CASTLETOWN AND THE SOUTH SIDE OF THE ISLAND
It still remains to explore the south side of the island, commencing
again at Peel. Here the chief interest centres in Castletown, with its
famous Castle Rushen; in the splendid stretch of coast between Peel
and Port Erin; and in the cliff scenery of Spanish Head and the Calf.
The direct road from Peel to Castletown, turning off from the Douglas
road at St. John's, and proceeding by way of Foxdale, is a dull affair
at best, and is spoilt at Foxdale itself by the untidy presence of
lead-mines. Beyond Foxdale, indeed, the landscape improves as we skirt
the east slopes of South Barrule, which have been covered of late years
with extensive fir-plantings, and begin to descend the hill, with the
sea splendidly conspicuous in front.
[Illustration: CASTLETOWN AND CASTLE RUSHEN.
Up to 1862 this was the capital. The grim Castle with
its massive keep overlooks the harbour and is one of
the most interesting features of the island.]
A much better road is to take the lane due south from Peel that
skirts the head of Glen Maye, and winds up to the pass on the west
of South Barrule. This, of course, is a rougher route, and involves
much additional hill. Better still for the pedestrian is a composite,
roundabout way that follows the grand coast-line more or less closely
to Port Erin, and bends thence to the east for Castletown. Two days
may easily be spent on this last journey by sleeping at Port Erin, and
spending the bulk of the following day in a leisurely exploration of
the Calf.
From Peel the coast-line may be followed the whole distance to the
mouth of Glen Maye; but the path, so far as it exists, is in places
rather giddy, and approaches unpleasantly near to the edge of the
cliff. We believe that it is examined every year before the beginning
of the "season" to make sure that it has not slipped away in the winter
months into the gulf below. All inland view is at first shut out by
the huge green slopes of Peel Hill on our left; but presently, as we
double Contrary Head, the fine southern range of mountain comprising
Cronk-ny-Irey-Lhaa (1,449 feet), the Carnanes (1,000 feet), and Bradda
Head (768 feet), is seen dropping to the sea, more directly and more
abruptly than perhaps any other hills to the south of the Border (in
Scotland it is matched on the southern coast of Mull), except perhaps
Penmaenmawr and the north coast of Exmoor. The view hence, looking
south, is impressive, or even deserves the epithet "grand"; at no
other spot in the island do mountain and sea group in a single picture
in such intimate proximity as here. At Glen Maye the line of cliff
is abruptly interrupted by the little stream that here descends from
Glen Rushen. The best of this glen is probably where it debouches on
the sea; higher up, however, it becomes wooded, and exhibits a small
waterfall, but is apt, perhaps, in "tripper-time" to be somewhat
unpleasantly popular. At the head of the glen we regain the main road,
by which we might have travelled, had we liked, directly from Peel.
Passing the hamlet of Dalby, and always looking down on the sea on our
right, we come shortly to a fork half a mile beyond the church, where a
lane drops down due south (the right-hand branch of the fork) into the
hollow of Dalby Lhag. At the bottom of this is a tiny rill pleasantly
hidden among trees. We are now virtually at sea-level, but in the
course of the next mile we rise nearly 800 feet. The ascent is by a
kind of rocky staircase, in which the bare ribs of the earth have been
stripped of their scanty covering of soil. At the top of this, where
we join a better lane that comes over Cronk Fedjag, we strike away to
the right, over high grass pastures, to the fairly obvious summit of
Cronk-ny-Irey-Lhaa: the lane goes down to Port St. Mary (with a turn
to the right for Port Erin), keeping the range of mountain between
the sea and itself. On Cronk-ny-Irey-Lhaa and the neighbouring ridge
of the Carnanes--the two are only severed by the sudden notch of the
Slack--those who are free to wander may well wander a summer day, or
bask a whole morning in the sunlight, stretched out on the scented turf,
While the dreaming man,
Half conscious of the soothing melody,
With sidelong eye looks out upon the scene.
