The Fairy Knowes of Loch Ard

Loch Ard, Aberfoyle, Stirlingshire, Scotland

Three low conical mounds on the south shore of Loch Ard — the Fairy Knowes — were used in the 17th century by Robert Kirk, the Aberfoyle minister, for his observations of the Sìthichean. He vanished from one of them in 1692.

Loch Ard is a small loch in the Trossachs at the foot of Ben Lomond, six miles west of Aberfoyle. Its southern shore holds three low conical mounds, side by side, called locally the Fairy Knowes. They are natural glacial features but their conical regularity has, since at least the medieval period, made them sites of fairy-folk tradition. The minister of Aberfoyle from 1685 to 1692 was the Reverend Robert Kirk — Gaelic speaker, theologian, and the author of a remarkable ethnographic treatise on the Sìthichean called The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies. The work, completed in 1691 but not published until 1815, is a systematic, sober description of the fairy-folk of the Highlands: their physiology, their society, their relations with humans. Kirk treated them as a real but ordinarily invisible neighbouring people, accessible to those with the second sight. Kirk's research site was the Fairy Knowes. He went there at dawn and at dusk to observe and, by Highland tradition, to communicate. In 1692 he was found one morning at the foot of the largest of the three knowes, apparently dead. The official cause was a stroke; he was 48 years old. The folkloric account is otherwise. Kirk had — by the tradition his successors at Aberfoyle Manse preserved — broken some fairy law in publishing his observations. His body was taken to Aberfoyle Kirkyard and buried. Shortly afterwards he appeared, in a vision, to a relative, and instructed that at his cousin's christening a dagger should be thrown over Kirk's apparition the moment he appeared, which would break the spell and release him from the Knowe. The dagger was not thrown. Kirk, by tradition, remains beneath the Knowe. His grave in Aberfoyle Kirkyard is well marked and, by local custom, the body is not in it. The Fairy Knowes are still walked at dusk by those who hope, even now, to throw the dagger that was missed.