In the flat land behind St Ouen's Bay, where the dunes give way to fields, stand three big stones known as Les Trois Rocques. Most standing stones in Jersey had a story of some kind, and this is theirs.
Dr Symons, who collected Jersey folklore in the early twentieth century, was told by a local informant that the fairies had been seen carrying these rocks about in their aprons, to frighten the Turks. His notes were never published in full but survive in the Lord Coutanche Library of the Société Jersiaise, and the story is summarised in Francesca Bihet's chapter on Channel Island fairies.
The Turks need explaining. Giles Bois, in Jersey Folklore and Superstitions, read the phrase as a memory of the Barbary corsairs, North African pirates who raided the coasts of the Channel and the Atlantic for slaves into the eighteenth century. On that reading the fairies are the island's defenders, piling up rocks against an enemy from the sea. Bihet points out the close parallel in Guernsey, where a fisherman saw a fairy woman walking up from the shore with a great stone in her apron and planting it in the ground; that stone is La Longue Rocque at Les Paysans.
The image of fairy women carrying megaliths in their aprons is known in Britain and Brittany too. What is distinctive here is the enemy. In a coastline that feared raiders for centuries, even the fairies were on watch.
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