It is astonishing that a hill-range of such minor elevation should
clothe itself in attributes of such really mountainous dignity. From
the end of the Carnanes we drop cautiously to the sea at Fleswick Bay,
whence those who are weary of much up-and-down may soon make their way
to Port Erin or Port St. Mary. Those, on the contrary, who are still
eager for the hills may yet, if they like, make another pretty climb by
scrambling up and over Bradda Head.
Port Erin and Port St. Mary, though only a mile apart, are almost
as different from one another--though, of course, in a different
way--as are Lynton and Lynmouth, in Devonshire, or any other famous
topographical twins. Those who prefer a watering-place that is almost
wholly watering-place, and not yet spoilt by extravagant building
(though the hands that direct its destinies had better call a halt);
who are content to be included in a definite bay that is bounded by
definite cliffs; and who are willing to look westward over unlimited
space, in which the sun sinks magnificently in his "ocean-bath," will
get what they like at Port Erin. Those, on the other hand, who like
to face eastward, and to vary the monotony of the seascape by distant
lines of low coast; who dislike to be cooped in a narrow space; and who
ask the stronger local colour of a busy little port, will probably turn
to Port St. Mary. _Stat suus cuique honor_: each may be praised without
dispraising its rival; though the writer, were he asked, would find
little difficulty in giving his casting vote between the two. In any
case it is intolerable that the little Manx railway, when rebuilding
Port St. Mary Station, should have built so conspicuous an erection in
such hideous red-brick. They have done the same at Douglas and Peel.
When will builders come to realize that red-brick of all complexions is
wholly out of place in a land of grey and green?
Castletown, till 1862, was officially the capital of Man, and is
still far the least "developed" of all its four principal towns.
It is simply, in fact, a small, quiet country town, even less
spoilt for visitors than the inland parts of Peel; though Peel,
of course, exhibits, in its peerless St. Patrick's Isle, features
of picturesqueness that we shall seek for in Castletown in vain.
Castletown, no doubt, would be big and ugly if it could; and by making
golf-links at Derby Haven it has certainly given hostages to fortune.
After all, there is nothing to see in the place save Castle Rushen,
which is principally keep, with a narrow ward, and an _enceinte_ wall
and ditch that surround the whole. So narrow a ward, and a keep so
disproportionately big, can be matched perhaps only at Middleham, in
Yorkshire--once the home of the "King-Maker"--where the keep is late
Norman, and the _enceinte_ fourteenth century. At Castletown, it is
asserted, no part of the existing structure dates back earlier than
the fourteenth, or at earliest the thirteenth, century; though the
castle itself is said to have been founded--the account is perhaps
mythical--by King Guthred the Dane in 947. The keep, moreover, though
so-called in all the guide-books, is not really a keep at all--not a
single solid tower, that is, in the sense of Middleham Castle, or, to
take more familiar instances, in the sense of Rochester, Dover, or
London. On the contrary it is really a minute inner ward surrounded by
an _enceinte_ of quite disproportionate height. Formerly, under the
rule of the house of Stanley, it served, like the Tower and Windsor
Castle, for castle and palace alike; after that the place was a
prison; and now it is dismantled, save for a handful of rooms, some
of which shelter the Manx Museum. Most of the apartments are gloomy
enough, and one is glad to escape from them back into the sunlight: the
great slabs of slate, however, that serve for floor or ceiling--some
of them measure 12 feet in length--are surely without parallel
elsewhere. The drawing-room, which is the biggest room in the castle,
has now an interesting collection of Manx antiquities--_e.g._, old
rushlight-holders, and the ancient Bishop's mace; but the object that
strikes one most with amazement is the splendid skeleton of an Irish
elk--an animal, of course, that has long since been extinct--which
was found some sixteen years ago in a marl-pit near St. John's.
This is said to be complete, and measures about 10 feet across the
antlers--sufficient indication of its general gigantic size.
