Editor’s Note: The fairies of Almscliff Crag seem to have been forgotten, but here is a report from 1884.

I often called, on my way to school, at the house of a very little old woman (in fact I do not ever remember seeing a less woman) called Fanny Bradley, with the pretence of buying pens and pencils, but more from a desire to see this little woman; and I am sure that there are scores of the older part of the inhabitants of Rigton and Stainburn and the villages surrounding Almscliff Crag at the present day who can remember this little woman and her brother Tom, who was a very little man also. People said that when these two little folk were infants their mother took them with her to a field adjoining Almscliff Crag, where she had occasion to go to shear or reap some corn. At that day it was generally admitted by most people that a kind of little people of the fairy order, about 2ft. high and about the same proportion in body, and dressed in all kinds of flash and gaudy colours, and flying about with the quickness of lightning, inhabited the openings and crooks in the rocks. While this woman was busy at work these fairies came and stole her children. When she found that her children had gone she cried and was so much troubled that the fairies brought them back, and placed them where they found them. And they said that that was the reason Fanny and her brother were so little. Anon, ‘Local Notes and Queries’