Joe
"When I visited the faerie glens on the Isle of Skye last summer"
None of those stories are believed any more - a thing of the past and recognised as such.
Even when they were, they carried with them a dangerous element - did you ever here of the case of the burning of BRIDGET CLEARY , the misnamed Clonmel witch - the case was used as an argument not to give Ireland Home Rule around the end of the 19th century- not a great support for your argument, I'm afraid?
Mystics always have sought to explain things they didn't understand at the time - progress had provided us with if not %100 proof, certainly far more rational explanations to The Meaning of Life, The Universe and Everything.
The legends are interesting - we have spent half a lifetime recording them - but I wouldn't set my clock by them, let alone allow them to guide my life.
A cautionary tale.
We recorded a very fine singer here in Clare in the 1970s.
One year we turned up to find he had been ill - when we visited him, he welcomed us as usual, but he was having a lot of trouble with a sore eye.
Despite his acute pain, he insisted that he didn't need medical help and was visiting the local, 'St Brigid's Holy Well at Liscannor which offered a "cure for eye trouble"
When we returned the following year he was dead - of cancer of the eye - easily curable by a small operation.
Jim Carroll