The unfortunate wight who turned up a fairy ring with the ploughshare became the victim of a wasting sickness—
"He wha tills the fairy green
Nae luck again sall hae,
And he wha spoils the fairy ring
Betide him want and wae,
For weirdless days and weary nichts
Are his till his deeing day."
The protector of the fairy ring was proportionally recompensed—
"He wha gaes by the fairy ring
Nae dule or pains sall dree,
And he wha cleans the fairy ring
An easy death sall dee."
The kingdom of Fairyland was supposed to be peculiarly beautiful, somewhere in the interior of the earth. The Ettrick Shepherd's description of this fair land is, perhaps, unequalled in Scottish poetry. It occurs in his ballad of "Bonny Kilmeny," embodying the tradition of the removal, to Fairyland, of the daughter of a labourer at Traquair, and her restoration to earth a few weeks after:—
"Kilmeny had been where the cock never crew,
Where the rain never fell, and the wind never blew;
But it seemed as the harp of the sky had rung,
And the airs of heaven played round her tongue,
When she spake of the lovely forms she had seen,
And a land where sin had never been;
A land of love, and a land of light,
Withouten sun, or moon, or night;
Where the river swa'd a living stream,
And the light a pure celestial beam:
The land of vision it would seem,
A still, an everlasting dream.
* * * * * * *
They lifted Kilmeny, they led her away,
And she walked in the light of a sunless day:
The sky was a dome of crystal bright,
The fountain of vision, and fountain of light:
The emerald fields were of dazzling glow,
And the flowers of everlasting blow.
Then deep in the stream her body they laid,
That her youth and beauty never might fade;
And they smiled on heaven, when they saw her lie
In the stream of life that wandered bye.
* * * * * * *
She saw a sun on a summer sky,
And clouds of amber sailing bye;
A lovely land beneath her lay,
And that land had glens and mountains gray;
And that land had valleys and hoary piles,
And marled seas and a thousand isles;
Its fields were speckled, its forests green,
And its lakes were all of the dazzling sheen,
Like magic mirrors, where slumbering lay
The sun and the sky and the cloudlet gray;
Which heaved and trembled, and gently swung,
On every shore they seemed to be hung."