Faery Trees

Back in 1999 a little tree made a very big name for its self, when workmen downed tools, refusing to chop down a little Hawthorn tree, believing it to be a fairy tree.

The building project was a multi-million pound motorway project. The Clare County Council were forced to alter the course of the motorway to accommodate the fairy tree, because of the widely held belief that to chop down the tree would bring very bad look on whoever did this.

This isn’t the first time that is has happened either.

Twenty years earlier on a massive factory project was brought to a stand still when machinery broke down on several occasions while trying to remove another fairy tree. This was eventually relocated to a nearby field.

There are many such stories of people refusing to cut down fair trees because of the widely held belief that something bad could happen.

The story of how foresters from Ulster tried to chop down a skiough, a fairy bush, only to break their hatchets on the sacred bush at every attempt is another. But where did these come from?

The Celts were well known for their respect for the natural world, but they had a special place in their hearts for trees, believing that the souls of the dead waited in them until they were reincarnated.

In Germany if you we’re caught even damaging Royal trees, the punishment was to replace the damaged part of the tree with your own flesh.

Even the Celtic written language, Ogham, is represented by different trees, a different species for each letter.

Ogham seems to either be a variant of the runic systems or the Roman alphabet, although some believe it could have originated from a form of sign language. Originally only consisting of twenty letters, five extra were added at a later date.

Ogham was at one time said to be used for divination this was called Crannchun or “casting the woods”, as each represented letter was marked onto a twig from its corresponding tree. Another variation of this was to use a bag, shaking the marked twigs before drawing out one in answer to a question asked to them.

Thirteen of the fifteen consonants are associated with the Beth-Luis-Nion tree calendar.

To the Celts every tree was sacred, symbolising the cosmic tree, which represented the three planes of existence.