The Isle of Man, as belonging to the Stanleys, was pertinaciously
Royalist in the great Civil War; and hither retired James, the seventh
Earl of Derby, on July 30, 1644, after the crushing defeat at Marston
Moor on the previous July 2 had finally shattered the cause of the King
in the North. Here he resided with his family in Castle Rushen for the
next six years; and well would it have been for him had he resided here
till the end. On June 16, 1650, however, Charles II. landed in the
Firth of Cromarty to commence the new campaign that was destined to
end so disastrously at Worcester; and in the August of the following
year Derby, in his turn, set foot again on English soil at Wyre Water,
in Lancashire, having been selected by Charles in the previous year to
command the Royalist levies out of Lancashire and Cheshire. On sailing
for this expedition, from which he was fated never to return, he
left his wife behind him at Castle Rushen, under the care of William
Christian, who commanded the insular forces. The Countess was the
famous Charlotte de la Trémoille, daughter of Claude de la Trémoille,
Duc de Thouars, and was lineally descended, on her mother's side,
from the great Dutch patriot, William the Silent. Already, in the
course of the great Civil War, she had distinguished herself by the
defence of Lathom House, in Lancashire, during the siege of which she
had "rejected with scorn all proposals for surrender, declaring that
she and her children would fire the castle and perish in the flames
rather than yield." The fortunes of her husband need not now be further
followed, save briefly to record that he was beheaded by the Parliament
at Bolton on October 15, 1651, having been captured near Nantwich
whilst trying to make his escape alone after the defeat at Worcester.
The unfortunate Countess, on hearing of his arrest, at once despatched
overtures to England proposing the surrender of the island in the hope
of saving his life. Whether the proposal was scouted, or arrived too
late, the Earl, we have seen, was put to death; and it is said that the
first intimation that his unhappy wife received of it was a curt and
brutal sentence (though it may not have been meant as such)--"the late
Earl of Derby"--in a letter from Colonel Duckenfield that was delivered
to her on October 29, calling on her to surrender Castle Rushen.
[Illustration: PEEL HARBOUR AND CASTLE.
This is the most picturesque of the Manx towns and its
Castle and Cathedral on St. Patrick's Isle are
extremely interesting buildings.]
The Parliamentary troops had landed on the island two days previously,
it is practically certain--though the point has been disputed--by the
treachery of William Christian. The distracted Countess was apparently
at first for holding out, but finally surrendered on November 3. She
ultimately died at Knowsley, in 1664, and was buried near her husband
in the parish church of Ormskirk. She had lived just long enough,
however, to see summary vengeance executed on the traitor by her son,
the eighth Earl. Christian, of course, was included in the general
Act of Indemnity that alone rendered tolerable the return of Charles
to England in 1660. Derby, however, was lord in Man, and claimed to
exercise there peculiar sovereign powers in his own right. Christian
was arrested, but refused to plead, and could not thus technically be
brought to trial. "The Governor requested the deemsters and the House
of Keys to inform him what the laws of the island provided should be
done in the case of a prisoner refusing to plead. The reply was that
the life and property of the recusant were at the absolute disposal
of the lord of the island." In England the old remedy in such a case
was pressing to death (the _peine forte et dure_), but the goods of
the prisoner were not forfeited. It is said to have been for this very
reason (that his property might descend to his heir), that Walter
Calverley refused to plead when indicted at York for the murder of
his children in 1605. On December 29 the deemster pronounced sentence
of death on Christian, and four days later he was shot at Hango Hill
on the seashore on the way to Derby Haven, and, roughly, a mile to
the east of Castle Rushen. The spot is almost exactly opposite King
William's College, and is marked by the slight ruins of a blockhouse
that was built by the seventh Earl, and by the site of an ancient
burial-ground. He was buried at Malew Church, as recorded in the parish
register--the last two sentences in terrible opposition: "Mr. William
Christian of Ronaldsway, late Receiver, was shot to death at Hangoe
Hill, on January 2. He died most penitently and most courageously,
made a good end, prayed earnestly, made an excellent speech, and the
next day was buried in the chancel of Malew." The character of William
Christian has been very variously estimated, but the islanders regarded
him as a patriot martyr, who died for defending certain of their rights
against the encroachments of the reigning house. "Baase Illiam Dhone"
(The Death of Brown-haired William) "dwells on the retribution that
befell the families of those who were responsible for his execution."
