The Bathing Fairies of Ilkley

One midsummer’s morning, c. 1820, William Butterfield opened the door to the Wells, a healing spring on the edge of Ilkley Moor. He was startled to find a band of little creatures dressed in green from head to foot, who were noisily disporting themselves in the water. As he watched, they scurried over the eight-foot-high wall, and disappeared. Is there any way to determine exactly what William Butterfield saw that morning? Were they insects, lizards, or, as William believed, fairies? Simon and Chris investigate. 

Source: http://www.strangehistory.net/puca-ghost-witch-and-fairy-pamphlets/the-witches-and-fairies-of-nineteenth-century-ilkley/

Transcript

[Simon] Today, we'll be looking at a very unusual fairy case, the bathing fairies of Ilkley. Now, Chris, give us a taste, please, of what happened to William Butterfield on that midsummer morning, somewhere around 1815.

[Chris] William Butterfield always opened the door the first thing in the morning, and he did this without ever noticing anything out of the common until one beautiful, quiet midsummer morning. As he ascended the brow of the hill, he noticed rather particularly how the birds sang so sweetly and cheerily and vociferously, making the valley echo with the music of their voices. And in thinking it over afterwards, he remembered noticing them and considered this sign attributable to the after incident. As he drew near the wells, he took out of his pocket the massive iron key and placed it in the lock. There was something canny about it, and instead of the key lifting the lever, it only turned round and round in the lock. He drew the key back to see that it was all right and declared it was the same that he had on the previous night hung up behind his own door down at home. Then he endeavored to push the door open, and no sooner did he push it slightly ajar than it was as quickly pushed back again. At last, with one supreme effort, he forced it perfectly open, and back it flew with a great bang. Then whirr, whirr, whirr, such a noise and sight all over the water, and dipping into it was a lot of little creatures dressed in green from head to foot, none of them more than 18 inches high and making a chatter and a jabber thoroughly unintelligible. 

They seemed to be taking a bath, only they bathed with all their clothes on. Soon, however, one or two of them began to make off, bounding over the walls like squirrels. Finding they were all making ready for decamping and wanting to have a word with them, he shouted at the top of his voice, hello there! Then away the whole tribe went, helter-skelter, toppling and tumbling, head over heels, heels over heads, and all the while making a noise not unlike that of a disturbed nest of young partridges. The sight was so unusual that he declared he either couldn't or daren't attempt to rush after them.

[Simon] So this is an unusual space that you've just finished describing there, and I'll try and do it justice because otherwise we'll be lost. We're in the West Riding in the 19th century, and we're on the edges of the village of Ilkley. The West Riding is my home county, so if you hear some pride in what follows, you'll understand why. Ilkley is on the edge of an island of moorland. This is the kind of moor that you turn up in Wuthering Heights. In fact, Wuthering Heights was inspired by moorland just like this, 10 miles down the road. And the particular site where the fairy sighting takes place is between the village of Ilkley and Ilkley Moor proper. It's on the very edges of the moor. And there, since time immemorial, there has been a very fast, very cold spring. Now sometime, we think in the 1700s, locals decided that this spring had medicinal qualities. The story is that a local shepherd had hurt his leg, and he went there to bathe his leg, and lo and behold, the leg suddenly healed. And at this point, various interests in the village tried to monopolize the spring. And by the time we get to 1815, 1820, when this story probably took place, the owner was a man named William Butterfield. And this is the individual who you've just described, Chris, walking up the hill and then having this remarkable experience.

[Chris] So he actually owned the site?

