There Are Fairies in the Bottom of My Garden*

And I’ve got ghosts in mine. Doesn’t stop me from liftin’ my leg on every rock in sight. But just in case we need more evidence of why Britain is no longer, well…Great Britain, here ya’ go.

“Villagers who protested that a new housing estate would “harm the fairies” living in their midst have forced a property company to scrap its building plans and start again. Marcus Salter, head of Genesis Properties, estimates that the small colony of fairies believed to live beneath a rock in St. Fillans, Perthshire, has cost him £15,000…

“He said: “A neighbour came over shouting, ‘Don’t move that rock. You’ll kill the fairies’.” The rock protruded from the centre of a gently shelving field, edged by the steep slopes of Dundurn mountain, where in the sixth century the Celtic missionary St. Fillan set up camp and attempted to convert the Picts from the pagan darkness of superstition.”

Well, that was obviously a failed mission.

“Then we got a series of phone calls, saying we were disturbing the fairies. I thought they were joking. It didn’t go down very well,” Mr Salter said. In fact, even as his firm attempted to work around the rock, they received complaints that the fairies would be “upset”. Mr Salter still believed he was dealing with a vocal minority, but the gears of Perthshire’s planning process were about to be clogged by something that looked suspiciously like fairy dust…

“Jeannie Fox, [community] council chairman, said: “I do believe in fairies but I can’t be sure that they live under that rock. I had been told that the rock had historic importance, that kings were crowned upon it.”…

And Ms. Fox should be crowned with it!

“A lot of people think the rock had some Pictish meaning,” Mrs Fox said. “It would be extremely unlucky to move it.”…

“The Planning Inspectorate has no specific guidelines on fairies but a spokesman said: “Planning guidance states that local customs and beliefs must be taken into account when a developer applies for planning permission.”

Think we’ve found a whole chain of missin’ links for Richard Dawkin’s theory of memes and evolution.

"There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?" -- Richard Dawkins

St. Fillan he ain’t.

*Bea Lillie’s signature song from 1934.

posted by Harrison at 8:52 PM