On the other hand, it seems certain that Christian was accused in
1658 of having embezzled extensive revenues of the then sequestrated
bishopric; and whether guilty of this or not--he was never brought to
trial--he certainly fled to England, and this presupposes his guilt.
Popular judgment and critical history thus often fall at loggerheads;
Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, who was beheaded at Pontefract in 1322, was
honoured after his death almost as though a saint--Leland, writing
in the time of Henry VIII., speaks of "the Hil, where the goode Duke
of _Lancastre_ was beheddid"--whilst the _Dictionary of National
Biography_ can find nothing better to say of him than that "despite his
tragic end, it is difficult to say anything favourable of Thomas of
Lancaster."
In what has been said we have endeavoured to treat generally of all
that is really best worth seeing in Man, dwelling briefly on those
topics, whether of history or topography, that seem really of most
validity, and passing in silence those aspects of the island--luckily
few and often temporary--that appear to the writer not in harmony
with its true and permanent charms, and in some cases even repellent.
It would be pleasant in conclusion, did only space permit, to dig
down a little deeper into the treasures of its place-names and local
traditions, and to review the many quaint notices of its history
and curiosities that are scattered up and down in the pages of old
writers. It is not clear that Camden had ever visited Man, though he
gives a short account of it at the end of his _Magna Britannia_. The
natives, he observes, lived chiefly on oat-bread; whilst both the sheep
and cattle were smaller than in England, "nor have they such stately
fronts." Part of his description is embodied in a letter that was
sent him by the Bishop, John Merrick. "The women," says this letter,
"whenever they go out of their own houses, as if mindful of mortality
wrap themselves up in the linen that is to serve for their shroud."
Similarly, the late Augustus J. C. Hare says that a married woman in
Northumberland, "in moments of gloom," will take out and try on her
grave-clothes, which she always procures as part of her trousseau, "and
find comfort in the inspection of the mournful linen." "Such women,"
continues the Bishop, "as are capitally convicted are sewed up in a
sack and thrown from a rock into the sea. The natives in general are
clear from stealing and begging from door to door, extremely religious,
and to a man exact in their conformity to the church of England."
Preaching in Jersey, in 1692, the learned Canon Falk thus boasted,
in similar strain, that that island did not then contain a single
dissenter. Giraldus Cambrensis, as cited by Camden, has a somewhat
amusing story. The island lies, he tells us, "in the midway between the
north of England and Ireland, occasioning no small dispute among the
ancients to which of the two it belonged. The dispute was at last thus
settled. As venomous creatures were found upon trial to live here, it
was unanimously judged to the Britans." Ireland, it is well known, now
possesses no poisonous reptiles: they were banished from its precincts
by St. Patrick.
Camden, very shrewdly, makes the further observation that "the natives,
however, in language and manners come nearer the Irish, but with a
small mixture of Norwegian." This is curiously confirmed by the modern
study of place-names, which indicates a considerable Norse settlement.
Other place-names are strongly Erse in character--_e.g._, the familiar
Balla (in Ballasalla, Ballabooye, Ballaquine, etc., and ninety-three
others). Slieau, as a generic name for mountain (Slieau Ruy, Slieau
Ree, etc.), and Glen for a mountain-ravine. "The map of the island,"
says the late Canon Isaac Taylor, "contains about 400 names, of which
about 20 per cent. are English, 21 per cent. are Norwegian, and 59 per
cent. are Celtic. These Celtic names are all of the most characteristic
Erse type." The old Manx language, in fact, is still not altogether
dead, though one no longer hears it spoken as Welsh is spoken in Wales,
or as Gaelic in the Highlands of Scotland. Gough, in his additions to
Camden, prints two specimens of this old tongue, though the present
writer will not vouch for their orthography. The charitable disposition
of the people, he says, "is marked by this proverb: _Tra tayn derrey
vought cooney lesh bought alley, ta fee heme garaghtee_: _i.e._,
When one poor man relieves another, God Himself laughs outright for
joy." "It is curious to observe," adds Canon Isaac Taylor--if we may
revert for the moment to the subject of place-names--"that the names
which denote places of Christian worship are all Norwegian; they are an
indication of the late date at which heathenism must have prevailed,
and help to explain the fact that so many heathen superstitions and
legends still linger in the island."