[Simon] He owned the site, and I believe he had a house there. But this is important. The spring itself did not have a roof on. It had a wall around. And so this is the area he's describing, and this is the way the fairies are able to go up and over the wall as they're escaping. So we have a spring, a cold water spring, on the edge of the moor. It's been tiled around, let's say, so people can lie down in it. And then there has been an eight-foot wall built around it, and there is a door into this space. And I imagine that this was William Butterfield just protecting his economic interests here, making sure that people didn't go up and use the well at night, say. Yorkshire men are famously tight. They're famously worried about their money. And so this is my guess why this wall was put around there. It's perhaps also worth saying that this spring today still exists, but it is now in a house. And this sometimes has caused confusion. It's roofed over. It's actually part of the cottage, which is today, and the cafe on the edge of the moor. And as of 2022, on their website, the owners had written and said that if anyone gets in touch ahead of time, they will be very happy to allow those who go and have scone and capes and tea at the cafe to go and bathe in the fairy spring. So you can go and bathe in the same place these little fairies found themselves in 1820. Chris, are you interested? Will you make the journey to Ilkley?

[Chris] I don't think so, because I don't like cold, cold water. But I know it's good for a lot of ailments.

[Simon] Perhaps this brings us on to the next topic that we need to talk about. What is this fascination with cold water and ailments? Because I know vaguely in the 19th century that a series of people with illnesses went to these spa towns. And Ilkley, in fact, tripled, quadrupled in size because of health tourism. People started to turn up in the village to climb the hills and bathe themselves here in the bath or in another of the springs that came off the moor. So what is the going on?

[Chris] It's a water cure philosophy. And don't quote me because I can't recall the actual details of the people that started this. But it was a very early version of clean living, fresh air, healthful things. Cold water was supposed to stimulate the immune system, for one thing. And we actually know that it's good for a whole lot of things. I just read an article about it curing panic attacks and anxiety because it stimulates the immune or the adrenaline to come up. And then you sort of get used to that. So it is good for a lot of things. And people would either naked or if they were mixed bathers, they would wear a loose shift of linen or something, sort of like a wet t-shirt contest. And they would be dipped by an attendant. If they were sickly, they didn't want anybody to go under and not come up. You would tip the attendants. So that might be another reason that he had it walled off and locked up because he was going to be collecting a fee. I actually have a friend whose great-great-grandfather was a water cure physician. And they studied all natural remedies. They really disliked drug culture. And to be fair, in the 18th century and 19th century, there were a lot of very toxic drugs. People were giving mercury and Calomel. And there's just too many very, very toxic treatments. So this was kind of backing away from this and saying, let's let the body heal itself. Plunge into the cold water and this will stimulate your immune system and you'll be radiant and it will make your skin lovely. And personally, I'd get all red and blotchy.

[Simon] We have to speak today about fairies, but I can't resist saying that when I look back through history, I've often been fascinated by these health movements that come and go. And the water treatment seems to have been one of these things. It had its high tide mark, I'm guessing in the mid-late 19th century. And then it just seems to have dripped away to the point where in the 20th century, no one would go for bath cures in the same way. But as you say, we still have in underground medical culture, the idea that sudden shocks of cold water can actually do the body great good. I've come across medical treatments that involve giving yourself a shower three or four minutes in the morning where I believe the shower is directed at the pituitary gland and you go through this ordeal and are a different person when you come out the other end. We should throw in here as well, Ilkley Moor because Ilkley Moor is just behind the bathhouse. It's very famous in Britain because Yorkshire's national anthem is called On Ilkley Moor Bar Tat, which means in dialect on Ilkley Moor without a hat. And this is a song with very special associations for me because it was sung at my stepfather's funeral. It refers to this remarkable space beyond the baths. And as we don't get this in our sources, I think I'll just throw this in because I'm very interested in Yorkshire and particularly West Riding Fairies. Ilkley Moor had several fairy sites associated with it. One of them was a huge rock outcrop known as the Fairies Kirk or the Fairies Church. Probably a 15 minute walk from the baths down to the south and up a little bit. And under the outcrop was a place called the Fairies House, which was an overhang where you could shelter in a storm and where allegedly fairies lived. And there is one source from the 1860s, so a little bit before our first sources published, that says the most fairy part of the Moor was actually the area immediately behind the bathhouse. So when you're thinking about our fairy descriptions here, it's important not just to look at them in isolation. This stuff is threaded into the local folklore.

