This pillbox in the field adjacent to Ballavarran Road is one of a scatter of small WWII coast-defence and airfield-defence structures built around Jurby, whose aerodrome opened in 1939 and was defended in part by pillboxes and air-raid shelters. No source could be found addressing this particular field pillbox's construction date, design type or wartime unit beyond its listing on the register.
This pillbox at Ballamoar is one of several surviving WWII defensive structures scattered around RAF Jurby, which was defended during the war by pillboxes and air-raid shelters alongside its runways and hangars. No source addressing this specific pillbox's construction date, design or history beyond the register listing could be found.
This pillbox, sited across fields adjacent to Church Road, is among the small WWII defensive works built around Jurby aerodrome, which opened in 1939 and was equipped with pillboxes and air-raid shelters as part of its ground defences. No source addressing this particular pillbox's construction date, design or history beyond the register listing could be found.
This pillbox, in fields adjacent to Jurby East Road, forms part of the network of small WWII defensive structures built to protect RAF Jurby aerodrome. No source addressing this specific pillbox's construction date, design or history beyond the register listing could be found.
This pillbox on Ballavarran Road is one of the surviving WWII defensive positions around RAF Jurby aerodrome. No source addressing this particular pillbox's construction date, design or history beyond the register listing could be found.
This pillbox, straddling fields near Ballamoar and Jurby Aerodrome itself, was part of the airfield's wartime ground defences, built alongside its runways and hangars after the station opened in 1939. No source addressing this specific pillbox's construction date, design or history beyond the register listing could be found.
This pillbox, in fields adjacent to Church Road, is another of the small WWII defensive structures dotted around RAF Jurby aerodrome. No source addressing this particular pillbox's construction date, design or history beyond the register listing could be found.
This concrete pillbox, standing in fields beside Jurby Road at Sandygate, is one of nine surviving pillboxes registered together in March 2007 as a group defending Jurby Aerodrome and its surrounding fields during the Second World War. Together with the aerodrome's guard house, bomb store, terminal building and aeroplane store, the pillboxes are protected as physical reminders of the RAF station that operated at Jurby during the war.
This pillbox, sited between Studio House and Jurby Aerodrome on Ballavarran Road, was part of the aerodrome's wartime ground defences. No source addressing this particular pillbox's construction date, design or history beyond the register listing could be found.
The former Police Station on The Quay was purpose-designed by the celebrated Arts and Crafts architect M. H. Baillie Scott and completed in 1901, his final and only police station commission on the Isle of Man before he returned to practise in England. Scott deliberately echoed neighbouring Castle Rushen by building in local Castletown limestone rather than his more usual timber framing, giving the building its distinctive cylindrical turret and pyramidal roof, along with handmade ironwork from a foundry in the town. It served as a working police station until 2017, retaining many original features including its Victorian cells, and Manx National Heritage subsequently placed the registered building on the market.
Fishing village and bay on the south-western coast of the Isle of Man, in the parish of Kirk Christ Rushen.
The older Manx name is Purt Chiarn, and a Manx dictionary of the period gives Purt-sheearan, adding that it was then generally called Port Iron. Feltham, writing at the end of the eighteenth century, gave the name as Earn or Iron, from the bay lying opposite Ireland, and described a beautiful natural harbour which a pier built at small expense would render commodious and give twenty-five feet of water.
An account published in 1845 describes the village as consisting of about forty houses and states that its herrings were held superior to all others. Port Erin worked as one of the southern stations of the Manx fleet. Evidence taken at Peel in August 1864 by the Royal Commission on Sea Fisheries returned 120 numbered boats to Castletown including Port St Mary, Derbyhaven and Port Erin, out of about 300 in the Island, and one witness observed that there was generally more fish off Port Erin and that its improvement would be a great advantage.
Improvement was slow and expensive. The Isle of Man Harbours Act 1863 authorised harbour dues to be taken at Port Erin to fund the works, against a loan of £58,200 from the Public Works Loan Commissioners. When the dues proved insufficient, the Act of 1864 charged any deficiency, to a limit of £1,600 a year, on the surplus customs revenue of the Island, and later legislation charged it instead on the £10,000 payable into the Exchequer. Port Erin was the only harbour in the Island still raising revenue by dues.
The bay is a horseshoe, with Bradda Head rising to the north. Above the village are a circle of graves on the hill, and on the Mull between Port Erin and Cregneash the circle known as Rhullick y lagg shliggagh. St Catherine's Well flows near the shore, and a lifeboat station was opened in 1883.
The Marine Biological Station at Port Erin grew out of the Liverpool Marine Biology Committee formed by Professor William Herdman in 1885, which ran a small shore laboratory on Puffin Island before establishing a station at Port Erin in 1892 and moving to its present site at the south-west corner of Port Erin Bay in 1902. From 1919 it was owned and run by the University of Liverpool, hosting generations of marine researchers and student vacation classes, before finally closing in 2006.
An RNLI lifeboat station established at Port Erin in 1883 following a request from local residents. The original boathouse cost around GBP250 to build, with a slipway - one of the RNLI's steepest - costing roughly GBP1,000. A 1895 inspection recommended relocating the service to Port St Mary, but Port Erin's station was not closed: instead the RNLI opened a new, separate station at Port St Mary in 1896, and Port Erin's historic boathouse on Breakwater Road remains in active service today.
