LOCAL AUTHORS
The Dartmoor Pixies Pixies first came into my awareness as a child growing up in the 1970s. On family trips to Dartmoor in my parents’ car, we’d sometimes stop off at the Pixieland giftshop near Dartmeet, with its eye-catching garden, full of cheerily-painted pixie statues. Pixies were briefly mentioned by writers, such as Coleridge, in his poem ‘Songs of the Pixies’ (1793). However, the pixie’s acceptance into the canon of faerie folklore, Fairy Mythology (Keightley 1850) and their popularisation, was due to a series of letters written by historical novelist Mrs Anna Eliza Bray (1790-1883), to her friend and mentor, the poet laureate, Robert Southey. These were published, in three volumes in ‘A Description of the Part of Devonshire Bordering on the Tamar and the Tavy’ (1836). Bray was wife of Rev. Edward Atkyns Bray, and resided at Tavistock Vicarage. Southey encouraged Bray to collect the history and customs of her local area. In her letter dated 24 April 1832, Bray introduces the pixies by saying ‘as no historian has here been found to record the acts of our pixies, I, unworthy as I may be to accomplish the task, will, nevertheless, adventure it’ and confesses that she has collected the pixies’ traditions at risk of being ‘laughed at’ by her wealthy and educated peers. ‘Pixie’, put simply, is a local synonym for fairy, though Bray notes that the local elders believed that they were a race apart, being ‘the souls of infants’ who had died before being baptised. Bray describes their clothing as green, that they can change their forms at will, enjoy music and dancing in a ring, are helpful, though also mischievous tricksters and sometimes malevolent. Their occupations, by command of the Pixy King, included helping farmers with threshing and farm maids
with butter churning. Some pixies were tasked with leading travellers astray, known as being ‘pixie led’ - the best remedy against this, was to turn one’s pockets or apron inside out. Bray later shaped these descriptions into tales for children, in her book ‘A Peep at the Pixies’ (1854). She also standardized the spelling as ‘pixie’, in preference to ‘piskey’ or ‘pisgie’; which may come from the same root as ‘pooka’ or ‘Puck’. Local maid servant, talented poet, Mary Colling (1804-1853), who became Bray’s protégé, played a key role in gathering the Dartmoor pixie folklore from the ‘local gossips’, of whom, Bray said, they were ‘less suspicious’. Bray helped to publish Colling’s poetry collection Fables (1831). Bray wrote that the pixies ‘delight in solitary places, to love pleasant hills and pathless woods; or to disport themselves on the margins of rivers and mountain streams’. She also visited the ‘Pixies’ Cave’ at Sheepstor. Reverend Polwhele had written of the cave and its traditions in A History of Devonshire (1797), the earliest known historical account of a Dartmoor pixie dwelling.
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