Cornwall has its own collection of mischievous fairies and humbling, awe-inspiring deities. Some share similarities to those in the other five Celtic nations, but those in the duchy are shaped by hard granite and a warm hearth, by storm-lashed coastlines and buttercup-strewn meadows, by yawning mines and the glistening ore that lies within. Tin. Copper. Gold. The Little Folk guard their treasure cautiously, whether it be metal or kindness. Tread carefully. Cast the corner of your pasty crust aside as an offering, and always—always—be respectful. Then you will be fine and dandy—truly, you will. Welcome to Cornwall.

Let’s hear from Robert Hunt in an extract from Hunt’s Complete Cornish Folklore…

The Elfin Creed of Cornwall

The Piscy or Pixy of East Devon and Somersetshire is a different creature from his cousin of a similar name in Cornwall. The former is a mischievous, but in all respects a very harmless creation, who appears to live a rollicking life amidst the luxuriant scenes of those beautiful counties. The latter, the Piskies of Cornwall, appear to have their wits sharpened by their necessities, and may be likened to the keen and cunning “Arab” boy of the London streets, as seen in contrast with the clever child who has been reared in every comfort of a well-regulated home. A gentleman, well known in the literary world of London, very recently told me that he once saw in Devonshire a troop of fairies. It was a breezy summer afternoon, and these beautiful little creatures were floating on the circling zephyrs up the side of a sunlit hill, and fantastically playing—

“Where oxlips and the nodding violet grow.”

They are truly the fairies of Midsummer Night’s Dream. They haunt the most rural and romantic spots, and they gather—

No such fairies are ever met with on Dartmoor. A few, judging from Mrs Bray’s tales^⁠1, may have been tempted into the lovely valley of the Tavy, but certainly they never crossed the Tamar. The darker shades in the character of the Cornish fairy almost dispose me to conclude that they belong to an older family than those of Devonshire.

It should be understood that there are in Cornwall five varieties of the fairy family, clearly distinguishable:

1. The Small People

2. The Spriggans

3. Piskies, or Pigseys

4. The Buccas, Bockles, or Knockers

5. The Browneys

The Small People

Of the Small People I have heard two accounts. Indeed, it is by no means clear that the tradition of their origin does not apply to the whole five branches of this ancient family. The Small People are believed by some to be the spirits of the people who inhabited Cornwall many thousands of years ago—long, long before the birth of Christ. That they were not good enough to inherit the joys of heaven, but that they were too good to be condemned to eternal fires. They were said to be “poor innocents” (this phrase is now applied to silly children).

When they first came into this land, they were much larger than they are now, but ever since the birth of Christ they have been getting smaller and smaller. Eventually they will turn into muryans (ants), and at last be lost from the face of the earth.

These Small People are exceedingly playful amongst themselves, but they are usually demure when they know that any human eye sees them. They commonly aid those people to whom they take a fancy, and, frequently, they have been known to perform the most friendly acts towards men and women.

The above notion corresponds with the popular belief in Ireland, which is, “that the fairies are a portion of the fallen angels, who, being less guilty than the rest, were not driven to hell, but were suffered to dwell on earth.”^⁠2

In Cornwall, as in Wales, another popular creed is, that the fairies are Druids becoming — because they will not give up their idolatries—smaller and smaller. These Small People in many things closely resemble the Elves of Scandinavia.

The Spriggans

The Spriggans are quite a different class of beings. In some respects they appear to be offshoots from the family of the Trolls of Sweden and Denmark. The Spriggans are found only about the cairns, coits, or cromlechs, burrows, or detached stones, with which it is unlucky for mortals to meddle.

A correspondent writes: “This is known, that they were a remarkably mischievous and thievish tribe. If ever a house was robbed, a child stolen, cattle carried away, or a building demolished, it was the work of the Spriggans. Whatever commotion took place in earth, air, or water, it was all put down as the work of these spirits. Wherever the giants have been, there the Spriggans have been also. It is usually considered that they are the ghosts of the giants; certainly, from many of their feats, we must suppose them to possess a giant’s strength. The Spriggans have the charge of buried treasure.”

The Piskie

This fairy is a most mischievous and very unsociable sprite. His favourite fun is to entice people into the bogs by appearing like the light from a cottage window, or as a man carrying a lantern.

The Piskie partakes, in many respects, of the character of the Spriggan. So wide-spread were their depredations, and so annoying their tricks, that it at one time was necessary to select persons whose acuteness and ready tact were a match for these quick-witted wanderers, and many a clever man has become famous for his power to give charms against Pigseys. It does not appear, however, that anything remarkable was required of the clever man. “No Pigsey could harm a man if his coat were inside-out, and it became a very common practice for persons who had to go from village to village by night, to wear their jacket or cloak so turned, ostensibly to prevent the dew from taking the shine off the cloth, but in reality to render them safe from the Pigseys.”^⁠3

They must have been a merry lot, since to “laugh like a Piskie” is a popular saying. These little fellows were great plagues to the farmers, riding their colts and chasing their cows.

