The fairies inside Camster

By the time you’ve crawled through the narrow passage at Camster, you’ve left enough daylight behind to appreciate why I choose this place to introduce guests to the Highland fairies. The chamber was built for the dead more than five thousand years ago, and although the bones have gone, you’re still sitting inside their tomb. If the word ‘fairy’ has brought Tinker Bell to mind, the surroundings are usually enough to encourage a rethink.

In Gaelic, the fairy folk are the daoine sìth, and their name belongs to a whole family of words connecting them with the mounds and knolls of the landscape. A sìthean can be a fairy hill or dwelling, which makes rather more sense when you’ve just made your way through a passage into a chamber beneath a mound. We know that Camster is a Neolithic burial place, but imagine finding somewhere like this before archaeology could explain who built it or why. There’s an entrance, there are rooms inside, and there may even be human bones. You can see how somebody might decide that the hill was occupied.

The Highland fairy folk looked much more like people than the tiny winged creatures in children’s stories, and meeting them was something to approach with considerable caution. They lived in a hidden world beneath the landscape and could cross into ours when they chose, although you could never be entirely confident about what they wanted from you. Their stories sometimes overlap with those of the dead, and I do wonder how much places like Camster contributed to that. Finding human remains inside a hill would give you something fairly substantial on which to build a belief in people living beneath it, even if we can no longer establish how that belief began.

There’s one other name that tends to come into the conversation, especially with anyone who knows Star Wars. The resemblance between Gaelic sìth and George Lucas’s Sith is difficult to resist when we’re talking about powerful beings you’d prefer to stay on the right side of. We have no firm evidence that Lucas borrowed the name from Gaelic, so I’d enjoy the possibility without claiming it as fact. Even so, once you’re inside an ancient burial chamber considering who might inhabit the hill around you, those dangerous Highland fairies begin to feel a good deal closer than Tinker Bell.

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