The genius of the Manx church: each arriving culture adapted to what was already there rather than replacing it. Christianity settled beside the holy wells. The Norse built their parliament on sacred ground. The ritual year wove both traditions together so tightly that by the eighteenth century nobody could have said where Christianity ended and the older religion began.

The early missionaries did not suppress the older world. Moore explained the mechanism: the early teachers of Christianity encouraged belief in charms against fairies and witches as a means of diverting their converts from the worship of nature. The clergy knew that to preach against the existence of fairies would make the people refractory. So they did not try.

The accommodation runs through everything. The wells sat in church grounds: pre-Christian practice operating inside Christian space, with the knowledge and consent of the clergy. The rushes still went up South Barrule at Midsummer while the Christian calendar governed the Tynwald ceremony below. The fishermen of Peel and Port St Mary prayed to Saint Patrick at the harbour — Dy bannee Noo Parick shinyn as nyn maatey, "St Patrick bless us and our boat" — and sang of Manannán on the water, the song collected in Kiaull yn Theay. The formal prayer went to the saint. The song remembered the god. Both lived in the same boat.

Teare’s daughter was still practising the charming of fishing nets in the late nineteenth century. Moore records it: "she is resorted to by the fishermen for the sake of having their nets charmed, and so cause them to be lucky in their fishing." The power passed man to woman to man, alternating through generations. At Kirk Andreas, Thorwald’s Cross carries Odin devoured by Fenrir on one face and Christ triumphant on the other — two religions on the same slab of stone. Around 950 AD, the Pagan Lady of Peel was buried with the full apparatus of Norse ritual inside a Christian cemetery.

Gill’s well-visiting on the hills was denounced by the Church at Snaefell but continued anyway. The scenes at Maughold were described as "essentially non-Christian." Moore noted that when Christianity was introduced, its ministers, "unable to do away with these feasts, wisely adopted their periods as Christian festivals, and so they have continued semi-pagan in form till the present day." The word wisely is Moore’s own. This was not defeat. It was wisdom.

The accommodation was not a compromise. It was a way of being in the landscape.