With St. Patrick’s Day approaching and North America’s obsession with leprechauns, I decided this week’s post should reflect mythical spirits. Every culture seems to have a representative magical being that is mischievous and used to explain unknown phenomena. Growing up, I was exposed to stories of pixies, sprites, brownies, goblins, fairies and leprechauns. As we discovered on our travels this past summer, the mystical Isle of Skye is full of fairies.

To reach our rented house on the Waternish Peninsula, we had to travel past the Fairy Bridge.

While it may seem like just another stone bridge, and not a very majestical one, it does have special significance. It is the meeting point of three streams with its Gaelic name is Beul-Ath nan Tri Allt meaning Ford of the Three Burns.

Legend tells of a chief from Clan MacLeod falling in love with a fairy princess. However, her father, King of the Fairies, would not allow her to marry a mortal man. As a compromise, they were handfast for a year and a day, but then she was to return to the fairy realm forever. During the year she gave birth to a son and when the time came for her to leave, she wrapped her son in a silk shawl and parted ways where the Fairy Bridge is now located. This shawl then became known as the Fairy Flag and has featured prominently in several other well known Skye stories (I will feature these in a separate post at a later date). The Fairy Flag is currently on display at Dunvegan Castle and is thought to have originated in Persia between the 5th and 7th centuries.

Another magical place on the Isle of Skye is the Fairy Glen. This has become a very famous location because of social media. However, what you see online is not reality. The Fairy Glen is an interesting geographical phenomenon created by land slips. Conical hills, rock castles, stunted trees and shimmering pools are found throughout this whimsical area. There are no fairies associated with this place other than the inspiring name. Lately, many tourists have taken to creating spirals on the ground with rocks (some claim fairies have moved them) and it is causing great distress to the Skye locals who remove them as they want to keep the special place as natural as possible. These Fairy Glen spiral photos are the ones most often seen online and attracts people to the site.

I’ll include a photo of the Fairy Pools (we visited one cool, misty morning) and I took a quick dip in 6C water but I’ll save that story for another time.

I hope that you remember the wonder that you had as a child for these special creatures and that you still believe in a little magic.