The British Isles are famous for their tales and fables of wee people: fairies, leprechauns, and trolls.  Are they just tales and fables?

It was about ten years ago that I first wrote about pygmy flints.  What on earth are pygmy flints?  They have been found all over the world, but the ones I wrote about on that day were in the British Isles–the Midlands.

They are found artifacts – minute chipped flints in the shape of borers, scrapers, knives, arrowheads, and axe heads.  Most are a quarter inch long or less, sometimes called microliths.

When you see one you might go, “Wait! What could anything this tiny be used for?”

At first it was thought that some of the points were used on tiny arrows for the purpose of shooting birds.  Some points may have been put on tiny spears for throwing at small mammals.

If you examine the flints closely, under high magnification, you can see what remarkable craftsmanship was put into them.  The work is so tiny and detailed that adult fingers could not make them.  Children would not know how and they would not have the dexterity and skills to do so.

This is when the mind veers off:  it looks more and more like tiny adult people would have to make them.  What’s more, miniature pottery and crockery have often been discovered near the tiny tools.

Who had fingers and hands so tiny they could employ the craftsmanship needed to create all these tiny things?  They were made with design and purpose.

The British Isles are famous for their tales and fables of wee people: fairies, leprechauns, and trolls.  Are they just tales and fables?

Something crossed my desk this past week that gave a glimmer of hope in favor of the tiny people.  I’m sure my eyes were bugging out when I saw the accompanying image.

There is a peninsula on the southwest coast of Ireland known as Beara Peninsula.    In 1835, a farmer found an odd item in the middle of a sheep track on the Caha Mountains.  It was a tiny shoe, less than three inches long.  It was hand stitched expertly, in tiny stitches.  It had tiny eyelets for shoe laces.  It was not made of cowhide leather, but of mouse skin.

There is this:  the tiny shoe was well worn and the heel was worn down from the wearing of it.

All attempts to have this be a doll’s shoe have failed.  It is definitely not a doll’s shoe.

It is so well made, that only a tiny person could have achieved such a result.

Experts are stumped.

The Somerville family of County Cork ended up with the shoe through inheritance.  They are not divulging its current home.  A member of the family once took the shoe to Harvard University to be examined.  Dr. Summerville was pleased that the characteristics of the little shoe were as they had believed, including its being fashioned from mouse skin.  Nothing new was learned, however, and no theories given other that it was a man’s type shoe in black, in a style that was popular one hundred years prior to the discovery.

Fairy Faith has often been part of the culture of the British Isles.

Fairy Faith is alive.

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