This three-storey stone building is rectangular in plan with a slate pitched roof. The stonework is exposed on the upper two storeys as cut blocks with random horizontal coursing. The ground floor is cement rendered to window sill level of first floor. There is a regular deployment of five vertically proportioned windows at each floor although the middle of the ground floor is designed as a semi-circular headed front entrance. The fenestration is rather modest, the only adornment being a plain cement rendered frame around the upper floor windows and a straight rectangular molding at the top of the ground floor rendering panel. There are no particularly significant features to the building either internally or externally. For the most part details are rather poorly handled, an example being the traversing of the main facade by electrical wiring clipped to the masonry, a single angle bracket light, a token flag-pole etc. As a town hall the building clearly has civic significance and it occupies a prominent position in an area which has already recommended to have a listing as a group related to its function.
The above description was prepared prior to the creation of Registered Building and Conservation Area legislation.
The structure has since been placed on the Protected Buildings Register (No. 17).
The building has served a variety of uses since being constructed for domestic use, including as the town hall, and later as offices. It is currently in commercial use.
Manannán wrapped his island in mist to hide it from invaders. The Traditionary Ballad records the method: "It was not with his sword he kept it, neither with arrows or bow, but when he would see ships sailing, he would cover it round with a fog." The Supposed True Chronicle adds that he "kept, by necromancy, the Land of Man under mists," and that if he feared an enemy, "he would of one man cause to seem an hundred, and that by art magic."
The Manx Gaelic word for this power is cloagey druiaght — the invisible cloak, rendering invisible at pleasure the person who wore it. Roeder recorded the term in 1904, sitting in a list alongside fer obbah, pishag, and guesag — the wider Manx magical vocabulary still in living use at the turn of the twentieth century. It is not borrowed from the Irish féth fíada tradition. It is a Manx word for a Manx concept.
In Irish mythology the cloak does more than hide islands. In the Wasting Sickness of Cúchulainn, Manannán arrives in a magic mist, takes his wife Fand back from the Ulster hero, and shakes his cloak between them so they can never meet again. Cúchulainn takes a draught of forgetfulness. The cloak separates lovers and erases memory. That is a different kind of power from the one the Manx stories describe, and rather less comfortable.
Whether anyone still believed in the mist by the eighteenth century is another question, but the old sense persisted that the Island was a place apart, sheltered, hidden, answerable to its own customs. Hall, writing in the 1880s, put it simply: "The mists of Little Mannanan, son of Lear, did not forsake our island when Saint Patrick swept him out of it. They continued to come up from the south, and to conspire with the rapid currents from the north to drive ships on to our rocks." The mist outlasted the god. Or the god outlasted the saint.
Prehistoric flint scatter.
A small quantity of worked prehistoric flint was recovered from the vicinity of Manannan's Chair by CH Cowley.
The description relates to OS Field no. 0662, which is centred at the grid reference provided.
The antiquary Charles Harry Cowley was an avid collector of worked flint and coarse stone artefacts revealed by agricultural activity, mainly on farms located around Peel, and occasionally from further afield. He was active from 1900 until 1943. His entire collection of artefacts, together with a daybook cataloguing his discoveries, was later donated to Manx National Heritage.
Ringfort. The now-discontinuous embankment of this plough-damaged site indicates a structure originally about 35m in diameter. Only the western and northern arc of the bank now survive, the former incorporated into a field boundary. Although the bank to south and east are largely ploughed down, the raised platform of the interior is still apparent.
The surrounding field has produced several worked flints.
An ecclesiastical mandate from John Sharp, Archbishop of York, authorizing the induction, installation, and enthronement of Thomas Wilson as Bishop of Sodor and Man. The document confirms Wilson's nomination by the Earl of Derby (as patron), acceptance by King William III, and consecration by the Archbishop. It includes the form of installation ceremony performed on 11 April 1698 by Samuel Wattleworth, Archdeacon. The text is presented in both English and Latin versions.
