left to rot in a depressing manner;

* various quick-fix local council ‘improvements’, at best new ‘interpretation boards’ and/or a mundane municipal sculpture, at worst things like the replacement of a park’s proper wooden-slat benches with one tiny and freezing anti-dosser metal-mesh seat;

* the numerous examples of over-interpretation and political ‘interventions’ at National Trust sites, and increasingly also at nature reserves;

* ersatz ‘fairy-fication’ via sculptures — ranging from some quite acceptable bits of outdoors art sympathetically made by local people, through a host of bland wickerwork dragonflies made by fly-by-night ‘creative practitioners’, right down to the occasional naff garden-gnome gardening (sometimes not without an eccentric charm, admittedly).

Doubtless readers can think of some tinkering or ‘improvements’ done at their own favourite places, which has caused the genuine fairy-feeling to vanish while (curiously) the litter remains un-picked.

So, yes… perhaps after all it’s best to leave most people with their brief ‘immediate emotional response’, before ushering them back to their latest forgettable TV series. Rather than pushing the mood on further, into a response that risks being either about ‘pickling’ or ‘tinkering’.