On the headland between Ouaisné and Portelet, a gully in the granite opens into caves that have produced some of the most important Ice Age finds in Europe. Excavations at La Cotte de St Brelade have turned up Neanderthal teeth and hundreds of thousands of stone tools, along with the bones of mammoth and woolly rhinoceros.
Long before archaeologists arrived, local people had their own name for it. The Jersey Evening Post's 2021 guide to island fairy lore, drawing on Jèrriais place names, gives it as La Cave à la Fée a Ouiné, the fairy's cave at Ouaisné. The Jersey CI Folklore blog likewise lists 'the Fairy Cave at Ouaisné' among the island's fairy places.
This fits a wider Jersey pattern that Francesca Bihet describes in her study of Channel Island fairies: the little people, les p'tits faîtchieaux, were thought to have lived in the island before humans and to have built or inhabited its ancient places, from dolmens to caves. Small stone beads found at archaeological sites were called fairy spindles.
That is as far as the record goes. We have found no specific tale of what the fairy of La Cotte did, or who met her. The name is recorded; the story, if there ever was one, seems to be lost.
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