The Rev. John Horsley in his Materials for the History of Northumberland, gathered in 1729-30, and printed by the late Mr. Hodgson Hinde, says, ‘The stories of fairies seem now to be much worn both out of date and out of credit.’ This is, however, incorrect, so far as regards country people, long after Horsley’s time. An old man once said to me that in the part of Northumberland where he dwelt there was a time when there was not a solitary hawthorn tree away out on the green hills, standing amid its circuit of fine cropped grass, that was not witness to the fairy revel and dance held beneath its encircling branches in the twilight or by the pale light of the moon. The Northumbrian fairies, numerous as they were, had been once a shy people, and little now can be gathered about their ongoings, which, however, have the same peculiarities as have been told of them in other favourite haunts. Denham 136-137

Mothers sometimes brought the cradle to the field in the harvest time and left it at the ridge end, when the little inmate would be liable to be exchanged for one of fairy breed. To deter children who gleaned behind the reapers from interfering with the stooks, it was customary to tell them that baits of ‘fairy butter’ were placed among the sheaves, and if they were tempted to touch and eat it the fairies would kidnap them. Of ‘fairy butter,’ Mr. Denham in a letter relates: ‘A story is told here (Pierse Bridge) how that, some women going into the field to work rather earlier one morning than usual, now some fifty or sixty years ago, found as much as nearly a pound upon the top of a gate post, how they carefully gathered it into a basin, and how they each and all partook, and found it to be the ‘nicest butther that ony o’ them had iver taasted.’Denham 138

In South Northumberland a great deterrent as well as revealer of the fairies, and a preventative of their influence, was a ‘four-neuked clover’ (a quadrifoil), although a ‘five-neuked’ specimen (a cinquefoil) is reckoned equally efficacious. This I learned from the people. (Denham 142)

‘Half a century ago,’ says Mr. George Tate, in his History of Alnwick, i. p. 438, ‘the fairies were supposed to have local habitations in our district. There was a Fairies’ Green not far from Vittry’s Cross; but on moonlight nights these tiny folk trooped out of dell, and cavern, and mine, and from beneath the bracken, and from under green knowes, and out of other lonely places, to hold their revels with music and dance in the Fairies’ Hollow at the top of Clayport Bank. Their favourite haunt was the Hurle Stane, near to Chillingham New Town, around which they danced to the sound of elfin music, singing:

Wind about and turn again,

And thrice around the Hurle Stane;

Round about and wind again,

And thrice around the Hurle Stane. (Denham 142-143)

There is a part of the rock on which Bamborough Castle stands only revealed to the lucky, where money is found, having been placed there by the fairies. Those who participate in their bounty may have it every time they visit the spot, but unless a silver coin is placed among it to secure it, it would slip away, as if it had never been. A certain lad got ever so much money there, but he had always to add to it a piece of genuine British coin, ‘to keep it whole,’ as the phrase went. An old man upwards of seventy told me, and he had had the account from his grandmother. (Denham 146)

The Berwickshire fairies were either a quiet lot or they lived among a too matter-of-fact population, for their memorial has almost vanished. The banks of Fosterland Burn, a contributory to a morass called Billy Mire in the Merse, ‘were’ says the late Mr. George Henderson, ‘a favourite haunt of the fairies in bygone days, and we once knew an old thresher or barnsman, David Donaldson by name, who, although he never saw any of those aerial beings, constantly maintained that he frequently heard their sweet music in the silence of the summer midnight by Fosterland Burn, by the banks of Ale Water, and on the broom-clad Pyper Knowes.’ In the last resort another authority asserts that ‘they used to come out from an opening in the side of the knowe, all beautifully clad in green, and a piper playing to them in the most enchanting strains.’ They once attempted, but failed, to abstract the shepherd’s wife of little Billy when in childbed; and they were detected loosening Langton House from its foundations in order to set it down in an extensive morass called Dogden Moss, in the parish of Greenlaw, but were scared by the utterance of the holy name.’ In one of Mr. Henderson’s MSS. I also find that some curiously formed eminences on the banks of the Whitadder, near Hutton Mill, called the Cradle Knowes, were in old times a scene of revelry for the light-footed fairies.  (Denham 148-149)

The white-flowered Linum catharticum, or purging flax, which grows in natural pastures, is called by the shepherds in Berwickshire ‘Fairy Lint.’ It is supposed to furnish the fairy women with materials for their distaffs. As I was the first to make known this name in Johnston’s Nat. His. East. Bor., p. 45, I protest against attempts made to explain that it is so-called ” from its great delicacy.’ Denham 149

From Mr. Jamieson, also, I have a ‘fairy stone.’ These stones are found in the clay-banks of Ellwyn stream which runs down the Fairy Glen to join the Tweed between Galashiels and Melrose. Scott has a good deal to say about the glen and the stones in his introduction to The Monastery and in chap. ii. ‘The Scottish fairies.. . were supposed to have formed a residence in a particularly wild recess of the glen, of which the real name was, in allusion to that circumstance, Corrie nan Shian’ [phonetic spelling]. This name, however, was cautiously avoided, for to name the ‘Good Neighbours’ was to bring ill luck, and the valley was commonly known as the Nameless Dean. ‘In evidence of the actual operations of the fairy people, even at this time, little pieces of calcareous matter are found in the glen after a flood … formed into a fantastic resemblance of cups, saucers, basins and the like, in which children who gather them . . discern fairy utensils.’ After flood rains Mrs. Jamieson, as a child, used to run off to the glen on Sunday afternoons with her brother and sister to collect the coveted stones, believed to bring good luck to the finders. Banks 344