#cairns

This week we are in Cairns in Far North Queensland to meet the frogs who are out and about in the wet season! Tonight we met the Lace-Lid Frog, the Green-eyed Tree Frog, the Wood Frog, the Northern Stony Creek Frog, the Orange-thighed Tree Frog, and a baby Graceful Tree Frog!

loss leaves June

her sanctuary

where wings

from the past alight

like butterfly kisses

on the tree of life

.

KDW@Naturallylilting—June 2025 (My photo of male and female Cairns Birdwing Butterflies. The following sign was nearby).

Burial mounds are, as the name suggests, mounds of earth (also called barrows) or rocks (also called cairns) used to bury the dead, made during the Neolithic (the period when farming and stone tools coexisted, running in Britain from about 4100-2500 BC) and the Bronze Age, with a brief revival by the pagan Anglo-Saxons. Because they were (for the most part) built by peoples who lived and died before recorded history, they attracted a great deal of speculation and, hence, folklore.

Burial Mounds and Faeries: One of the most common and well-known motifs of burial mounds is that faeries live in them. Some whole grounds of faeries were credited with living in them, such as the spriggans [1] and Small People [2] of Cornwall and the hogboons of the Northern Isles [3], and some barrows were home to specific individual spirits, such as Hob Hurst’s House in Beeley, Derbyshire, home to the faerie of the same name [4] and Watt’s Parlour in the New Forest, where the eponymous pixie taught the local cunning men (folk magicians) their skills [5]. For a similar story, a Yorkshire cunning man tried for his work in 1654 claimed he received his power by knocking three times on a faerie hill, meeting faeries and getting power – inside the mound, it was perpetually twilight. He was acquitted because his cures reliably worked [6]. Scottish lore went into particular detail about faerie mounds, naming the interior as the bru and the exterior as the sithein [7] and stating that they moved between mounds on each of the quarter days: Candlemas (2nd February), May Day, Lammas (1st August) and Halloween [8]. In many cases, it was the noises coming from a mound that revealed it to be a faerie mound – Bincombe Hill and Bincombe Down outside Bincombe, Dorset were named the “music downs” from the elfin music coming out of them [9], whoever runs nine times around the barrow of Pudding Pie Hill in Sowerby, Yorkshire, plunges a knife into the turf and puts their ear to the ground will hear faerie conversation [10] and in Scotland moaning and rushing sounds are the mark of a faerie mound [11].

Some barrow-dwelling faeries could be benign, such as those of Wick Barrow in Stogursey, Somerset, who gave a baker cake in exchange for fixing their peel (the wooden board used by bakers to slide bread in and out of ovens) [12] – a story also told in Worcestershire [13] – but one of the most common motifs of these stories is an element of danger. Repeated visits to faerie mounds causes consumption [14], a child left on a barrow by Dagworthy Castle, Suffolk in the 13th century  was taken by faeries [15], opening Beedon Barrow in Berkshire caused a massive storm [16], faerie women in the Gaelic world were known for luring men into mounds where they became trapped [17], the trows (as faeries were called in the Northern Isles) of the Orkney isle of Papa Westray lamed a man in 1881 as revenge for ploughing their mound [18] and the aforementioned hogboons could be particularly vicious – a man who dug up one of their mounds in 1911 lost six cattle and six members of his household, and hogboons even punished children who played or cattle who grazed on their mounds [19]. In the Gaelic parts of Scotland, one of the particular dangers of the faerie mound was the Cù-Sìth, a green dog the size of a bull who lurked in rock clefts, carried souls away to the underworld and bayed; anyone who heard three bays from him without being in a place of safety by the third would drop dead and the bays in question were so loud that sailors at sea would hear them. Faeries used him to watch over their mounds and to hunt intruders [20]. They were shaggy with long tails (either coiled or plaited), silent footsteps, and are usually bound inside faerie mounds, being let loose to chase after intruders or look for cattle, or occasionally to roam alone [21]. There’s a reason why, in a 19th-century Scottish folktale, a man trying to retrieve his son from the fair folk entered the mound took three apotropaics with him; a cockerel, a Bible and an iron dagger [22].

