VISITING WITH THE COTTINGLEY FAIRIES

Society loves fairies, lets face it the tales, and merchandise are everywhere. Even before marketing and 21st century life fairy tales were a huge deal. They were read and sung by passing bards, they were hunted out, sought out by men like the Grimm Brothers-it’s not just a phase. These creatures can be winged, or like a human tall and perhaps elfin with their ears  or entirely like tinkerbell who can only speak with a whisper or a bell. Even better Labyrinth-they bite. Each interpretation is different from the previous one. The one thing remains, even today we seek them, from fairy doors to fairy gardens. We have not lost the hope that there is something else out there, different from us and magically available if one only knows how to conjure it. The Cottingley Fairies were one of these instances.

Two cousins in Cottingley England ventured into the woods and played a brook daily. They came home wet and muddy quite often. In fact, the youngest cousin Frances insisted to her mother that she was playing with fairies at the waterfall. Elsie the older cousin agreed with Frances. The pair begged for a camera to get proof for the adults and that is how the fairy pictures began. The girls began taking more and more pictures which started a sensation in the England. Some believed it was proof of fairies and others that is was a hoax. The girls insisted until their deaths that fairies are real, and that the pictures were not a hoax. The “living fairies” were pictured between 1917 and 1920.They even had Sir Arthur Conan Doyle fooled-even though his Sherlock would have had it  figured out.

A scenic village Cottingley is located between Shipley and Bingley in Yorkshire, England. Cottingley is a wonderful place, historical and very much filled with remnants that Elsie and Frances (the Cottingley fairy girls) would notice. People do come here to find fairies for themselves, because hey it’s a belief. Originally named for the sons of Cota, and a highly prized meadow area it was never inhabited by one family long. The area suffered from the plague in the seventeenth century and became famous because of the early 20th century living  fairies.