[Chris] Absolutely. And it's almost as if Mr. Butterfield was looking at these fairies and it's like, oh yeah, they're carrying on over the fence and they're going to their happy place right beyond that on the Moor.

[Simon] It doesn't give us the direction they run in in that beautiful passage, but that's exactly how I imagine it. And I think intuitively it's right because they're running away from the humans. They're running away from Ilkley and human settlement up to their place, the place where they command, through the Bracken and to the Moorland. So I'm sure you're right about this.

[Chris] Okay. We have this unusual space. We have these fairies. How do we know about them?

[Simon] We know about them because of two different writers. The first of these writers, Dinah Craig, in 1870, published a magazine piece on this experience, William Butterfield's experience. And then in 1878, so almost a decade later, a man called Charles Smith wrote in the very first issue of the periodical that became Folklore, Britain's Great Folklore Journal. It was then known as Folklore Record. He published a very similar account. The problem with these two accounts is, unfortunately for us, they're third-hand. Both Dinah Craig and Charles Smith had learnt about these accounts from a famous Ilkley personality, John Dobson. Dobson was arguably, if not one of the two or three most remarkable men from Ilkley in his generation. He died in 1878. Charles Smith's piece, I suspect, was a kind of memorial. John Dobson, as a young man, had known William Butterfield. It was an intergenerational friendship. When John Dobson was in his late teens, he had hung around with William Butterfield, who was then in his 60s. And this story did slowly become part of Ilkley folklore. He heard from the horse's mouth. But we have to remember here, we get the story at two removes in both of our writers. So Dinah Craig, Charles Smith, both got the story from John Dobson. And John Dobson, in turn, got it from William Butterfield. And William Butterfield himself refused to tell anyone the story for several years after it had happened. So there will also have been the constant elaboration, sometimes called secondary elaboration, in William Butterfield's own head. All of this to say, Chris, we do not have here a straightforward witness account.

[Chris] Right. And it's obvious that, at least in, I think, the Dinah Craig account, it's very literary.

[Simon] I think of it as being verified. Dinah Craig uses lots of animal images, and I'm sure we'll bring these up, but I suspect most of those she just put in herself. There are too many of them to be part of a Yorkshire folk account from William Butterfield. That would be my take on that.

[Chris] Exactly. I think you're right.

[Simon What on earth did William Butterfield see? Are there any pedestrian explanations for what this middle-aged Yorkshire man at dawn saw?

[Chris] I so wish that I could answer that. And I have to say that when I first read this, I was sure that he had seen insects. He'd seen dragonflies or mayflies or locusts, but there's no wings mentioned. And none of the local creatures is the right size. I mean, you've got sort of two plausible candidates. One is the water stick insect. It looks sort of like an aquatic praying mantis. And the very rare sand lizard, which is bright green. But the stick insect is no longer than two inches, and the lizard is about eight inches. And stick insect flies, obviously. The lizard doesn't. As for if it was a bird, I'm at a complete loss unless there was a Yorkshire colony of feral parakeets like they have in London. I'm really struck by how many natural references there are, particularly in Dinah Craig's account. It's a whole menagerie of local creatures. You've got squirrels and birds and young partridges and grasshoppers and mayflies. She talks about a scrambling as if a troop of rabbits or rats and the minnows and blue bottle flies. In the rest of Mr. Butterfield's account, he looks up and down the hill to see where the green people went. And he couldn't see anything except a great stirring among the bracken growing tall and green as if a troop of hares or rabbits or some small animals were scampering.