Then again, humans were not wholly innocent; legends of humans stealing chalices from faerie mounds appear in the Forest of Dean [23], Willy Howe in Yorkshire [24] and the Hebridean island of Mull [25]. Considering that the chalice from Willy Howe is currently held by the Scottish royal family [26] and the one from the Forest of Dean was given to Henry I [27], and that another famous faerie chalice, the Luck of Eden Hall from Cumberland, is now known to have been made in medieval Syria [28], it’s likely that these stories sprang up to explain exotic cups held by noble families.

What with the adversity between the people of the barrows and the children of Adam, it is hardly surprising that sacrifices were made to the fae, and their mounds were a primary location to do it. Hebridean lore recommended pouring new milk onto the local barrow morning and evening [29], hogboons each year got ale at Yule and the first jug of ale from each household, along with the first milk from each cow after it calved [30], milk was given to the undefined spirit in the mounds of Wilkie’s Knolls on Westray in the Orkneys [31] and reverting a changeling to a human centred on leaving them overnight on a faerie hill with various foodstuffs [32]. These examples are all from what folklorist Jeremy Harte in Explore Fairy Traditions identifies as the upland zone, consisting of the Scottish Highlands and islands, the Isle of Man and Ireland; the wildest parts of Britain, where faeries were objects of genuine reverence and sincere fear [33]. The only remotely similar practice elsewhere was in Worle, Somerset, where fisherman would invoke success in fishing by tapping a white stone on a certain cairn and saying “Ina Pic Winna, send me a good dinner” [34]. The other pattern of interest here is that, with the exception of the last one, these are all liquid offerings, fitting offerings made to spirits down inside the earth. However, sacrifices were not their only method of approaching the fae. The farmers of Huip on Stronsay in the Orkneys (again, in the upland zone) until the 1850s penned trows in for the night by a circle of men and women closing in on the mound while banging milk pails [35]. Finally, here are some interesting faerie mounds:

Byrn y Ellyllon (Hill of Goblins) in Mold, Flintshire, which is home to an apparition of a knight in golden armour as well as goblins [36].

Bryn y Pibion, Caernarfon, Caernarfonshire, a cairn that features in a story of a girl being hired as a maid by faeries [37]

Fairies’ Cradle, Hetton-le-Hole, Durham, where the local faeries held parades [38].

Park Mound, Pulborough, Sussex, where the faeries once held a funeral [39].

Trollhouland, Bixter Voe, Shetlands, with inner walls covered in gold and silver [40].

Burial Mounds and Heroes: The fact that these mounds held human remains was not forgotten in folklore, even while it was eclipsed by their status as a seat of the fae, and accordingly several barrows are identified as the resting place of famed heroes. Because there are fewer patterns here, this entry will be a listing of sites and the person lying in them, and some interesting details when present:

Bedd Branwen, Anglesey, which contains Branwen, a female character who the fourth branch of the Mabinogion, the Welsh national epic, is named after [41], and who inadvertently sparked a cataclysmic war between Wales and Ireland [42].

Beddgelert, Caernarfonshire, which holds a dog called Gelert, famed for saving a nobleman’s child from a wolf and being killed in a fit of fury thanks to his master temporarily thinking he was to blame [43].

Bevis Mound in Southampton, Hampshire, which holds Sir Bevis of Hampton, a knight noted for slaying a giant called Ascapart [44].

Carne Beacon Barrow in Carne, Cornwall, holding a hero called Gerennius, buried with his weapons and regalia; however, an excavation in 1855 found nothing in the tomb [45].

A cairn I don’t know the name of in Ceulanymaesmawr, Cardiganshire, holding the great Welsh bard Taliesin; sleeping next to it either grants poetic skill or causes insanity [46].

Another barrow I don’t know the name of in Dornoch in the Scottish Highlands, holding the Norse dragon slayer Sigurd [47].

Silbury Hill, Wiltshire is variously explained as the burial chamber the golden-armoured King Sil, that of a gold statue of a mounted knight or a mound of soil dumped by the Devil after the prayers of clergy prevented its dumping atop Marlborough [48]; on moonlit nights, King Sil emerges, riding on horseback in golden armour, and a headless figure is sometimes seen around the mound [49].  

Finally, a burial mound I again don’t know the name of near Wormelow, Herefordshire holds the body of Amr, Arthur’s bastard son, and yields a different length with every measurement attempt [50].

