Ferier’s Hill

You will recall, perhaps, that most enjoyable conversation over dinner the other week? You were assuring me with great conviction — I cannot now reconstruct the context — that there are now no fairies left in Norfolk. Apparently — or so you said — the Puritans — or was it the Roundheads? — had driven them all away. And even if a few had somehow survived, they wouldn’t much like our vast, industrial-scale, expensively disenchanted fields. ‘Tis is a well-known thing — or so you insisted, pouring more claret — that fairies much prefer a landscape of stone walls, age-old hedges and ancient ring-forts, of the sort you are so lucky to have still in Ireland. Well, that reminded me of something. Indulge me, then, briefly, while I tell you the story of Ferier’s Hill. I must have been twelve years old at the time. That’s almost sixty years ago now! I was in my last year at my frankly appalling junior school, so welcomed the advent of the Easter holiday as only a small, bookish, hopelessly…