Songlines - The Seven Sisters Dreaming - Paris

 Songlines is an exhibition of Australian tribal art depicting the Dreamtime story of kungkarangkalpa - the Seven Sisters. This creation Dreaming forms a Songline stretching 4000km across the whole Australian continent, and as a consequence, several tribal groups share the Dreaming, and are custodians of its sacred sites on their land.

  The Seven Sisters are ancestral beings who came down from the sky. When men saw the women they wanted them to be their wives, but this was against clan law, so the women drove them away with their digging sticks. A powerful shape shifting spirit man also wanted one of the sisters for his wife, and so the women decided to flee across the country. The spirit man followed them, and in their attempts to evade him, the Sisters created various features in the landscape, such as sand hills, rock outcrops, water holes, and caves etc. Eventually the Sisters escaped by transforming themselves into fire, and ascending back up into the sky where they became the Pleiades star group.

The Grassington Fairy Hole cave - rediscovered

 The few modern references to Fairy Hole Cave list it as an alternative name for the Cove Hole Cave, located in the limestone scar, half a mile to the north of Grassington, in the Yorkshire Dales.

 Older references however, indicate that the Fairy Hole was actually a separate cave, with Bailey John Harker writing in the mid 1800's, noting that ....
"Close by Cove Hole there is a place called the Fairy Hole, the name of which tells us the faith that Grassingtonians once had in these creatures of the fancy. (Harker 1869).

 Harker was born in Grassington, so his local knowledge should be reliable. A few years later, Harry Speight visited the Fairy Hole, and provides some extra details ....
"On the right of the lane and a field-length distant, is the ancient Fairy Hole, a low opening in the limestone which can only properly be entered by such tiny sprites as the fairies. Ordinary mortals must descend to an access on all fours. Some yards away is the Cove Hole, a long wedge-shaped cave, twelve feet high and forty feet through to the far side." (Speight 1900).