Burial Mounds and Ghosts: One of the best-known stories linking a ghost and a burial mound is Rillaton on Bodmin Moor, Cornwall, with burial mound haunted by a ghostly druid [51] who offered people drinks from a magical chalice; a hunter who rejected fell into a ravine shortly after. In 1837, a skeleton with a golden cup (now assigned to the Bronze Age; note that druids were from the Iron Age) was found [52]. Another dangerous barrow was located in Challacombe in neighbouring Devon, where a treasure-digger heard ghostly hoofbeats, and died of horror when he saw the apparition [53]. For another, less dangerous gold-bearing ghost, the banks of the River Teifi in Cardiganshire are haunted by a girl in green who carries golden objects, fills a tub with them and guards treasure in a nearby mound [54]. Wiltshire, which is well known for barrows, has several haunted ones. West Kennet Long Barrow is haunted by the ghost of a priest, who enters it at sunrise on Midsummer Day, accompanied by a hound of the hill. After the excavation of Manton Barrow in 1906, the widow of the excavator saw the woman buried in the barrow emerge, walk around her house and squint into the window; being given medicine by a doctor remedied this, although not immediately [55].

Burial Mounds and the Devil: All over England, the Devil is credited with making barrows; on the Berkshire Downs and around Narborough, Leicestershire, they come from clods of earth thrown up by him ploughing and around Wellington, Somerset the cairns are produced by him shaking stones out of his glove [56]. The barrows around Thursley, Surrey and Treyford, Sussex are known as the Devil’s Jumps due to him doing exactly that on them; they also have legends involving the Devil interacting with Thor attached to them, which were probably inadvertently planted by folklorists looking for survivals of paganism in communities with placenames known to derive from Thor [57]. But the most famous burial mound to be linked to the Devil is the Kit’s Coty barrow in Aylesford, Kent. A baker tried to count the allegedly uncountable stones by placing a loaf of bread on each one and saw – depending on the version – one of the loaves replaced with the Devil or an extra loaf [58]. The stones are therefore also known as the Countless Stones [59]. The barrow is also the sight of a phantom battle between Jutish and Briton warriors [60] and the burial ground of a British chief [61] and the stones were said to have been raised by four local witches [62]. Interestingly, barrows and cairns are never associated with the Devil in Wales, but some are named after witches [63].

Burial Mounds and Black Dogs: On Exmoor in western Somerset and northeastern Devon and central Somerset’s Mendip Hills, black dogs protect cairns [64], and Doghill Barrow outside Amesbury in the neighbouring county of Wiltshire is also guarded by one [65]. Returning to Somerset, the Quantock Hills in the east of the county were home to a pig-sized black dog seen as late as the 1960s and known for being hostile to hunters and their horses but protective to children collecting mushrooms, who appeared from and disappeared into cairns [66]. To round out Somerset’s grave-keeping black dogs, they were several round the Blackdown Hills in the county’s southern portion [67]. Outside of the West Country, black dogs were seen in isolated cases in Chilham, Kent [68] and Whitby, Yorkshire [69].

Burial Mounds and Giants: There are barrows containing giants in Wilmington, Sussex [70] and Dalton, Yorkshire [71] and a very similar legend is attached to both the Giant’s Grave Barrow and Adam’s Grave Barrow in Wiltshire, that they contain a giant and that running around seven times will summon a spirit; the Devil and the giant in it, respectively [72]. Over in Wales, King Arthur killed a giant called Rhita and buried him at a cairn in Snowdon in Caernarfonshire or beneath a stone at Tan y Bwlch [73].

Burial Mounds and Danger: Much of this has already been covered above, but there are some other pieces that do not fit well into the above categories. People who dig in the barrows on Carburrow Tor near Warleggan, Cornwall will be attacked by a flock of magical birds [74]. At Torrylin Cairn on Arran in Buteshire, a grave robber was cursed [75]. Norrie’s Law is a cairn in Largo, Fife where, if anyone blows a horn nearby, they will fall dead; the barrow is named for a shepherd who made that mistake [76].  

Burial Mounds and Magic: By far the most famous of these is the Wayland’s Smithy barrow (historically in Berkshire, now in Oxfordshire), where, if a horse is left overnight with a coin, it will be shod in the morning (Chainey [77] and the coin gone. Wayland himself is an anglicised form of Völundr, a mythical Norse smith who was crippled in order to force him to work for a wicked king, but used magic to kill the king’s family and escape [78]. Less famously, ill people went for healing in a pool at the River Dochart called St. Fillan’s Well in Strathfillan in the Highlands. Patients were immersed in it and picked up nine stones from the bottom, after which they walked around three cairns thrice and placed a stone each time they passed by one. If animal feed was mixed with the well’s water, it would heal the animal, provided the halter was placed at one of the cairns [79].