INDEX
The principal reference is given first after names.
Andreas, 21
"Baase Illiam Dhone," 59
Ballaugh, 18
Baregarrow, 31
Barrule, N., 6, 18, 31, 44
" S., 31, 48
Beinn-y-Phott, 38, 18, 37
Bishop's Court, 30, 29
Bradda Head, 8, 31, 49, 51
Bride, 21
Calf, The, 48, 49
Carnanes, The, 49, 51
Carraghan, 37
Castle Rushen, 53, 28
Castletown, 53, 10
Christian, William, 56, 57
Clagh Ouyre, 18, 38
Cobham, Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester, 13
Colden, 18, 20, 37
Contrary Head, 49
Corna Dale, 43, 44
Cronk Fedjag, 51
Cronk-ny-Irey-Lhaa, 51, 38, 49
Cronk Urleigh, 31
Curraghs, The, 21
Dalby, 50
" Lhag, 50
Deemsters, The, 23, 22
Derby, Charlotte de la Trémoille, Countess of, 56
Derby Haven, 53
Derby, James, Earl of, 55
Dhoon Glen, 45
Douglas, 7, 10
Eagle Mount, 31
Fleswick Bay, 51
Foxdale, 48
Glen Audyn, 39
" Helen, 19
" Laxey, 45
" Maye, 50
" Mooar, 36
" Roy, 45
" Rushen, 50
Great Wheel, The, 46
Greeba Castle, 19
" Mill, 18
" Mountain, 18
Guthred the Dane, King, 54
Hall Caine, Mr., 19
Hango Hill, 58
House of Keys, 23
Injebreck, 37, 7
Irish Elk, 55
John, Presbyter, 44
Jurby, 21
Keeil Woirrey, 43
King William's College, 58
Kirk Braddon, 21, 42
" Maughold, 8, 21, 40
Kirkmichael, 8, 18, 25, 42
Laxey, 45, 36, 39
Le Scroop, Sir William, 26
Levinz, Bishop Baptist, 27
Lhargey Ruy, 18
Malew Church, 58
Manx arms, 26
" Crosses, 41, 40, 21, 29
" Museum, 54
Merrick, Bishop John, 60
Neb, River, 10, 19
Peel, 10, 7, 8
" Bay, 11
" Cathedral, 21
" Hill, 49
Port Erin, 52, 7
" St. Mary, 52
Pre-conquest architecture, 11
Ramsey, 39, 7, 18
Reneuriling, Hill of, 31
Rhenass Fall, 20
" River, 35
Round Tower, 11
Russel, Bishop Thomas, 30
Russel, Bishop William, 30
Rutter, Bishop Samuel, 12
Saint Germain's Cathedral, 12
" John's, 18, 22, 55
" Maughold's Head, 40
" Patrick's Island, 11, 8, 10
" Trinian's Chapel, 19
Sart Fell, 20, 31, 35
Slack, The, 51
Slieau Dhoo, 31
" Froghane, 31
" Ruy, 18
Snaefell, 33, 7, 18, 24, 31, 32, 36, 38, 46
Sodor and Man, Bishopric of, 30
Spanish Head, 48
Spectre "Dog," 14
Stanley, Sir John, 26
Stanley, Sir Thomas, 13
Sulby, 18
" Glen, 31, 32, 36
Tholt-y-Wilt, 36
Tynwald Hill, 22, 31
Wilson, Bishop Thomas, 25
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