As anyone who has the misfortune to live in a house built across a faerie road will acknowledge, we do not need to see faeries to know they are among us. Traditionally, such houses have their front and back door opposite each other, and the inhabitants would leave their doors wide open on Midsummer Eve and Halloween when the faeries ride and leave gifts of milk, cream, and butter to appease them. Failure to leave the doors open would lead to violent shaking of the entire house and, in rare cases, demolition as the faeries vented their anger. Plainly, that we cannot see faeries does not make us immune.

This raises an interesting question for folkloric research and experimental paraphysics confirms that certain animals have far higher visual awareness of faerie phenomena than others and many animal species are more aware than the average human. Dogs are frequently seen to bark at nothing, cats will refuse to enter a room, horses will spook for no reason, and some bird species will often fly in frenzied alarm. Most of this behaviour has a physical explanation but some are genuine encounters between animal and the world of faerie.

Quite why horses, cats, dogs, and many species of bird, are visually aware of faeries and man is not remained a great mystery until the last few decades when the answer came, indirectly, from the study of colour vision in primates. All fish, reptiles, amphibians, most species of birds, several species of primate, and humans, have trichromatic vision that distinguishes between shades of red and yellow; however, the great majority of placental mammals (this excludes the marsupials) have dichromatic vision which cannot distinguish between red and yellow. The study concluded that trichromacy was lost in early mammals but later re-evolved among certain primate species. Further study of these primates proved that all were, or had evolved from, frugivores—fruit-eaters—indicating that trichromacy re-evolved to discriminate between ripe and unripe fruit.

These studies were published in the relevant scientific journals but made little impact outside the field of evolutionary biology until Professor Leon Heidenreich of Berlin University’s Paraphysics Laboratory noted a correlation between those animal species with dichromatic vision and those with heightened awareness of faerie, or paraphysical, phenomena. Remarkably, Professor Heidenreich showed that all higher mammals with dichromacy have at least partial awareness of faerie phenomena while those with trichromatic vision have none. He concluded that when our distant primate ancestor gained the ability to identify the ripe fruit from the unripe they lost the ability to detect faerie, or ‘Bright Colours’ as they are known. Professor Heidenreich’s findings led to a rush of new research, some creditable some less so, which eventually proved a correlation between colour blindness and psychic awareness in humans. This is not to say that all with colour blindness can see faerie colours (thank heavens!) merely that there is a greater chance they might do so. Curiously, colour blindness is far more common among males at an estimated one in twelve of the population than in women where only one in two-hundred is affected. I myself suffer from colour blindness and it always made offering my wife advice on her latest dress diplomatically awkward—why she would insist on asking me I shall never know—and perhaps exacerbated our estrangement, along with her affair with Rupert the riding instructor.

Some of the research following Professor Heidenreich’s findings has been intriguing, if far-fetched. The most curious, to my mind, was that of Julius Endicote, a homeopath and animal psychiatrist with no obvious scientific or medical training, who drew a parallel between the evolution of trichromacy in primates and our loss of visual contact with the faeries and our estrangement from God in the Judeo-Christian account of the Fall of Man. In both cases, Endicote argued, the cause was fruit: the ripe fruit desired by the primate and the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge eaten by Adam and Eve. Needless to say, the theories of Julius Endicote do not appear in scientific journals.

I shall have more to say on ‘Bright Colours’ in due course, but for the moment it suffices to say that they do not resemble ordinary colours so much as shades of emotion or moods.

Faeries, like humans, build their roads sensibly: neither too steep nor too winding and when topography demands it faerie roads and those of man take an identical course. Hence, man and faerie often meet on the road, albeit only the wariness of your horse will alert you to their presence for while they are curious about humankind they generally leave us alone. Thus, while Tormod M’Neis intends his remark ‘Have the little folk crossed the road?’ as a joke it is not without substance for they will have crossed the road or walked beside us at one time or other.