72- FAIRY RINGS...FAIRY CIRCLES...HONEST!....

Some people, in other countries, call them 'elf circles' or 'pixie circles', and they occur naturally as a ring of mushrooms. I've witnessed them twice. Once a ring was in a grass field beside my school, about 15 to 20 feet in diameter. It was close to being a perfect' arc. Before I could find a camera, though, the marching band had trampled it. The other ring was in a horse pasture, and one of my students called me on a Friday afternoon, excited. However, by the time I got there the next morning, early, the horses had trampled the area. That one was much larger!
The fungus, mushrooms, are usually found in forest areas. At times grass rings may appear as a darker green arch.
I have always been fascinated with real 'fairy tales', as a child, especially when a GOOD teacher read about them at the end of the day in class. We put our heads down on the desk top and listened, enthralled. Her tales, read to us, usually took place in European settings...European forklore! Settings were often neat places where elves gathered to dance!
Oh, I realize the scientific reasonings (you can look those up), BUT the imaginary happenings surrounding these Fairy Rings are what I am in like with...period! Oral traditions of folklore, like the Celtic folk superstition, claim that the safest way to investigte a ring is to run around it nine times, enabling the human to hear the fairies dancing and frolicking.
Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream (Act II, Scene I)"...he says, "And I serve the fairy queen,/To dew her orbs upon the green" and "To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind"....
Victorian era Fairy Circles art came into vogue in European countries.
As a Socratic-style educator, YOU are invited to seek out more on these current Fairy Ring happenings on YOUR own, whenever and where you can find them, quickly capturing the evidence on film. Oh, especially dig out a children's folklore book or three in your attic or head for the local library to borrow one of the books to relive, uh, this imaginary world of Fairy Circles...honest!