The site of a mound of unknown significance, which is known as The Landmark but there was a belief that it might be an ancient burial mound. In the past the tenant of the land here was not allowed to plough the mound, which was the location of a minor triangulation point. It is a ditchless mound, orientated north-northeast to south-southwest and measures 12.0 metres by 6.0 metres and is 0.4 metres high. It has rather sharp edges apparently created by ploughing around it. Past excavations at the site of the triangulation point have revealed three stones. Its present appearance is not that of a barrow and it is likely that its past importance was for the presence of the triangulation point rather than any archaeological interest. The mound is not a prominent point or landmark in the accepted sense. It is likely that the farmer was forbidden to plough it for fear of disturbing the trangulation pillar socket.
The census numbers tell the story. In 1874, 16,200 people spoke Manx, roughly thirty per cent of the population. By 1901, 4,598. By 1911, 2,382. By 1921, 896. By 1931, 529. By 1946, perhaps twenty native speakers remained. The mechanism was domestic, not dramatic: English-language schooling produced children who spoke English at school and Manx at home, then children who spoke English everywhere because their parents wanted them to get on. Margaret Murray remembered the old folks talking Manx when they did not want the children to understand. There were stories of Manx speakers getting stones thrown at them in the towns. The Revestment did not kill the language, but it removed every institutional support that had sustained it.
The revival began before the last native speaker died. Brian Stowell, who learned Manx from the last speakers, began teaching in the 1960s. In 1899, A.W. Moore had helped found Yn Cheshaght Ghailckagh, the Manx Language Society, whose motto was Gyn chengey, gyn cheer: without language, without country. In 1948, the Irish Taoiseach Eamon de Valera sent recording equipment to capture the voices of the last speakers, because the Manx government at that time would not. In 1985, Tynwald adopted Manx as an official language. In 1992, classes began in schools. In 2001, Bunscoill Ghaelgagh opened, the first primary school teaching entirely through Manx. By the 2011 census, 1,823 people claimed some ability. The first new generation of native speakers had appeared: children raised bilingually.
Chapter 15 from 'Land of Home Rule' (1893) examines the impact of the 1765 Revestment on Manx society, focusing on labour law reform post-1777, the island's transformation into a debt refuge under the 1737 Protection Act, suppression of smuggling, and the final purchase of the Duke of Atholl's remaining interests by the Crown in 1825. The chapter traces economic consequences from the loss of illicit trade through tourism and literary discovery, and evaluates the Stanley and Atholl dynasties' stewardship.
The final years before Parliament acted. George Moore's Letter Books recorded a cosmopolitan trading world operating from Bridge House in Castletown. The family networks — Moore, Quayle, Taubman, Christian — wove together commerce, governance, and community. The Keys passed their resolution. Hugh Cosnahan carried the deputation to London. The Whitehaven merchants petitioned Westminster. Parliament moved to protect East India Company revenues. The Isle of Man Purchase Act received Royal Assent on 10 May 1765.
At least 5 small tumuli on the Laggan on the slope of the west side of the river. The mounds may be tumuli or hut mounds of the Block Eary type. One tumulus has been examined, with a height of 3 foot 9 inch, diameter about 33 foot. An area 5 by 4 foot was uncovered, disclosing four upright stones irregularly placed and several others in the horizontal position. No signs of charcoal were found but evidence found of the artificial character of the mound.
The area has been revisited but no trace of the mounds was found. The west slope of the Largan is extremely steep and fern covered with little width at the valley bottom and the area southwest of Keeill Woirrey is rough pasture. The mounds are shown on Gelling's shieling distribution map, however.
The conjectured site of an Early Medieval keeill or chapel and burial ground, thought to date to the period AD500-1000. No trace of the keeill has ever been found, but about 1907, during ploughing, lintel-graves were exposed at the site. One grave, 100 metres southeast of Ballalergy was recognised by a stone slab, measuring 2 metres by 0.6 metres (noted on field copy of the 6 inch Ordnance Survey map by P.M.C. Kermode in the Manx Museum). The site was visited by J.R. Bruce in 1963 who stated that no foundations or burial-ground banks were evident in the even surface of the pasture field.
