There lies an expanse of rugged moorland, where menhirs are scattered between rocking stones and the odd quoit. Soaring granite descends amidst thick bracken only to be restrained by a tangle of ancient field systems that yield to the sparkling and otherworldly blue sea. It is here that the old tale Nursing a Fairy takes place.

Something mythic, almost untouchable, pervades this story. Its meaning hides in shadowy corners of the mind, but don’t look too closely or it will vanish altogether, just like the fairy child it tells of. And yet at the same time, it is so very everyday. The thrifty housewife at the story’s heart could be any one of us with her practicality and her curiosity. And perhaps we all keep a fairy child of sorts tucked deep within, a creature strange and unknowable. Perhaps we all keep a mysterious fairy gentleman there too.

Nursing a Fairy could almost be an archaic moralistic tale. Almost. Don’t poke your nose into things that aren’t your business. Don’t be bold (it’s not becoming of a woman). And for heaven’s sake, don’t make deals with fairies. Yet if the thrifty housewife hadn’t looked, she never would have seen. And that is what we all want most of all… to see… to know.

Nursing a Fairy

A thrifty housewife lived on one of the hills between Zennor Churchtown and St Ives. One night a gentleman came to her cottage, and told her he had marked her cleanliness and her care: that he had a child whom he desired to have brought up with much tenderness, and he had fixed on her. She should be very handsomely rewarded for her trouble, and he showed her a considerable quantity of golden coin.

Well, she agreed, and away she went with the gentleman to fetch this child. When they came to the side of Zennor hill, the gentleman told the woman he must blindfold her, and she, good, easy soul, having heard of such things, fancied this was some rich man’s child, and that the residence of its mother was not to be known, so she gave herself great credit for cunning in quietly submitting.

They walked on some considerable distance. When they stopped the handkerchief was taken from her eyes, and she found herself in a magnificent room, with a table spread with the most expensive luxuries, in the way of game, fruits, and wines.

She was told to eat, and she did so with some awkwardness, and not a little trembling. She was surprised that so large a feast should have been spread for so small a party—only herself and the master.

At last, having enjoyed luxuries such as she never tasted before or since, a silver bell was rung, and a troop of servants came in, bearing a cot covered with satin, in which was sleeping the most beautiful babe that human eyes ever gazed on.

She was told this child was to be committed to her charge; she should not want for anything, but she was to obey certain laws. She was not to teach the child the Lord’s Prayer; she was not to wash it after sundown; she was to bathe it every morning in water, which she would find in a white ewer placed in the child’s room—this was not to be touched by any one but herself, and she was to be careful not to wash her own face in this water. In all other respects she was to treat the child as one of her own children.

The woman was blinded again, and the child having been placed in her arms, away she trudged, guided by the mysterious father. When out on the road, the bandage was removed from her eyes, and she found she had a small baby in her arms, not remarkably goodlooking, with very sharp, piercing eyes, and but ordinarily dressed. However, a bargain is a bargain, so she resolved to make the best of it, and she presented the babe to her husband, telling him so much of the story as she thought it prudent to trust him with.

For years the child was with this couple. They never wanted for anything. Meat, and even wines, were provided—as most people thought—by wishing for them. Clothes, ready-made, were on the child’s bed when required, and the charmed water was always in the magic ewer.

The little boy grew active and strong. He was remarkably wild, yet very tractable, and he appeared to have a real regard for his “big mammy,” as he called the woman.

Sometimes she thought the child was mad. He would run, and leap, and scream, as though he were playing with scores of boys, when no soul was near him. The woman had never seen the father since the child had been with them, but ever and anon, money was conveyed to them in some mysterious manner.

One morning, when washing the boy, this good woman, who had often observed how bright the water made the face of the child, was tempted to try if it would improve her own beauty. So directing the boy’s attention to some birds singing on a tree outside the window, she splashed some of the water up into her face. Most of it went into her eye. She closed it instinctively, and upon opening it, she saw a number of little people gathered round her and playing with the boy. She said not a word, though her fear was great; and she continued to see the world of small people surrounding the world of ordinary men and women, being with them, but not of them.

She now knew who the boy’s playmates were, and she often wished to speak to the beautiful creatures of the invisible world who were his real companions, but she was discreet, and kept silence.

Curious robberies had been from time to time committed in St Ives Market, and although the most careful watch had been kept, the things disappeared, and no thief detected.

One day our good housewife was at the market, and to her surprise she saw the father of her nursling. Without ceremony she ran up to him—at a moment when he was putting some choice fruit by stealth into his pocket—and spoke to him.

“So, thou seest me, dost thou?” he said.

“To be sure I do, and know ‘ee too,” replied the woman.

“Shut this eye.” He put his finger on her left eye. “Canst see me now?”

“Yes, I tell ‘ee, and know ‘ee too,” again said the woman.

“Water for elf, not water for self. You’ve lost your eye, your child, and yourself,” said the gentleman.

From that hour she was blind in the right eye. When she got home the boy was gone. She grieved sadly, but she never saw him more, and this once happy couple became poor and wretched.

An extract from Hunt’s Complete Cornish Folklore, Robert Hunt.

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It sat there on the shelf, its spine the colour of enchanted forests, its title radiant in gold foil accompanied by a circle of fairfolk in joyous dance below. I’m not sure how it arrived in our house, only that my father was deeply interested in the ancient sites of old Cornwall, and I have a nebulous recollection that it may have come from a friend who sold books to Hay-on-Wye.

