Are there fairies at the bottom of your garden?

2017 is the 100th anniversary of the start of the Cottingley fairies story, a hoax which entrances the UK to this day. Cousins Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright faked photos of fairies at the bottom of the garden, intended to be a practical joke on their grown-ups. When Elsie’s mother showed the photos to the local Theosophical Society, she set in motion a chain of events that led Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to declare the photographs to be authentic. He wrote an article on fairy life for The Strand magazine in November 1920, and fairy fever gripped the nation. Conan Doyle later wrote a book on the subject, The Coming of the Fairies – The Cottingley Incident.

In 1923, Cicely Mary Barker published The Flower Fairies, a book of 170 botanically-accurate drawings with enchanting fairy images based on real children, which has remained a part of British culture ever since. The Flower Fairies have even joined us in the modern world, on Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram! I imagine there are plenty of readers who could say that the Flower Fairies introduced them to the natural world.

Beyond the garden, the environmental movement is coming to the conclusion that we need to tell better stories if we are to convince a wider audience that we can and should be working towards a better world. There’s also a resurgence of interest in British folklore, and the two can come together – we can learn as much from our own historic culture as we can from the indigenous cultures that survive across the world.

A new book, Magical Folk: British and Irish Fairies – 500 AD to the Present, gathers together the latest research on the topic from leading folklorists and historians. A tidal wave of new fairy sightings has been uncovered by the digitisation of