General Chat

Clare This is a piskie Cornish country people have believed for centuries that their homeland is shared with the Little People they call piskies. In the Cornish language Kernowek (still spoken by some people today and with similarities to Breton and Welsh) the word pixie was changed so that the 'x' sound 'ks', was turned round into 'sk' and 'pixie' became 'piskie.' Some linguists believe that the word originally came from 'Picts' - the race of small, dark people who originally inhabited Scotland. They could be wrong, of course. In the past,older Cornish people were very sure about how piskies behaved, although they were less clear about what the piskies looked like. Most said the piskies were a playful, teasing but happy people who came to Cornwall with the saints from Ireland while others believed that the piskies were once the gods of pre-Christian Cornwall. No-one was sure though. Even today however, many people still respect the piskies, because they can be as good as they are mischievous, helping with household tasks or threshing corn on a moonlit night. People who upset them though are said to become piskie-led, losing all sense of time and place and wandering helplessly through what seems to them to be strange and unfamiliar lands, until eventually they drop down exhausted.