From Newsgroup: soc.culture.irish


Listening to something on tv, re fairy forts, they didn't mention the
real meaning of those places.

Those were small plots of land where babies who died in infancy, in the
old days, when people were poor, were buried, rather than go through the rigours of a full funeral.

They were probably in every locality, dotted about the country.

Fairies were not involved, but the myth may have served to save the
sacred clay from desecration.

Where a whitethorn/blackthorn tree sprang up, nourished by the clay of
those buried, it was allowed to stand as a marker, to mark the plot and
to protect it.
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