The conjectured site of an Early Medieval keeill or chapel and burial ground, thought to date to the period AD500-1000. No trace of the keeill has ever been found, but about 1907, during ploughing, lintel-graves were exposed at the site. One grave, 100 metres southeast of Ballalergy was recognised by a stone slab, measuring 2 metres by 0.6 metres (noted on field copy of the 6 inch Ordnance Survey map by P.M.C. Kermode in the Manx Museum). The site was visited by J.R. Bruce in 1963 who stated that no foundations or burial-ground banks were evident in the even surface of the pasture field.
The spirit friend, a guardian spirit identical with the Irish Liannan-Shee. A familiar or household spirit who was implacable in resentment but unchanging in friendship. One of the two familiar spirits known in the Isle of Man, the other being the Dooinney-Oie. The Lhiannan-Shee attached itself to a particular person and could bring either great fortune or great ruin depending on how the relationship was maintained.
Volume 3 of Sir John Malcolm's authoritative three-volume biography of Robert, Lord Clive, drawn from family papers. Covers Clive's governorship in Bengal (1766–1767), including the officers' mutiny over batta reduction, revenue measures, and his return to England. Provides detailed context on East India Company administration, military discipline, and political tensions during the formative period of British rule in India.
A rare breed of sheep native to the Isle of Man, with brown wool and multiple horns. When George Moore was asked to buy twenty Loghtan sheep for Lord Barnard of Durham, the animals were shipped to Whitehaven and refused entry by Customs. The Isle of Man was foreign territory for tariff purposes. Five days later, when the sheep were finally put back ashore at Ramsey, nearly half were dead or dying of starvation. Twenty sheep, legally bought, legally shipped, killed by a system that treated the Island as simultaneously too foreign to trade with freely and too close to leave alone.
A Whitehaven merchant family whose trajectory embodies the conflict of interest at the heart of the Revestment. Walter Lutwidge and Thomas Lutwidge signed the Whitehaven merchants' memorial to the Treasury in the early 1750s, calling for 'purchasing the sovereignty of the said Island' and warning of £200,000 in annual losses to the Crown and 'great damage' to the East India Company. Charles Lutwidge — of the same family — provided the Treasury with a detailed intelligence report on the Duke's revenues in July 1764, estimating annual income at £7,500 and annual Crown losses at £200,000. He was then appointed Receiver-General after the Revestment. The family that lobbied for the seizure administered its consequences. Charles was seldom on the Island, drawing approximately £1,000 per year from an island revenue of £3,500. He seized wrecks, herring customs, fishings, and derelict ground 'under the pretext of their belonging to the Crown.' The 1792 Commissioners found him absent since 1786, sitting on £5,119 in unreported balances. P.J. Heywood's correspondence from the 1780s reports on Lutwidge's continued influence over patronage twenty years after the Revestment.
The Traditionary Ballad — sometimes called the Manannan Metrical History or the Manx Chronicle in Verse — is the oldest surviving piece of Manx historical verse. Composed in Manx Gaelic between 1504 and 1522, it was first translated into English by Joseph Train in 1845. The full Manx Gaelic text with literal English translation also appears in the Mona Miscellany (Manx Society Vol. XXI, 1873).
The ballad records the tribute paid to Manannán: the rent each landholder paid was a bundle of coarse meadow grass yearly. It describes his protection of the Island: he would set a man standing on a hill to appear as if he were a hundred, "and thus did wild Mannanan protect that Island with all its booty." It names the two places the rushes were carried: South Barrule and Cronk y Voddy.
The ballad then records Saint Patrick’s arrival and Manannán’s expulsion, the establishment of Christianity, the succession of bishops and kings, and the coming of the Stanley family. It preserves the ecclesiastical settlement: "for each four quarterlands he made a chapel, for people of them to meet in prayer." It is at once a political chronicle, a record of ancient tribute, and a statement of identity — the Island’s oldest surviving account of itself, in its own language.
