The oldest recorded rent on the Island. Bundles of coarse meadow grass carried to the summit of South Barrule each midsummer and offered to Manannán mac Lir, the god of the sea. The practice predates Christianity. The Traditionary Ballad records the destinations: some rushes went "up to the great mountain above Barrool" — South Barrule — and some to "Mannanan above Keamool" — Cronk y Voddy, Manannán’s Chair.

Sacheverell, writing in the 1690s, could find record of only one tax Manannán had ever levied: "a quantity of rushes, which were brought him on Midsummer day." The Supposed True Chronicle confirms it: "he never had any form of the comons; but each one to bring a certain quantity of green rushes on Midsummer Eve." A god whose rent was grass. A legislator whose tax was something you could pull from a ditch.

Culture Vannin confirms the tradition survived into the modern era: "Even up until a couple of hundred years ago, rushes gathered at the bottom of the hill were brought to the summit in tribute, usually on Midsummer’s Eve." Some Manx people still make the gesture today. And Sophia Morrison draws the line that matters: Manannán received the yearly rent of green sedge at the Festival of the Sun on Midsummer Eve, and as the people sat on the slopes of his mountain they would weave mats for his palace, for they were clever plaiters of rush. "And that is why to this day rushes are strewn on the path to Tynwald Hill on Midsummer Day."

A farm adjoining the Tynwald grounds held its tenure tithe-free on the condition of providing rushes for the Tynwald ceremony. The rushes laid along the procession way connect the constitutional ceremony to a pre-Christian offering. The oldest parliament in continuous existence, and its annual ceremony still carries a trace of a tribute to a pagan god. Nobody planned that. It survived because it mattered.