[Simon] I think if we take this at face value, it's very difficult to identify a creature this could be. Now, I always like to outdo you, and I have here in front of me a very rare book, which I like to think is not in your collection. This is Gordon T. Holmes, Fairies on Ilkley Moor, The Evidence. And we are definitely at the self-publishing end of self-publishing. Essentially, Gordon's task in this little booklet was he took some photographs on Ilkley Moor and was convinced that he had seen fairies there within the photographs. It's one of the very early examples of people pulling out fairies from the natural world. And Gordon has in this little booklet a passage where he suggests that what we're seeing here are lizards. Now, my problem with this is that for one, lizards are too small. For two, I think this is just the wrong time of the day. Lizards come out and lounge in the sun. I can well imagine them being on a wall around a bath on a moor. That makes sense. But the idea of them being lots there together, I find very, very strange, unless we imagine some kind of lizard parliament going on in the early morning. And then there's also the detail of the noises. Lizards do not make a chirping, crying sound like little babies. This simply won't work. And so even if we accept that William Butterfield's eyesight was not the best, even if we accept that walking up that hill, he'd entered some kind of strange rapture, and he opened the door and myopically he saw some fairies where there were actually animals. I have problems identifying them with any British animal.

[Chris] I agree. Yeah. Craig describes them as skimming on the surface like water spiders, or she describes them as they were agile and lively like a swarm of mayflies or a shoal of minnows. So they seem to be watery creatures, but then they start climbing up the walls. I mean, yes, lizards do that. Is there some breeding period where they all come together in that area? I don't know anything about the habits of lizards in Yorkshire, but reptiles do form groups for mating purposes.

[Simon] I could well imagine a group of lizards hitting the wall, running for the top and being over, and that being quite an impressive sight. And we do have in nature, and I hope to do some work on this in the next couple of months, but we do have these natural collections of animals that every so often come together. And yet maybe, just freakily, a group of lizards had come together. But once more, we have the problem of sound. We have to some extent the problem of size. He talks about different sizes, but he says as big as 18 inches. That would be the largest lizard in Western Europe and then some. And so I'm not quite sure. But of course, if he'd been in a rapture, it's always possible that he'd exaggerated this to some extent in his mind quite innocently.

[Chris] Ah, now let's hypothesize that this was in fact a lizard mating orgy or something. If you have a couple of animals stuck together, you might have the right length.

[Simon] Okay, that starts to become interesting. Again, if we go back to this idea of poor eyesight, we've got the right color there. I like this. I like also the Roman orgy image. I can imagine that the lizards plunging in and out of the pool and then rolling around on the floor with each other, a little bit of wine in the corner. I can see this working. And in the area, the white wells were known in dialect as the Roman baths. So your orgy theory is not perhaps as foolish as some listeners may think. I would anxiously perhaps undersign this theory, at least for now.

[Chris] Initially, again, I thought these were insects because they were sort of buzzing and buzzing around in a big flurry and that's the way insects lie. So I've thrown out a theory about insects and fairies before. So bear with me in this slightly convoluted explanation. 

I tried and I failed to find some stories that I remember reading in Fortean Times. And this was about, to the best of my recollection, a person who saw a black puma or panther leaping over a fence or hedge in the dark. And when they came back to the same spot the next evening, they found a woman with her dog. And she said she'd been there the night before and the dog had jumped over the fence. So what the person thought was a black puma was actually a dog. George Eberhard in his book, Mysterious Creatures, also described a tiger attacking a forklift. The next day, police noted that all the footprints at the scene were those of a dog. There's kind of a Fortean theme of witnesses thinking that they've seen mystery big cats that either morph into or are later shown to be ordinary dogs. And I wonder whether something similar happens with fairies, insects, dragonflies. Does seeing certain vibrations of movement trip some switch in the brain where you think you're seeing dragonflies, but suddenly realize that they're fairies?

[Simon] I mean, I suppose the objection to this would be that in our hard wiring, dogs and their ancestors and above all cats and their ancestors were dangerous creatures. Actually, I've turned out here to say that cats are dangerous for humans. And of course, Bartosma plasmosis, they're not. But what I mean is the  tigers and the ancestors of tigers going back was certainly, they were early predators for Homo sapiens. So that kind of confusion makes complete sense, I think, in evolutionary terms. I find it a bit more difficult to imagine an insect or a lizard being exaggerated for those kinds of reasons. But again, I have to say that looking through fairy accounts over the years, I've often found myself thinking, has that person seen a fairy or actually are they just describing an insect? Can I just read you an example of this, Chris? I've kept it safe by my desk here. This is not in the fairy census mark one, but it should be in the fairy census mark two. And this is a young man who in the 1970s was at school and he was in his teens. I was a boy at a boarding school. There was a school outing, but because I experienced motion sickness, I didn't have to participate. I should say at this point, I wish I'd thought of this. We used to build dens or camps and I had visited the one our gang had made. Walking back through the trees, I saw a small person, blue jacket, reddish trousers with a sword to its side, about three inches tall. I recall a hat. It was besides a tree hovering in the air. We regarded each other. Then it darted behind the tree. I followed, but it disappeared. I find this account fascinating. I find it one of those very memorable fairy accounts, but I also wonder whether this kid didn't see not a three inch flying insect, but say an inch and a half flying insect that seemed bigger because it was just so dramatic. And a series of colors mixed with the local vegetation got confused in this way. And with many modern fairy sightings, I do wish I had an entomologist or an ornithologist at hand because I have this sense that sometimes some of these sightings perhaps could be explained in other ways in the same way that those who record UFO sightings always check where Venus was in the sky.

[Chris] Right. Yeah. This is kind of a poser here because it's one thing to think you're seeing a fairy and then suddenly you realize, oh, no, no, that's just a dragonfly or mayfly. But they start out seeing an insect and then they recognize it as a fairy. And that's just a puzzler. And when I was looking into fairy music, I noted a number of cases where the so-called fairy music was high pitched and repetitive, and it was confined to a certain area. To me, it suggested a tuneful amphibian or some wild creatures call. And as you say, I think if we could rope in an entomologist or ornithologist, we might be able to rule out some fairy sightings as bugs or birds.

[Simon] Can't help citing your brilliant article on fairy music that has one of my favorite fairy details of all time that you point out that actually the music of some whales in some cases could have been mistaken for fairy music.

[Chris]

Absolutely brilliant. Oh, that was such an interesting discovery. This folklorist was out in a, what was it, a coracle and heard the first opening notes of this famous folk tune and said, oh, my God, that's whales. It was it was wonderful. I was so happy to find that story.

[Simon] Clearly, we have to be skeptical about all accounts. This is our job. But let's give William Butterfield the benefit of the doubt. Let's say he had good eyesight. Let's say he was a strong, solid Yorkshire man. He was not the kind of person who fell into a rapture. And let's say he opened the door after this strange pushing and shoving and found in front of him these series of fairies. In terms of what he described, how should we assess this with Yorkshire fairy lore?

[Chris] We've got your standard issue, green wearing fairies. This is their favorite color. In fact, humans are not supposed to wear green because it makes them upset. It's they're very territorial about their favorite color. It's an uncanny color. It's an ominous color. You're told it's not lucky to wear it. You're not supposed to get married into it. It's unlucky in particular to fetch anything green into the house on St. John's Day. So we're looking at midsummer here, right on the cusp of St. John's Eve. So here we are with green things confronting us. You can also say it's the color of the uncanny. You've got the green children of St. Martin's Land. You've got the green man, the green knight, the little green men, of course. So it somehow has a very uncanny feel about it. So I believe that Mr. Butterfield would have felt he was witnessing something definitely uncanny.

[Simon] Let me attack a little bit what you're saying there, Chris. When I read this account, for me, there were two things that stand out as being strange. Now, of course, we're in the company of fairies. Of course, there are going to be things that are strange. But looking at fairy sightings, there are two things that are peculiar given where we are. The first is the size of the fairies. Now, fairies in England are usually, not inevitably, but usually described in the 19th century as being somewhere around the size of, say, an eight-year-old or a 10-year-old. And these fairies are a lot smaller. The biggest were 18 inches. So the first thing that strikes me as being a little bit peculiar is the size. The second thing, though, and here I would tentatively disagree with you, is the colour. John Clarke, who has worked for many years on the green children, has looked a lot at this question of to what extent fairies are green. He has made the surprising discovery that fairies are actually rarely described as green, certainly not routinely. Now, when you get into Victorian children books, this logic starts to change somewhat. But in terms of traditional sightings, green was there as a colour and there are examples, but there just aren't that many.