An ecclesiastical mandate from John Sharp, Archbishop of York, dated 20 January 1697, formally installing Thomas Wilson as Bishop of Sodor and Man. The document includes the Latin original and English translation, with attestations of installation dated 11 April 1698. Relevant to understanding the Isle of Man's ecclesiastical governance and the formal procedures by which bishops were appointed and installed during the period leading up to the 1765 Revestment.
Collection of three previously published essays by David Craine on early modern Manx history: 'The Killing of William Mac a Faille' (1639), 'Sorcery and Witchcraft' (16th–18th centuries), and 'Church and Clergy, 1600–1800'. Edited and reprinted by Stephen Miller in 1994. Based on close-reading of Manx Museum manuscript holdings, these essays provide insights into Manx legal procedure, folk belief, ecclesiastical governance, agricultural practice, and social structures during the period preceding the Revestment.
3 names listed by year of death; First World War. Grey-green slate with inscriptions in gold. The memorial was unveiled by Sir William Fry, Governor of the Isle of Man, on Thursday 25 May 1922 in its original location of the Old Courthouse. It was moved to its present location in May 1979 when the Old Courthouse was demolished.
Memorial designed by Archibald Knox and executed by Mr Thomas Quayle of Douglas.
The Manx Choral Society in Cleveland, Ohio, was a musical organisation serving the Manx diaspora community in the city. Cleveland's estimated 25,000 to 30,000 people of Manx origin sustained a vibrant cultural life, with the Choral Society reflecting the strong traditions of communal music-making brought from the Island.
Comparative table of customs duty rates on imports and exports in the Isle of Man across four centuries (1577, 1677, 1692), differentiated by native and foreign merchants. Covers staple commodities including agricultural products, alcohol, textiles, and colonial goods. Directly relevant to understanding the revenue base and trade patterns that made the Revestment fiscally significant.
The Manx Customs Establishment was the Island's own customs service under the Lords of Mann, responsible for collecting duties on goods imported into and exported from the Island. Its revenues formed a significant part of the Lord's income and grew substantially during the eighteenth-century smuggling trade, when the Island served as a major centre for the redistribution of dutiable goods to Britain and Ireland.
A popular historical essay tracing the Standish family's connections to the Isle of Man and arguing that Myles Standish and his wife Rose (and later her sister Barbara) were of Manx origin before emigrating aboard the Mayflower in 1620. The work examines family genealogy, Manx Church records, property entailments, and the Standish family's subsequent role in Manx political life, including House of Keys membership.
The Royal Manx Fencibles were a body of Manx troops forming part of the British regular army, raised during the wars with France between 1779 and 1810. Initially consisting of three companies for Island defence only, the force was expanded to a full regiment of ten companies in 1795, serving in Ireland during the 1798 Rebellion and at Omagh and Whitehaven before being disbanded at the Peace of Amiens in 1802 and re-embodied in 1803.
The native language of the Isle of Man, a Goidelic Celtic language closely related to Irish and Scottish Gaelic. Spoken on the Island since at least the fifth century. By the eighteenth century, the vast majority of the population spoke Manx: of 20,000 people, few knew English. The language was the medium through which the island knew itself. Without it, the identity survived but in diminished form, like a landscape seen through glass. The first printed book in Manx was Wilson's Coyrle Sodjeh in 1707. The complete Bible was finished in 1772, seven years after the Revestment. The language went from universal to extinct in two hundred years. Ned Maddrell, the last native speaker, died in 1974. But the revival began before he died, and by 2011, 1,823 people claimed some ability in Manx. UNESCO reclassified it from extinct to critically endangered.
The language lived longer in Ohio than it would live on the Isle of Man. Thomas Kelly's letter from Ohio in 1828 dropped into Manx twice. On the night the emigrants arrived, thirty-three Manx people gathered in one house and Manx was spoken in plenty. Pastor Cannell held services in Manx. George Borrow met a woman whose son lived in a place where Manx was spoken. But the arc was the same: Manx spoken freely by the first generation, used as a secret parents' language within a generation, then gone. The institutional supports were unnecessary in Ohio because the Manx had each other. But as the community dispersed, the language dispersed with it.
