Robert Kirk of Doon Hill

Robert Kirk (1644–1692) was the Gaelic scholar and minister of Aberfoyle who compiled The Secret Commonwealth, the most significant seventeenth-century account of Scottish fairy belief. He catalogued the shape-shifting, the subterranean halls, the abductions and the second sight — information, local tradition held, that the Good People never intended for mortal eyes. On the evening of 14 May 1692 he was found, apparently dead, on the rounded summit of Doon Hill beside the village, a low wooded knoll known in Gaelic as Dun Sithean, the Fairy Knowe.

The official verdict was death by apoplexy, but folklore would not settle for that. Kirk appeared in a vision to a cousin shortly after his funeral, insisting that his body in the churchyard was a phantom and that he was in truth a prisoner in Fairyland, spirited away for exposing the elves' secrets. He was to be the Fairy Queen's chaplain for as long as the hill stood. One chance remained: at the christening of his posthumous child, Kirk would appear, and if his cousin struck the image with a knife, the enchantment would break — but the cousin froze, and Kirk was lost.

Doon Hill itself became a pilgrimage site. A lone Scots pine at the summit is identified by tradition as the tree in which Kirk's spirit is imprisoned. Visitors still tie wish-ribbons to its branches, leaving petitions to the fairy court. Walter Scott published Kirk's Secret Commonwealth in 1815, bringing the legend to a wider audience; the folklorist Marina Warner later called it one of the most important works of supernatural natural history ever written.