In olden days, Cornish country people believed that they shared their lovely land with another, more elusive population of piskies. The Cornish piskey, of course, is legend, but much less is generally known about those other faery people, the spriggans, knockers and Small People, whose activities, like his, were closely interwoven with those of the ordinary mortal folk among whom they lived.

Not so many years ago,one could ask any really old soul whose days had been spent in Cornwall and get a sure description of any of these little creatures and what they got up to. First there were the prankish, teasing, laughing, heel-kicking piskies who,some declare, came with the saints from Ireland, while others say that they are the souls of virtuous pagans from times yet deeper in the past. There are those, too, who believe the piskies were once the gods of pre-Christian Cornwall, giant-like in stature, but who, in the face of the new religion - some say they were scattered with holy water-shrank in size, a fate which will continue until they vanish entirely from the earth.

Whatever their origins, the piskies - or Piskey as he is called, for he usually works alone - are as good a people as they are mischievous, helping the aged and infirm in their household tasks, threshing the corn on a moonlit night, plaiting the pony's mane for stirrups and riding it wildly the night through. And, of course, many people of old were piskey-led when benighted, losing all sense of time and place and wandering helplessly in what appeared to be a strange landscape, until they dropped down into an exhausted sleep.

What were these little old men, the piskies, like to look upon? To begin with they were all identical, and each no higher than, say a mouse. They wore wigs of grey lichen beneath their red caps. Eyes as bright and unwinking as a robin's stared out of each small, wrinkled face. They were dressed in dapper fashion - white weskits, green stockings, brown coats and breeches, while their brightly gleaming shoes were buckled with diamond dew- drops. Always lively, when they chattered they filled the air with a sound like the droning of bees. They were accustomed with riding about on snails.

Times have changed in Cornwall, for better or worse. Few who live in the county today have cause to be out and about in the countryside alone whenever or wherever her elfin people may be abroad. Even lesser numbers work underground in search of rich ores the knockers were so expert in finding. In many ways the little people of Cornwall therefore have their haunts to themselves more than ever before, rarely disturbed by a gatherer of samphire or gull's eggs on the cliff ledges, by a lone traveller on a dark moorland track after "day-down", or by miners working at the end of a level. The spread of education, of course, has caused most people to be sceptical even about their existence but in Cornwall, where belief in such things dies hard, such outright scepticism is less noticeable. And the fact remains that, just because you don't believe in these enchanting creatures, they don't cease to exist as a result.