"For a long time the fairies alone had possession of L'Ancresse, the cromlechs, hougues, and caves," Miss Chepmell wrote. Then men went across the sea, learned magic, and came back to spread witchcraft through the island so fast that the fairies had no time to get used to it. Their rings were trampled by witches' feet and scorched by "the hoofs of their demon partners every Friday night", and their human friends and pet animals wasted under spells they could not lift.
The fairies met on L'Ancresse and, finding they could do nothing, decided to forget. At the eastern end of L'Ancresse Bay a great pile of rocks rose from the sea, much reduced by quarrying since, and at the top was a small fountain, cool in summer and never frozen, whose water made those who drank it forget the past. The fairies climbed the rocks in a sad procession and drank. For them the water had no effect. In despair they hurried back across the common to the three standing stones with a fourth laid over them, "and there they hung themselves with blades of grass. So ended the kindly race in Guernsey, the fairy fountain and the upright stones their only monuments."
Carey added some last traces of fairy belief: an old woman of eighty who remembered food left outside the door with unfinished work, and an old man who said the fairies lived in a vaulted cave above La Petite Porte and would mend cart wheels in return for food. The Gibet has gone. The map point is placed on L'Ancresse Common near Fontenelle and is approximate.
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