I wasn’t yet fifteen turns about the sun, and for all intents and purposes, I should’ve been interested in plenty more than a worn book, but from the moment I opened its ragged, foxed and yellowed pages, I was enchanted, taken with the fairies, transported to another realm. The folklore collected from Hunt’s rather long ‘walk’ around Cornwall was, and still is, utterly intoxicating.

The book in question is Popular Romances of the West of England by Robert Hunt, and from that very moment, Cornwall lived and breathed. Instead of that lonely cove or that barren hill near the village of my birth, there was that place where the little folk dwelt, that cove where mermaids pulled unsuspecting sailors to their doom, that road where a curmudgeonly giant seized hefty tolls. Unseen currents ran strong, colours vivid, raging storms alive.

And that was the beginning. The beginning of my love of contemporary and urban fantasy. The beginning of my love of folklore, my love of books, my love of story. It began there, and it never let up. Its thread led me along winding lanes, over bright moors and through the odd cave, right to this moment.

Because one day, many years later, while browsing through Briggs and some compendiums of folklore in a local bookshop, it occurred to me that Hunt’s complete and evocative tome wasn’t here. I couldn’t understand it. It was only later still, after writing my own novels, that I realised it was all in the title.

Popular Romances of the West of England. What does that tell you? Take ‘Romances’ to begin with. The term today implies stories of people falling in love. It also implies fiction. What it most unequivocally doesn’t suggest is folklore. Then take ‘the West of England’. As far as many are concerned, this implies Bristol, Somerset, Dorset, Devon and Cornwall. In no way is it specific to Cornwall. And ‘England’, well, there are plenty who would argue Cornwall isn’t even part of England at all, and that it stands in its own right as one of the six Celtic nations, but I’m not opening that particular can of worms right now.

So what we have is a title that translates as Love Stories Set in the West of England. I’m sorry, aren’t we talking folklore here? Isn’t this one man’s magnum opus, a collection of tales as old as time? Isn’t this the recounting of giants and demons, of lost lands and Arthurian quests, of saints that most definitely hold an otherworldly air?

Which brings me to the very modern concept of metadata. Today, the title doesn’t work. Enter ‘Cornish Folklore’ into a standard search, and for years this book wouldn’t appear, though with AI, it’s now showing up more. What hits the first page is typically compendiums, many of them having drawn from Hunt. But not this book. Not this complete, supreme, inimitable collection.

If you root about a little harder, using the original title, you may find that thankfully, it’s on Project Gutenberg for posterity. Because of this, it has been reproduced, but I use the term lightly. Facsimiles of the first edition have been jostled into ebooks and print editions that are barely legible. There’s an ebook version on Gutenberg too that’s doing the rounds, but it’s only the second part, and the copies on Amazon have been titled inaccurately, implying they’re the whole thing (Popular Romances was originally published in two series).

No care. No love. No folklore beneath the skin. No moon-lit, pisky-led, pasty-fuelled passion. No fairy-blindness for anything but the old lore. Just the chance of a quick buck in a cheap wrapper.

To the best of my knowledge, the collection hasn’t been edited since Hunt’s amendments of the third edition in 1881, when it was revised and enlarged, which makes reading a little hard going at times. After all, it’s been a hundred and forty years. And that tugged at the thread—the one that unravelled all that time ago, that wound through my life to include writing and art and editing and publishing, and led me all the way to a very special project today.

Late lamp-lit nights and early sun-spilled mornings, I’m at my desk in deepest West Cornwall, my study window revealing the sweep of fields for the span of a mile before they dip and fold at Penberth Cove. For the first time since its publication, I’m editing Hunt’s tome with reverence.

Hunt’s language itself is not a problem. It’s as remarkable and evocative today as it ever was. But the formatting and typesetting are drowning in Victorian-osity. There was a thing going around TikTok where authors were blacklisted for using em dashes (—), slating their work as AI generated because of them. One look at Popular Romances casts that notion into the flames. Victorian punctuation revelled in them. They were brandished like swords that speared readers’ eyes in every single sentence, and that was after the poor folk were shackled at the wrists and ankles by countless colons and strangled by page-long paragraphs. Though that was the norm for the time, so I doubt there were complaints. But for us today, the remarkable folklore and Hunt’s inimitable voice are obstructed by the usage of its time.

And so my work in progress (at least one of them—my fiction also calls regularly) is preparing a new edition of Popular Romances, retitled Hunt’s Complete Cornish Folklore, so it can be found easily and identified for what it is. This version flows with modern punctuation and formatting, yet completely preserves Hunt’s style and voice. It is comprehensible to modern readers, including those with accessibility needs. It is an edition that will be cherished for years to come, framed within a beautiful, illustrated, foiled hardback (so it glimmers like the original), one that can be enjoyed and gifted and loved.

I’ll be launching it as a special edition on Kickstarter before it’s published in other formats elsewhere, but for now, I’ll be detailing my journey as I delve into old Cornwall and Hunt’s world, dropping extracts and impressions as I grow closer to Hunt with every word.

I’d love for you to join me, so we can continue this journey over the wild moorland down to the storm-lashed sea together.

Cornwall calls you too, my friend.

My publication The Cave Under the Mountain is free for all. But if you do want to support my work, you are most welcome, and it is truly appreciated.

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