Thus he is best remembered for his treatise of 1691 The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies. Andrews and Edinburgh, a master of Celtic tongues, the author of the Gaelic Psalter of 1684, a theologian and student of antique lore, Kirks greatest intellectual achievements were as a natural scientist (so to speak) of the hidden realm. Kirk was the victim not only of the spite of a notoriously capricious folk, but of his own curiosity. Whatever the case, the great tree of Doon Hill is still called the Ministers Pine, and one to this day can occasionally find bright strips of cloth”upon which wishes have been written”strewn about it or tied to the branches of surrounding trees. Another, less terrible version of the same story says that Kirk is not so much a prisoner of the fairies as an ambassador, able to convey messages between two realms that over the years have become increasingly estranged from one another. Local legend has it that there is nothing more interred beneath that slowly dissolving monument than a coffin filled with rocks, the good reverends body having been spirited away by fairies soon after his sepulture, to be kept till the end of time in their mansions beneath Doon Hill (the Anglicized version, I assume, of dun sitheen or fairy knoll), by which device they also keep his soul imprisoned in the great pine that grows on the hills crest. Perhaps it does not matter all that much, however the marker may be only a cenotaph, when all is said and done. Linguæ Hiberniæ Lumen ) now worn down to a shallow and barely legible intaglio of milky gray.

The great slab of his gravestone is in much the same condition as most of the other funerary markers that survive from the seventeenth century in those latitudes: smoothed and darkened by the winds and rains of three centuries, brindled with dark green and pale glaucous lichens, gently sunken to one side by a slight subsidence in the soil, and bearing an inscription (Robertus Kirk, A.M. Robert Kirk, who lived from 1644 to 1692, and whose mortal remains rest”or do they?”in his parish kirkyard in Aberfoyle, a Scottish village lying near the Laggan River and at the foot of Craigmore. As the feast of All Souls nears, spare a piteous thought, if you will, for the poor Rev.

The Secret Commonwealth by Robert Kirk