[Chris] Oh, but I didn't think he said that they were green. I said their clothing was green.

[Simon] But even with clothing, you don't always get the description of green with clothing. And one of the things I like about John Clarke's work is he looks at this whole question of colour and he points out it's often ambiguous whether it's clothes or skin or hair. And in fact, we do have, I think, one example from Yorkshire of a group of fairies being described with green hair. Here for me, this is the punk fairy. It's quite an image. It's not really clear whether we're talking about the skin or the clothes, but he does talk about from head to foot, which suggests to me that these were green beings.

[Chris] Now, that's not how I interpreted it, but that's just my tendency to say, okay, this was clothing, just because I'm interested in what fairies were wearing. I also interpreted in the light of the reading I'll be doing at the end, where they are clearly wearing green clothing.

[Simon] Yeah. We'll come to this reading later, obviously, but this is from the same report of Dinah Craik and from another fairy experience in the early area. And there you have fairies who are described in a very similar way. So if in some senses, these are not your typical North of England fairies, it has to be said that both of the descriptions from the same area are much of a tie.

[Chris] Now, hold on. You've talked about this account as if they've got green skin, but it says that they were dressed from head to foot in green, and they were bathing with all their clothes on. They're dressed.

[Simon] Chris, I'm rushing my fingers down the page here. You're right. They're dressed. Well, so much for my attack on green clothes and fairies here. Certainly, the two sources that give it to us seem to have the idea that they're dressed in green. I suppose I could try and defend myself and say, who knows what William Butterfield really says. But given these are the sources we have, you're absolutely right.

[Chris] Right. And they're very clear about it being in the other one, I believe it's a bright grasshopper green, which is why I assumed they were insects to start with. But this is classic fairy wear. We've got the grass green silk and the shoes of green velvet of Thomas the Rhymer.

[Simon] I'm worried, Chris, about sticking my head up again above the parapet here, but I'm going to do it. Are we sure that green is such a common colour with fairy clothes? Just as I'm saying this, I'm thinking of examples. How likely, if we were to see fairies in the 19th century in Britain, say, how likely would it be that they would be dressed in green?

[Chris] I would say it would be between 50% and 70% of them were dressed in green. You also find accounts of them wearing brown or grey or red caps. That's a very common look for a rural fairy. But the green seems to be an almost constant theme from the Middle Ages, even through the 19th and early 20th century. There's a story from the fairy mythology, Thomas Kightley. A little girl was, and this is from Yorkshire also, the little girl was in the parlour and she came flying to her mother and says, the green man will have me, the green man will have me. And she said, what are you so frightened about? And she says, the parlour's all full of addlers and mentor, which I assume were local terms for elves and fairies. She said they were dancing and a little man in a green coat with a gold-laced cocked hat on his head offered to take her hand as if he would have her as his partner in the dance. Scared the poor child.

[Simon] This would be a wonderful thing to look at in a future episode of podcast, maybe just specially dedicated to fairy fashions. I'd like to get old sciencey on this and actually get a hundred accounts from the 19th century where fairy clothes are described and see how many of these actually involve green. I suspect you're right, but I will keep my findings to myself so I can unleash these on you in an unexpected moment.

[Chris] I'll have my database ready.

[Simon] Yes, now we'll take out our excels and duel with them. Well, that's an interesting argument for the future that presents are otherwise of green. What about the whole question of the timing of this?

[Chris] Midsummer's day, what better time to see fairies? It's one of those mystic, luminal times of year. I hate the word luminal, but there we are. Supernatural creatures were always becoming visible or they'd roam about unchecked to interact for good or ill with humans. Some people say that the good people came out to celebrate midsummer with humans. There was ambivalence about whether you really wanted to invite them into your life on midsummer. Some people hung St. John's Wort over the doors to prevent elvish visits. In Denmark, if you wander under an elder tree at 12 o'clock on Midsummer's Eve, you'll see the king of the fairyland go by with all his trains. You get to choose your midsummer adventure. It's not surprising that the little men in green were seen on midsummer.

