I believe in the fairies. I do.

It doesn’t hurt that science these days is talking about parallel universes and worm holes, and that particles are neither here nor there but maybe both places. I’m not sure that is an accurate description of the current state of physics, but it sure is interesting.

James Hynes and his brother Gus, a farmer and a laborer, were born in the Burren, County Clare, around 1930. They were in their 70s when I met them some years ago, hardworking Irishmen with leathered hands. I remember the hands. I also remember words they said to me, a simple sentence: “Isn’t that interesting?” Those words followed a very mystical story involving fairies. I’m sure I’ll tell it to you one day.

What I remember is there was no bravado suffused in their story, no aquarian revelation. To them, it seemed a mere retelling of facts — though facts that perhaps pointed to a deeper meaning found below the surface of things. “Isn’t that interesting?” was the simple anchor of it all.

The brothers were deeply connected to the land. “I think the farther away people get from the land, the farther away they will be from these experiences,” James told me.

It was after all in County Clare that a highway bypass project had to be rerouted to avoid the cutting down of a whitethorn tree, known as a fairy tree. Workers refused to participate for fear of displeasing the fairies and bringing bad luck and misfortune to motorists. Some say the story is apocryphal; others say all you have to do is go to the spot and see for yourself the bend in the road and the tree that still stands.

Lady Gregory, cofounder in 1904 of the Abbey Theater along with W.B. Yeats, dedicated herself to collecting tales of folklore directly from their tellers across County Clare. Her book, Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, published in 1920, is rich with stories told to her “on the spot.” It was said that the Sidhe (shee, or fairies) “clustered around her thick as grass.” Of the fairies, she wrote: “Their country is Tir-Nan-Og — the Country of the Young. It is under the ground or under the sea, or it may not be far from any of us.”

Lady Gregory had heaps of stories about the famous herbalist and wisewoman Biddy Early. This from an old man on the beach: “The priests were greatly against Biddy Early. And it’s no doubt it was from the fairies she got her knowledge. But who wouldn’t go to hell for a cure if one of his own was sick? And the priests don’t like to be doing cures themselves. Father Carey used to do them, but he went wrong, with the people bringing him too much whiskey to pay him.”

Visiting Ireland, one is prone to hearing stories. A man once entranced me with an amazing tale about the fairies. I was atop a stool at Keane’s pub in Maam after hiking up to Maumeen, a pilgrimage site where St. Patrick is said to have blessed Connemara. My pint was erupting nicely in front of me as a man asked the inevitable question, “Are you here on holiday?” There’s no disguising a Yank.

It wasn’t long before he told me the story. He was out for a few pints, and when the evening session was done, he began to cycle home. There was a big hill he had to climb between the pub and his house, so he took to walking his bike. The man told me there was a fairy fort, a ring fort, behind the walls, and a fine flat field of a few acres, and from behind a gap in the wall came a few very small men, fairy men, who blocked his path. “We need a referee for the hurling match,” they said. Their usual one, well, “He never showed up, wherever he went.”

The man knew well the stories about displeasing the fairies, of “being taken.” So, he leaned his bicycle against the wall and in he went. “Up and down, up and down they went, hell for leather!” he said. “They were able to play hurling.” Close to the end of the match, with the score level, he told me he blew his whistle to make sure there was no losers. “They asked me would I come again, so pleased they were, and I said I would,” he told me. “But I never took that road to my house again.”

Eddie Lenihan tells a version of this story in his 2003 book, Meeting the Other Crowd. That term, “the other crowd,” is one of several ways Irish people speak of the fairies. They’re also known as “the gentle people” or “the wee folk.” Just don’t call them by their names.

Ancient Celtic mythic stories have survived for over a millennium, thanks to the Irish monks who transcribed them on vellum. According to Manchán Magan, in his book Listen to the Land Speak, the monks also “made sure to weave St. Patrick into the old pagan folklore once Christianity began to spread in Ireland after the fifth century.” The stories are often wild and phantasmagorical, but Magan writes: “It is worth bearing with the myths, though, even when they are at their most far-fetched. Irish mythology is based on the notion that the natural, human, and divine worlds all co-exist.”

It must be said that Celtic culture is not alone in recognizing these parallel worlds. It might be any culture, James Hynes reminds us, that is so intimately bound to the land.

Ah, then there is the sea, as Lady Gregory tells us. In the west of Ireland, like here on the Outer Cape, there exists a culture bound to the sea. The rugged coast extends from Donegal to Cork, and then there are the Aran Islands and the Blaskets, and it is here that the Selke, a being half seal and half human, is sighted by those living in remote coastal areas.

In order to come ashore, the Selke must shed its skin or tail. If you find either and hide it, the Selke it belongs to cannot return to the sea. Irish folklore includes plenty of stories of men finding a Selke skin, hiding it, then marrying the Selke. They’ve made me forever look differently at the crowd at Longnook, hauled out and basking on an August afternoon.

And of course, there’s the horses, for it was said by a man near Dun Conor that “everything in the sea the same as on land and we know there’s horses in it.” A woman from Connemara told Lady Gregory that “a man saw horses and foals coming up from the sea. He caught one and kept it, and set it racing, and no horse or no pony could ever come near it, till one day the race was on the strand, and away with it into the sea, and the jockey along with it, and they were never seen again.”

The poet and philosopher John O’Donohue hails from a farm in County Clare, not far from Hynes’ Cross, where James and Gus lived. It’s entirely possible, in this mythical world, that he spoke the following words to the brothers: “The call of the wild is a call to the elemental levels of the soul, the places of intuition, kinship, swiftness, fluency, and the consolation of the lonesome that is not lonely.”

Sláinte.