Note 289 — Chapter XVI
Reading edition
See Mrs. Bray's work just cited, Vol. I., Letter x.: also a reference to the goblin or "bucka" as hairy, in Mr. Whitley Stokes' "Gwreans an Bys," pp. 124, 125.
In Mr. Hunt's "Popular Romances of the West of England" (London, J. C. Hotten, 2nd edit., pp. 217, 218), there is a weird story of a wrestling-match by night, at a certain cairn near Penzance. The wrestlers were believed by the two onlookers to be supernatural beings:—"They were men of great size and strength, with savage faces, rendered more terrible by the masses of uncombed hair which hung about them, and the colours with which they had painted their cheeks." They had appeared to issue out of the rocks of the cairn. Although the term "great size," if it denotes stature, does not include these men among dwarfs, yet they are represented as Picti; and as "supernatural," hirsute cave-dwellers.