The peat-fire flame : folk-tales and traditions of the Highlands & Islands

FAERIES : THEIR PROPENSITIES AND ACTIVITIES
and Islands ; and even to this day there are folks Hving in
the remoter parts of Scotland who have the greatest
confidence in the protective properties of such metals.
Rusty nails and pins are still believed to possess the power
of protecting one from malevolent faeries and other
undesirable representatives of the elf-world. In the chapter
on the Little Folk contained in my recent publication, The
Haunted Isles, I told of the old woman living in Lewis,
whom my late father knew intimately. She was called Mbr
Nic Dhomhnuill—Morag, daughter of Donald. Morag,
during the greater part of her life, was in direct touch with
the faeries inhabiting the knoll known as Cnoc Dubhaig, at
Sandwick Hill, not far from the town of Stornoway. But
so persistently did they molest her in her latter years that
she resorted to collecting every rusty nail and pin and
needle she chanced to find. Frequently one might observe
her stopping on a cart-track to pick up an odd nail that had
worked its way out of a horse-shoe. This collection of
metals she conscientiously stuck into a large pin-cushion
suspended behind the door of her cottage, believing that only
in this wise could she prevent the faeries from invading her
home.
While cutting peats on Cnoc Dubhaig as a young girl,
Morag allowed herself to fall under the influence of the
Sandwick faeries—an influence of which she was quite
unable to rid herself in later years. The faeries sat and
conversed with her in her old age, despite her repeated
protestations to them. She knew all of them by name.
One was called Deocan nam Beann (Sucking-plant of the
Mountains—milk-wort, maybe). Another was called
Popar. A third was known as Conachag (a little conch).
Peulagan was a fourth ; and there were others whose names
my kinsfolk at Sandwick cannot now recall.
So demented was Morag on many occasions by the
intrusions of the Little Folk of Cnoc Dubhaig that at times
she besought local men to discharge a gun over her shoulder,
in order to frighten them away. When, just before her
death, she entered the house of a neighbour at Sandwick
Hill to find a young man in the act of shaving, she insisted
that he brandished his razor behind her back, so as to scare
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