It Happened In England

In the 1950s, the United Kingdom was in the process, like the United States, of modernizing its roadways for automobile traffic. Now, in the United States over the past several decades, there have been a number of cases in which American Indians have protested highway projects which threaten sacred sites, either because it is a place of holy pilgrimage (like sacred hills or bodies of water) or because there are human burials of a tribal nature located in the threatened locus. But to get back to the United Kingdom, there happened a most curious event in the southern part of England among a group of people whose culture had, by that point, undergone heavy industrialization and urbanization for over a century and a half. Traditional culture in the rural areas at this late date persisted only in fading fragments. Yet, when a neolithic mound was to be taken out to make room for a new highway route, the rough and tumble road laborers refused to demolish it. Their explanation was that it was a fairy knoll, and therefore sacred to the fairies. They would not show them any such disrespect as to destroy their dwelling. And so the highway had to be built around it. This story I first remember reading about in the introduction to Ruth L. Tongue's The Lost Folktales of England. It appears that the sacred landscape and the related appreciation of its animistic qualities (think of the "landvaettir" of Norse Mythology), die hard, even in the age of the atom.