Case study: searching for the Colt Pixie
In January 2022, whilst researching for the first few episodes of The Wyrd Side, Finn and I travelled to “Cold Pixies Cave” on Beaulieu Heath - where Aiden and Kitty ended up after emerging from the fog.
We were searching for the Colt Pixie, the subject of our dynamic duo’s first investigation, local to the low lying heathland of the New Forest in the south of the UK.
The Colt - or sometimes Cold - Pixie takes the form of a ragged and pale pony, akin to the many hardy ponies found roaming loose across the heathland. Similar to many Will O’the Wisp stories, it seems to be more mischievous than malevolent, luring livestock and the occasional traveller into the many peat bogs across the New Forest.
We were looking for it around “Cold Pixies Cave”, theorised to have been renamed from “Colt Pixie” in the Victorian era following a typo on a survey map. This is where Aiden and Kitty end up after hiking through the unnaturally thick and disorienting fog in Episode 2, and is, contrary to the name, not actually a cave but a Bronze Age barrow, an ancient burial ground excavated in 1941 during the construction of RAF Beaulieu airfield.
I’m sorry to report that we encountered no strange activity while we were out there. Plenty of ponies were scattered around the area, but despite our searching and generally helpless nature, no Colt Pixie tried to lure us off the path.
Perhaps the weather was too fine, or maybe we carried too few apples in our bags to be interesting to the Pixies. Another likelihood is that we did actually encounter one amongst the small ponies, but it was too busy guarding the herd to bother leading us astray.
For now, however, both in the fiction of The Wyrd Side and in real life, the Colt Pixie remains elusive.
