In Ulster Folklore (1913) Elizabeth Andrews records two County Down stories from Maghera. An elderly man there told her that when his brother was four or five years old he went out with his father and lay down on the grass. After a while the father heard a great noise, and looking up saw little men about two feet high dancing round his son. He shouted at them to be gone and they ran toward a fort and disappeared. The child became deaf and did not recover his hearing for ten years, and died at seventeen.
An old woman also at Maghera told Andrews that her great-grandmother had been visited by a small old woman who forbade the building of a turf stack, saying evil would befall anyone who injured the chimneys of her house. The warning was ignored, the stack was built, and before long four cows died. Andrews notes that to cut a fairy thorn or injure a fairy's house was believed to bring misfortune.
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