Port Erin railway station is the western terminus of the narrow-gauge Isle of Man Railway and today the only surviving original outer terminus of the line. It opened on 1 August 1874 with a modest station built of local slate rubble, but growing tourist traffic to the resort led to a substantial rebuild in Ruabon brick between 1902 and 1909, adding a booking office, a ladies' waiting room and a café in the former porters' office. The adjoining locomotive shed (1907) and goods shed (1908), both built of local stone, still stand beside the platform; the goods shed became the entrance and shop for the Isle of Man Railway Museum after a 1998 renovation. The museum, housed since 1975 in a former bus garage, displays historic locomotives including No. 16 Mannin (1926) and No. 6 Peveril (1875), plus carriages once used to carry Queen Elizabeth II and the Queen Mother. A regeneration programme between 2016 and 2018 re-roofed and restored the station buildings and reinstated an original roof ventilator.
Port Soderick railway station sits in Port Soderick Glen and remains an active stop on the Isle of Man's heritage steam railway. The small resort once also had its own cliff-top tramway connection linking it up to the Douglas Head Marine Drive above, though that line closed after the Second World War; the surviving railway station is one of the few reminders of Port Soderick's Victorian and Edwardian heyday as a seaside excursion destination.
Fishing village and harbour on the southern coast of the Isle of Man, in the parish of Kirk Christ Rushen.
The settlement appears in earlier sources as Port le Marie and similar forms. Robertson's list of Manx ports and creeks places Port le Marie among the creeks belonging to Derbyhaven, together with Castletown harbour, Poolvash, Port Erin, Fleshwick and Niarbyl.
Fishing was the principal occupation of the village. Port St Mary developed as one of the southern stations of the Manx herring fleet and later supported a substantial fishing community working the waters around the Calf, Spanish Head and the southern coast.
The harbour was naturally sheltered but limited in size, and its improvement became a recurring concern as fishing boats increased in number and size. Quays, breakwaters and harbour works gradually altered the original shore. The same pressures affected Port Erin on the opposite side of the southern peninsula, although the two ports faced different waters and landing conditions.
The surrounding coastline contained older religious and settlement sites. Chapel Bay preserves the name of a chapel close to the shore, while the wider parish of Rushen included Port Erin, Spanish Head, the Calf of Man and the agricultural land inland from both ports.
Port St Mary remained closely tied to the fishing industry into the modern period. Later accounts of Manx sea fishing regularly list it alongside Peel, Ramsey and Port Erin as one of the Island's principal fishing stations.
An RNLI lifeboat station established at Port St Mary in 1896, after the Deputy Chief Inspector of Lifeboats recommended relocating the service from Port Erin. It remains one of five active lifeboat stations on the Isle of Man, currently operating a Trent-class all-weather lifeboat and a D-class inshore lifeboat from Lime Street.
Port St Mary railway station, with its associated goods shed, sits on Station Road as an intermediate stop on the Isle of Man Steam Railway's southern line, between Douglas and Port Erin. The station remains in regular use today as part of the surviving heritage railway timetable that runs trains to Port Erin, one of only two lines to survive from the island's once-extensive Victorian steam network. Its goods shed is a reminder of the station's original role moving freight as well as passengers through the village.
Feltham's Tour through the Isle of Man records a memorial to Captain Caesar Parr and states he was buried on 20 February 1766, aged twenty-nine. Neither Parr's Omeka item nor this pass identifies which parish or church holds the memorial.
Powrie Cottage, at 5 The Quay, is a Registered Building on Castletown's harbourside. The Island's own register description attributes the house to the noted Arts and Crafts architect M. H. Baillie Scott, who worked on the Isle of Man in the early twentieth century, but no additional independent documentary source on the specific commission or dating of this house was found.
On the Scarlett peninsula near Port St Mary, a distinctive black limestone known as Poyllvaaish or Pooil Vaaish 'marble' has been quarried since at least the early 1700s (documented uses include St Peter's Church, Liverpool in 1704, large flag shipments in 1705, and named tombstone/flag suppliers arriving by 1713). Capable of taking a polish, it was prized for chimney-pieces, tombstones and decorative stonework, and was used in Castle Rushen and the Old House of Keys. A popular claim that it was used at St Paul's Cathedral is, per Manx Notebook's own catalogue entry, 'largely mythical' - the real connection is a narrow 1873 restoration purchase for the Cathedral's North Portico; a further claim of use at Hampton Court's Chapel Royal was not corroborated by any source checked. Quarrying continues on a small scale today.
Primrose Thatch Cottage is a small Manx cottage on St Mary's Road in Port Erin, included on the Isle of Man's Registered Buildings list for its thatched roof, though the covering is a modern, untraditional material rather than the straw or reed once used locally. No further verifiable history for this specific cottage was found.
Quarry Bends, around 18.46 miles, is a complex of curves that owes its name to a small railway siding built in 1879 off the Manx Northern Railway, which crossed the road here at a spot then called Close e Volley to serve Clarke's stone quarry at Ballavolley. The crossing point was later renamed Quarry Bends, and the road here was re-profiled and widened during the winter of 1987 as part of ongoing course safety works.
