The pixies are the faery folk of the South West of England, by which I mean Cornwall, Devon and the western part of Somerset (essentially Exmoor, the Quantocks and the Blackdown Hills). Beyond this area, moving into northern and eastern Somerset and into Dorset, it is far more common to speak of fairies. Pixies came to wider attention through the work of a handful of authors. Before that, they had been well-known within the south-west, and local people had speculated about their origins over centuries.