The Buccas or Knockers

These are the sprites of the mines, and correspond to the Kobals of the German mines, the Duergars, and the Trolls. They are said to be the souls of the Jews who formerly worked the tin mines of Cornwall. They are not allowed to rest because of their wicked practices as tinners, and they share in the general curse which ignorant people believe still hangs on this race.

The Browney

This spirit was purely of the household. Kindly and good, he devoted his every care to benefit the family with whom he had taken up his abode. The Browney has fled, owing to his being brought into very close contact with the schoolmaster, and he is only summoned now upon the occasion of the swarming of the bees. When this occurs, mistress or maid seizes a bell-metal, or a tin pan, and, beating it, she calls “Browney, Browney!” as loud as she can until the good Browney compels the bees to settle.

Mr Thorns has noticed that in Cornwall “The moths which some regard as departed souls, others as fairies, are called Pisgies.” This is somewhat too generally expressed; the belief respecting the moth, so far as I know, is confined to one or two varieties only. Mr Couch informs us that the local name, around Polperro, of the weasel is Fairy. So that we have evidence of some sort of metempsychosis amongst the elf family. Moths, ants, and weasels it would seem are the forms taken by those wandering spirits.

We read in Bishop Corbet, whose work was published in 1648, and was reprinted many years after by Bishop Percy—

Other writers have supposed that at the time of the Reformation the fairies departed from the land. This hypothesis is not warranted by evidence. It is possible that they may have taken possession of some of the inferior creatures, but they are certainly still to be found in those regions which lie beyond the reach of the railway-giant, with his fiery mouth, or of that electric spirit who, travelling on his mysterious wires, can beat the wildest elf that ever mounted “night-steeds”.

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

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¹ Traditions, Legends, Superstitions, and Sketches of Devonshire, on the Borders of the Tamar and the Tavy, by Mrs Bray.

² See Keightley’s Fairy Mythology.

³ The Cornish had formerly a great belief in piskays or fairies. If a traveller happened to lose his way, he immediately concluded he was “piskay led”. To dispel the charm with which the “piskay-led” traveller was entangled, nothing was deemed sufficient but that of his turning one of his garments inside-out. This generally fell upon one of his stockings; and if this precaution had been taken before the commencement of the journey, it was fully believed that no such delusion would have happened. —Drew and Hitchins’ History of Cornwall, p. 97.

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Where birds sing melodiously in Cornish hedgerows woven with ferns, pink campion and foxgloves (a fairy bloom if ever there was one), so striking is the sound, is it any wonder that it might be taken for otherworldly music? And yet perhaps there is something beyond the trill and warble, a lightness, an undulation so sublime it cannot be resisted, a melody that if followed, leads to a realm so beautiful that to scratch its description onto the page would never, ever do it justice. Who could blame a child for following such a thing?

The Lost Child

In the little hamlet of Treonike, in the parish of St Allen, has long lingered the story of a lost child, who was subsequently found. All the stories agree in referring the abduction of the child to supernatural agency, and in some cases it is referred to the “Small People or Piskies”— in others, to less amiable spiritual creatures. Mr Hals^⁠1 has given one version of this story, which differs in some respects from the tale as I heard it, from an old woman some thirty years since, who then lived in this parish. Her tale was to the following effect.

It was a lovely evening, and the little boy was gathering flowers in the fields, near a wood. The child was charmed by hearing some beautiful music, which he at first mistook for the song of birds, but being a sharp boy, he was not long deceived, and he went towards the wood to ascertain from whence the melodious sounds came.

When he reached the verge of the wood, the music was of so exquisite a character, that he was compelled to follow the sound, which appeared to travel before him. Lured in this way, the boy penetrated to the dark centre of the grove, and here, meeting with some difficulties, owing to the thick growth of underwood, he paused and began to think of returning.

The music, however, became more ravishing than before, and some invisible being appeared to crush down all the low and tangled plants, thus forming for him a passage, over which he passed without any difficulty.

At length he found himself on the edge of a small lake, and greatly to his astonishment, the darkness of night was around him, but the heavens were thick with stars. The music ceased, and wearied with his wanderings, the boy fell asleep on a bed of ferns.

He related, on his restoration to his parents, that he was taken by a beautiful lady through palaces of the most gorgeous description. Pillars of glass supported arches which glistened with every colour, and these were hung with crystals far exceeding anything which were ever seen in the caverns of a Cornish mine.

It is, however, stated that many days passed away before the child was found by his friends, and that at length he was discovered one lovely morning, sleeping on the bed of ferns, on which he was supposed to have fallen asleep on the first adventurous evening.

There was no reason given by the narrator why the boy was “spirited away” in the first instance, or why he was returned. Her impression was, that some sprites, pleased with the child’s innocence and beauty, had entranced him. That when asleep he had been carried through the waters to the fairy abodes beneath them; and she felt assured that a child so treated would be kept under the especial guardianship of the sprites for ever afterwards. Of this, however, tradition leaves us in ignorance.

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

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¹ See Davies Gilbert’s Parochial History of Cornwall.

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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.

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