[Simon] If we're going to get all liminal, of course, it was also dawn. It's the moment between the night and the day. Of course, he's also opening a gate or a door into this bathing area. Yes, if you want to be liminal, there's lots of this about. As far as midsummer goes, which you rightly have concentrated on, Dinah Craig suggests that these ignorant Yorkshire people didn't understand the meaning of midsummer night, particularly in relation to fairies. Well, she calls it an interesting coincidence, as if to say William Butterfield simply was not aware of what was going on. How likely do you think that is? My thought was someone growing up in the Yorkshire countryside in the early 19th century would have absolutely been aware of midsummer nights, not necessarily for fairies, but a turning point in the year, perhaps associated with other customs or festivals.

[Chris] Yes, I don't think there's any question he knew what day it was. I think that's just silly to say that he was ignorant about what time. That's just nonsense. You can also look at the question about it was dawn. Of course, there's the belief that any supernatural creature that comes out at night vanishes at the first light of dawn. That goes along with the little folk in green suddenly vanishing. And just as he was gaping after the little folk in green, boom, the sun comes up. The big round red sun popped up his head in sort of picturesque language there. So, I suppose you could say it was just a midsummer night's dream of William Butterfield, but I don't know. I wasn't there. I'm inclined to say he saw something. He certainly believed he saw something, but at this distance, how do we know? How can we define it?

[Simon] Yeah, I think we could have run into problems there. It's interesting, the suspicion though, that we both have that there may have been some kind of confusion with something in the animal kingdom. We only have one witness here as well. And I got rather lyrical and excited that we have two different accounts, but they come both of them at the second hand and both from the same person at second hand. So, it's lovely to have all this writing about a single account. And it's a very memorable account. And of course, it's spread over the net, not least thanks to Katherine Briggs and others who have quoted it. And this brings me to another theme, and that will be the whole question of fairy wells. Fairy wells were sites associated clearly with fairies. But what's special about fairy wells is, and this is not typical with fairy place names, they were usually next to human habitations or close by. So, next to a village or next to a town or next to a group of farmhouses. Usually that's not the case with fairy place names. For instance, a fairy hole or a fairy stone or a fairy wood, they're usually up on the mountain or on the other side of the mountain. They're a while away from human habitations. Fairy wells are the one exception to that. And so, while this place is called the White Wells, which in itself is perhaps a suggestive name, but while it's called the White Wells, I wonder if there weren't fairy associations with this, not least because the moor in general had a couple of fairy places. And so, in this way, maybe the fairy well was a bridge between the human world and the fairy world on the edge of the settlement. 

[Chris] Oh, good point. Yes.

[Simon] But this is, we have no record of the wells being called this, but I wonder because it's the right kind of place. The other thing that's worth throwing out there is that locally, as mentioned before, they were called the Roman Baths. In several places in Britain, Roman archaeological finds were associated with the fairies. So, for example, a horde of Roman coins had dug up and the locals say, oh yeah, they're just fairy coins. So, maybe, maybe here we have a series of ideas already around this well. And we don't have the proof, but I think even if we did surrender in a rather, perhaps overly or cruelly skeptical fashion, these wonderful green fairies to the lizards, we could still say, but isn't this suggestive of some kind of complex of folklore around these wells? 

[Chris] Yeah. Again, even if you're misinterpreting them as fairies, there's some kind of tradition there that's suggesting this to your mind. He had a long history, I'm sure, of hearing local lore and it just doesn't make sense that he would just automatically say these are fairies without some background.

[Simon] Some kind of stimulus.

[Chris] I wish we could go back and interview some of the townsfolk there when the word got out, because I gather that he kept it to himself. He was worried that this was an omen, that it would hurt. Something was going to happen to his wife and child. And he eventually told his wife, who told all the other ladies in the village. So, it would be lovely to go back in time and hear what they thought of this.