Bibliography

Dee Dee Chainey, 2018, A Treasury of British Folklore: Maypoles, Mandrakes and Mistletoe, National Trust Books, pp.80-81

Katherine Briggs, 1976, A Dictionary of Fairies, Penguin Books Ltd., p.375

Jeremy Harte, Explore Fairy Traditions, Heart of Albion Press, p.70

W. P. Witcutt, 1942, “Notes on Staffordshire Folklore”, Folklore, volume 52, number 2, pp.126-127

Brice Stratford, 2022, New Forest Folklore, The History Press, p.153

Janet Bord, Fairies: Real Encounters with the Little People, Michael O’Mara Books, p.126

Briggs 1976 p.50

Robert Kirk, 1692, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, Andrew Laing, p.7

Jo Bourne et al., 2009, The Most Amazing Haunted & Mysterious Places in Britain, The Readers’ Digest Association, p.36

Marc Alexander, 2002, A Companion to the Folklore, Legends and Customs of Britain, Sutton Publishing Ltd., p.223

Chainey 2018 p.109

Bord 1997 p.156

Briggs 1976 p.413

Briggs 1976 p.26

Harte 2004 p.26

Alexander 2002 p.16

Walter Evans-Wentz, 1911, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, Oxford University Press, p.88

Ernest Marwick, 1975, The Folklore of Orkney and Shetland, Batsford, pp.44

Marwick 1975 pp.39-41

Alexander 2002 p.61

Briggs 1976 p.83

Briggs 1976 p.63

Martyn Whittock, 2009, Life in the Middle Ages: Scenes from the Town and Countryside of Medieval England, Robinson, p.222

Harte 2004 p.26

Harte 2004 p.39

Briggs 1976 p.140

Whittock p.222

Chainey 2018 p.78

Bord 1997 p.18

Marwick 1975 pp.39-40

Briggs 1976 p.438

Chainey 2018 pp.109-110

Harte 2004 p.41

Briggs 1976 p.232

Marwick 1975 p.37

Bourne et al. 2009 p.194

Briggs 1976 p.297

Alexander 2002 p.92

Bord 1997 p.155

Marwick 1975 pp.38-39

Bourne et al. 2009 p.201

Miranda Aldhouse-Green, 2023, Enchanted Wales: Myth and Magic in Welsh Storytelling, Calon Books, pp.11-14

Alexander 2002 p.102

Geoffrey Ashe, 1990, Mythology of the British Isles, Guild Publishing Ltd., p.4

Tony Deane and Tony Shaw, 1975, The Folklore of Cornwall, Batsford, p.23

Alexander 2002 p.16

Strumpshaw, Tincleton and Giggleswick, 2021, Great British Folklore and Superstition Map, Strumpshaw, Tincleton and Giggleswick

Ashe 1990 p.37

Ralph Whitlock, 1976, The Folklore of Wiltshire, Batsford, p.23

Alexander 2002 p.235

Alexander 2002 p.346

Deane and Shaw 1975 pp.143-144

Alexander 2002 p.36

Colin Bord and Janet Bord, 1985, Sacred Waters: Holy Wells and Water Lore in Britain and Ireland, Granada Publishing Ltd., p.132-133

Whitlock 1976 pp.24-25

Jeremy Harte, 2022, Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape, Reaktion Books, pp.44-48

Harte 2022 pp.60-61

Chainey 2018 p.28

Alexander 2002 p.57

Bourne et al. 2009 p.67

Ashe 1990 p.40

Alexander 2002 p.156

Harte 2022 p.49

Mark Norman, 2015, Black Dog Folklore, Troy Books, p.131

Whitlock 1976 p.25

Briggs 1976 p.208

Norman 2015 p.35

Norman 2015 p.211

Norman 2015 p.242

Ashe 1990 pp.44-45

William Henderson, 1879, Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders, Nichols & Sons, p.195

Chainey 2018 pp.27-29

Ashe 1990 pp.199-200

Alexander 2002 p.43

Strumpshaw et al. 2021

Alexander 2002 p.204

Tabitha Stanmore, 2024, Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic, Penguin Random House Ltd., p.140

Ashe 1990 p.40