The Ploughman

When air was clean and water pure, there lived in the Northlands all manner of faerie folk, some good and some evil. Something they all shared, however, was a distrust of humans, and they made every effort to keep themselves out of sight. Nowadays, they have either perfected the art, or have gone altogether. Whichever is true, they are, for the most part, remembered with fondness, like this one.

The early morning mists had blown away to reveal the ploughman already hard at work behind his team of Shire horses. He toiled in the fine spring morning near the village of Humshaugh, a beautiful place close by the river of the North Tyne. As he progressed the seagulls and corbies swooped down on the unearthed worms in the furrows behind him and the air filled with their shrill cries. In the May trees, thrushes and blackbirds were singing at the top of their lungs, while the occasional feathery-poke threaded in and out of the hawthorn hedgerows. The bees buzzed busily between the lambstails as they danced in the breeze and the poughman was very content in his work.

As he passed under the catkins he could hear the steady grinding of the faeries as they churned their butter. He did not stop his work though, for he had heard the sound many times and he knew that no good would come of his interference. So he turned his team around and cut the sod in the opposite direction. When he returned at the completion of the furrow, however, the churning has ceased and he heard a small piping voice cry:

"Alas and alack! I've broken my staff!"

"Leave it for me on yon stump and I'll fix it," he said with a smile, but he did not wait around, instead he turned the horses again and ploughed another furrow in the field. Sure enough, when he returned, there upon the stump was a tiny broken churn staff. He took out his knife and cut a piece of willow twig from a tree and fashioned an entirely new staff from it, and, placing it on the stump, he again turned to his work.

On his next return, he saw there on the very spot where he had left the new churner, a pat of shining yellow butter, his reward for being such a very kind ploughman.