Traditional Manx Christmas carols, sung in Manx Gaelic in the parish churches during the Christmas season. The carvals were composed by local poets and sung in the oie'll voirrey, the vigil service on Christmas Eve. They represent a distinctive Manx musical tradition that combined Christian devotion with vernacular poetry in the native language. The carval tradition was one of the cultural practices sustained by Wilson's church and diminished after the institutional supports were withdrawn.
The tailless cat native to the Isle of Man, one of the most recognisable symbols of the Island worldwide. The breed's origin is debated but the cats have been documented on the Island for centuries. Various folk explanations exist for the missing tail, including that the cat was late boarding Noah's Ark and the door closed on its tail. The Manx cat is a living emblem of the Island's distinctiveness, a creature that exists nowhere else in the same form.
The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History recorded that eventually there were over three thousand Manx people and their descendants in the greater Cleveland area. Most settled outside the city proper, in surrounding townships — Newburgh, Warrensville, and the small settlements along the lake. The community was bound by their own Gaelic language, which they used almost exclusively with each other, giving them what Kinvig described as a reputation for clannishness and allowing him to speak of an unmixed descent to the present day, when the sixth generation had been reached.
The Fencibles were the island's own response to the Napoleonic crisis — and they were, in their way, the most Manx thing about the entire period. Fencible regiments were defensive forces raised for home service. In the 1790s, Mann raised its own — officered by Manx families, recruited from the parishes, trained on the island's own ground. This was not the British garrison. These were Manx men, serving in the Manx military tradition that the Edward Christians and Illiam Dhones had served in before them. They were raised from an island that Parliament treated as a revenue line. Their families were living in collapsed economy, ruined harbours, sixpence-a-day wages. And they volunteered anyway — not out of loyalty to Parliament, but out of something older: the habit of service woven into the island's identity.
The flag of the Isle of Man — the three legs armoured and spurred on a red field — has no recorded moment of formal adoption. At some point in the early twentieth century, a decision was taken to fly it outside government buildings in place of the Union Flag that had been raised over Castle Rushen when the Revestment took effect on 11 July 1765. No debate appears in the Tynwald or House of Keys Hansard. No specification of the design was written down, and no direction for the legs was ever stated. For the next quarter of a century, both clockwise and anticlockwise versions continued in general use.
The first formal adoption of the current version — feet to the viewer’s left, running against the sun — came in 1958, when the Manx Post Office used it on the Island’s first local postage stamps. It was not a proclamation. It was a postage stamp.
On 19 July 1968, Government Secretary G. J. Bryan issued Government Circular No. 41/68, “Regulations for the Flying of Flags on Government Flagstaffs.” The circular specified when and where the flag should be flown, listed the colours, and described the design as “the Three Legs armoured and spurred, in the centre of a red field.” It said nothing about which direction the legs should face. Instead, it noted that “a reproduction of the agreed and authorised emblem of the Three Legs may be seen or obtained at Government Office.”
The symbol that appears on every official document, that flies from flagpoles around the Island, was never the subject of a parliamentary vote, a public consultation, or even a clearly documented executive decision. Its direction was standardised by a postage stamp and its regulations by a memo.
The Manx Garrison comprised the paid soldiers who garrisoned the Island's forts under the Lords of Mann, primarily Castle Rushen and Peel Castle, with smaller detachments at Douglas, Ramsey, and Derby Fort on Langness. The garrison soldiers also performed civil duties and acted as turnkeys, with their arms and provisions supplied at the Lord's expense; after the Revestment of 1765, these functions passed to British troops and civilian constables.
A historical chapter examining the 1703 Act of Settlement, the foundational land tenure reform in the Isle of Man under Bishop Wilson and the 10th Earl of Derby. The text traces the evolution of Manx land tenure from Goddard Crovan through the problematic 1645 leasehold system, explaining how Wilson persuaded Derby to restore customary inheritance rights and fix rents. The author draws parallels to contemporary Irish land reform debates (1845-1870), positioning the Manx settlement as a model that Ireland should have followed.
