Around 950 AD, a woman was buried in a stone-lined grave on St Patrick’s Isle at Peel. Beside her lay a necklace of glass, amber and jet beads — some already three hundred years old — with an amber ring pendant at its centre. A leather pouch held bronze needles. Three iron knives, a pair of shears, a bone comb, a miniature stone pestle and mortar, and an ammonite fossil were placed around her. Down the length of her body lay a long iron rod, wrapped in textile and feathers from a goose wing. Seeds lay near the rod.

Excavations at Peel Castle between 1982 and 1987, directed by David Freke for Liverpool University, uncovered an extensive early Christian cemetery on St Patrick’s Isle. Within it, seven pagan Norse burials were found — interments that followed Norse custom, placed inside the grounds of a Christian burial site. Among them, this woman’s grave was by far the richest. It is now considered the wealthiest Viking-age female burial in the British and Irish Isles outside Scandinavia.

The iron rod was initially interpreted as a cooking spit, and the burial as that of a high-status head of household. That reading changed when the archaeologist Neil Price examined the object and identified its resemblance to iron staffs found in Norse female graves at Veka in Norway and at Birka in Sweden — graves associated with women who practised seiðr, the Norse tradition of prophecy and magic. The Old Norse word for such a woman was völva, meaning staff-bearer. The staff was the instrument of her craft. If Price is right, the Pagan Lady of Peel was not simply a wealthy woman. She was a seer, a practitioner of the old religion, buried with the tools of her art in the one place on the Island where the worlds of the living and the dead had met for centuries.

Bone chemistry analysis confirmed that she was not born on the Island. She was a traveller who came to Mann and was buried there, carrying with her a necklace assembled from across Europe — beads from Britain, Scandinavia, and the Continent, some of them likely heirlooms, passed down through generations before they reached her.

The burial tells more than one story. A pagan woman, laid to rest with the full apparatus of Norse ritual, inside a Christian cemetery. The community that buried her saw no contradiction, or if they did, they accommodated it. 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. The Pagan Lady’s grave is the same statement made in earth: the old world and the new, side by side, in the same consecrated ground. The same pattern runs through everything on the Island: the wells in the churchyards, the rushes going up the hill at Midsummer, the fishermen praying to Saint Patrick at the harbour and singing of Manannán on the water.

The necklace is now displayed in the Viking Gallery at the Manx Museum in Douglas.