The Irish fairies occasionally inhabited the ancient burial-places known as tumuli or barrows, while some of the Scottish fairies took up their abode under the “door-stane” or threshold of some particular house, to the inmates of which they administered good offices.[29]
The so-called fairy-rings in old pastures[30]—little circles of a brighter green, within which it was supposed the fairies dance by night—are now known to result from the out-spreading propagation of a particular mushroom, the fairy-ringed fungus, by which the ground is manured for a richer following vegetation. An immense deal of legendary lore, however, has clustered round this curious phenomenon, popular superstition attributing it to the merry roundelays of the moonlight fairies.[31] In “The Tempest” (v. 1) Prospero invokes the fairies as the “demy-puppets” that
“By moonshine do the green-sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites; and you, whose pastime
Is to make midnight-mushrooms.”
In “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (ii. 1), the fairy says:
“I do wander everywhere,
Swifter than the moon’s sphere;
And I serve the fairy queen,
To dew her orbs upon the green.”
Again, in the “Merry Wives of Windsor” (v. 5), Anne Page says:
“And nightly, meadow-fairies, look, you sing
Like to the Garter’s compass, in a ring;
The expressure that it bears, green let it be,
More fertile-fresh than all the field to see.”
And once in “Macbeth” (v. 1), Hecate says:
“Like elves and fairies in a ring.”
Drayton, in his “Nymphidia” (l. 69-72), mentions this superstition: