Two schoolgirls, a borrowed camera and a beck at the bottom of a Bradford garden produced five photographs that convinced Sir Arthur Conan Doyle fairies were real. The Cottingley Fairies hoax ran for six decades before anyone admitted the truth.
Most visitors to Bradford head for the National Science and Media Museum without knowing the village that gave the museum one of its strangest exhibits sits three miles away, tucked between Saltaire and Bingley. Cottingley itself is unremarkable. What happened at its beck in the summer of 1917 was not.
Region: West Yorkshire, Bradford district
Best for: Folklore, photography history, a short woodland walk
Getting there: Bradford Interchange to Bingley by train, then bus or a short taxi to Cottingley village. Limited on-street parking in the village itself.
Time needed: Half a day, including the museum visit in Bradford city centre
Two Cousins and a Camera – Cottingley Fairies
In the summer of 1917, nine-year-old Frances Griffiths had just arrived in England from South Africa with her mother. They moved in with relatives in Cottingley, a village on the edge of Bradford, where Frances’s cousin Elsie Wright, then sixteen, lived with her family. The two girls spent their afternoons at Cottingley Beck, a narrow stream running through wooded gardens at the bottom of the Wright family’s plot.
They kept coming home with wet shoes and soaked hems, and their mothers kept telling them off for it. Frances and Elsie’s answer was always the same: they went to the beck to see the fairies. To prove it, Elsie borrowed her father Arthur Wright’s quarter-plate camera.
The first two photographs, taken that July, show Frances behind a small waterfall with four winged figures dancing in front of her. A second, taken weeks later, shows Elsie with a gnome. Arthur Wright, an amateur photographer himself, developed the plates in his own darkroom and dismissed them immediately as a trick, most likely paper cutouts. His wife Polly was less certain, and it was Polly’s conviction that eventually carried the story far beyond the Wright family’s front room.
Elsie left school that same year to work at a Bradford photographic studio, retouching negatives for a living, a detail that would later matter a great deal to anyone trying to work out how good her technical skills with a camera and a printed image actually were.
From a Bradford Beck to Conan Doyle’s Desk
The photographs might have stayed a private family curiosity if Polly Wright had not shown them at a Theosophical Society meeting in Bradford in 1919. Theosophy, with its interest in hidden spiritual realms and unseen nature spirits, gave the images an audience primed to believe in them before a single expert had examined the plates. From there they reached Edward Gardner, a leading Theosophist, and then Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and, by 1920, a committed spiritualist searching for proof of a world beyond the visible one.
Conan Doyle used two of the photographs to illustrate an article on fairies commissioned for the Christmas 1920 edition of The Strand Magazine, the same publication that had carried his Holmes stories for over a decade. Gardner had sent Elsie a new camera and photographic plates over the summer, marked with a private symbol so they could later be identified as genuine, and asked the girls to try again. Frances and Elsie produced three more images in August 1920, including one showing a fairy offering Elsie a flower and another, the fifth and final photograph, showing what the girls described as a “fairy bower.”
The pictures caused a sensation on publication. Conan Doyle expanded the article into a full book, The Coming of the Fairies, published in 1922. He never met the girls in person and relied entirely on Gardner’s reports and expert photographic opinion, several analysts finding the images consistent with genuine, unretouched exposures, a verdict that says more about the limits of 1920s photographic science than about fairies. Britain in 1920 was two years out from a war that had killed close to a million of its men. Spiritualism, and the hope of contact with something beyond ordinary loss, had a receptive audience that had little to do with Yorkshire or photography at all.
The Trick and the Sixty-Year Silence
The fairies in the photographs were not paper cutouts sketched from imagination. Elsie had traced them from illustrations in Princess Mary’s Gift Book, a children’s annual published in 1914, then added wings and coloured them in with watercolour. She and Frances pinned the cutouts upright in the grass and undergrowth with hatpins, angled the camera low, and photographed them from a distance that made the pins invisible against the dark background of the beck.
Both girls maintained for decades that at least some of the photographs, and the fairies themselves, were genuine. Frances continued to insist into old age that although four of the five images were faked, the fairies she and Elsie saw at the beck were real, and the fifth photograph showed them as they actually appeared. Elsie was more evasive, hinting at the trick in interviews without confirming it outright, and, by most accounts, enjoying the mystery she had helped create rather more than she regretted it.
The full unravelling came in the 1980s, when Geoffrey Crawley, editor of the British Journal of Photography, ran a detailed technical investigation into the plates, the camera, and the printed source material, comparing the fairy figures directly against the 1914 gift book illustrations. Faced with the evidence, both women, by then in their seventies and eighties, admitted the photographs were staged. The story had run, unchallenged in any serious way, for sixty-three years, longer than either woman’s working life.
Why a Bradford Photography Museum Still Displays a Hoax
The original photographs, along with two of the cameras used to take them, are held permanently by the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford city centre, a short journey from the village itself. The museum acquired the final camera in the story in recent years, completing the physical record of exactly how the images were made. The museum treats the case not as an embarrassment but as one of the clearest examples in British history of how easily photographic “evidence” can be manufactured and believed by intelligent, sceptical people, a subject with obvious relevance well beyond 1917.
Cottingley Beck, where the original photographs were taken, sits on private land behind houses and cannot be visited directly. What you can do is walk the public footpaths around Cottingley Woods, using a section of the Bradford Millennium Way, and get a genuine sense of the setting: narrow water, overhanging trees, the kind of dappled half-light that makes a staged photograph plausible in a way a wide, open field never would.
Practical Tips
Start at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford city centre to see the original photographs and cameras before travelling out to the village itself. Entry to the museum is free.
Cottingley village is reachable by First Bus services from Bradford Interchange, or a short taxi ride from Bingley railway station, which is on the Airedale line from Leeds and Bradford Forster Square.
The beck itself runs through private gardens and cannot be accessed. Do not attempt to enter private property looking for the exact spot; the public footpath around Cottingley Woods gives a comparable feel to the setting without trespassing.
Use the AllTrails app to navigate the Cottingley Woods circular route, which links into the wider Bradford Millennium Way footpath network.
Combine the visit with Saltaire, a UNESCO World Heritage village less than two miles from Cottingley, for a fuller day out in the area.
Responsible Visiting
Cottingley is a residential village, not a tourist attraction. Stick to public footpaths, keep noise down near the houses bordering the beck, and do not photograph private gardens or attempt to locate the exact original spot on private land.
Reader Q&A
Can I actually see the spot where the photographs were taken? No. Cottingley Beck runs through private land behind residential gardens. The public footpath through Cottingley Woods passes nearby and gives a similar setting.
Are the original photographs on public display? Yes, permanently, at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford city centre, along with two of the cameras used to take them.
Did Elsie and Frances ever fully admit it was a hoax? Elsie admitted all five photographs were faked. Frances maintained until her death that four were faked but insisted the fifth was genuine.
Why did Arthur Conan Doyle believe the photographs were real? Conan Doyle was a committed spiritualist by 1920, searching for evidence of a world beyond the physical in the years after the First World War. Photographic experts of the era found the plates consistent with unretouched exposures, which reassured him, though 1920s analysis had no reliable way to detect a carefully staged studio-style trick shot taken in a garden.
How long did it take for the hoax to be exposed? Sixty-three years. The photographs were taken in 1917 and 1920. Full technical exposure came in the 1980s through Geoffrey Crawley’s investigation for the British Journal of Photography.
Where did the fairy designs actually come from? Elsie traced them from illustrations in Princess Mary’s Gift Book, a children’s annual published in 1914, then coloured and cut them out before pinning them upright in the undergrowth.
Where to Stay
The Mercure Bradford Bankfield Hotel sits centrally in Bradford, within easy reach of both the museum and the Airedale line out to Bingley and Cottingley.
Oakwood Hall, a family-run hotel in Bingley, puts you within a short drive of Cottingley village itself and the wider Bronte Country to the west.
A Village That Outgrew Its Own Street
Cottingley today is a quiet suburb of Bradford, the kind of place you could drive through without noticing. What happened at the bottom of one garden in 1917 outlasted the girls who staged it, fooled one of the most famous writers in the world, and still draws people out to a beck they are not allowed to see. The fairies were paper. The hold the story still has on people is not.
For more Yorkshire history worth seeking out, visit Secret Yorkshire.