[Simon] It would be interesting as well to reflect a little bit on his idea that seeing the fairies was an omen. Do we also have there a little bit of folklore caught in the aspect of the account? An Ilkley idea about the local good folk.  Well, where can we read more about the Ilkley fairies? Well, I'm very proud to say that in preparing for this podcast, I put together all my notes on Ilkley fairies. And I've decided to publish another of my small pamphlets on this theme. I haven't quite decided on my title yet, but I think it will be Ilkley fairies and witches in the 19th century. So, I've also given some space to the witches and I will dedicate this to the fairies of Ilkley more, I suspect. And all the sources are there. And they include a series of writers from the Ilkley area talking about fairies and witchcraft in the 19th century. And they include our two accounts. Now, just in case you decide that you're not interested in getting a print-on-demand publication via Amazon or one of our other suppliers, you could also look independently for these. And I will probably put the link up to this on Academia. But the first of our sources, Dinah Craig, most of the interesting bits were published by me in an article in Folklore in 2012, the first fairy article I ever wrote. And that will be, and it is already up on my Academia site. So, you could just go and find it there. The second source, Charles Smith, is to be found in an old Folklore record article. And I will also put that up in a special section on my Academia site. So, you can get the print-on-demand version. You can also get the summed-up version from 2012 in an academic article by myself. Or you can go to the original with Charles Smith from 1897 and get that as well from the Academia site.

So, if you're interested in these sources, they're all there. I should also throw in here at the end, that there is a book that at the moment I'm pretending to have because I've ordered it and it's arrived at my dad's house in Britain, but I've not yet had a chance to read it in any detail. My poor dad has been condemned to reading bits to me out over the phone. And it describes the history of the Baths at Ilkley and specifically the Baths that William Butterfield owned. It's a little bit confusing because there were actually several William Butterfields. There seems to have been a dynasty of Butterfields in the 19th century. But this is a relatively rare book and getting rarer. If anyone is really interested in the history of Ilkley and the history, the human history, let's say, behind this fairy sighting, that book looks as if it's smashing stuff. And now I was going to suggest we could finish with another read. It describes a man near Ilkley who has to work a long way to the farm where he's labouring every day. And again at dawn, one morning, he comes across some fairies. It's a beautiful account. And for me, it's very much of a type with the William Butterfield experience. We have relatively small fairies. And it also has one point that has always got my curiosity going. 

The fairies here are associated with fertility, with the crops growing well. Now that's a very commonplace idea, but this is the first example I found from Britain, really between what, well, since the time Midsummer Night's Dream has a reference to fairies and fertility. I have no of nothing from the early 1600s through to this in the 1870s. So this is a little bit of fairy history here as well.

[Chris] One morning, Roundel rose so early, it was almost in the middle of the night and started off the field, which he reached long before sunrise. He thought somehow it looked queer-like in the misty dawn that the turnips had grown ever so much greener and higher since he left them overnight and that their leaves were stirring strangely. When he looked again, he saw that what was moving about was not turnip leaves at all. Between every row of them was a row of little men, all dressed in green and all with tiny hoes in their hands. They were hoeing away with might and main and chattering and singing to themselves meanwhile, but in an odd, shrill, cracked voice like a lot of field crickets. They had hats on their heads, something in the shape of foxglove bells, Roundel thought, but he was not near enough to distinguish them plainly, only he was quite certain they were all dressed in green, just the same color as the turnip leaves. He crept cautiously forward and peered through the bars of the gate, hiding himself as much as he could the while, but unfortunately he leapt too heavily on the top rail and though he'd fastened the gate himself overnight and it looked as if it were fastened still, as soon as he touched it, it swung open with a great bang and he fell right flat with his face in the mud, then whirr, whirr, off went the little men like innumerable coveries of partridges. When Henry got up, he could not see a single one of them and strange to say, though he searched up and down the rows of turnips in every direction, he could not find any of their hoes, such tiny hoes and yet the turnips were hoed up as well as he could have done them himself, and the little people seemed so busy and so merry. It was a sight which, though it only lasted a minute or two, he declared he never forgot.