The name is first found in print as the title of an air in the Mona Melodies of 1820, according to A. W. Moore, who thought little of the English verses that Barrow wrote for it. The Manx words were printed by Moore in his Manx Ballads and Music of 1896, from the manuscript of the late Robert Gawne, under the heading Berrey Dhone, with an English rendering, Berrey Brown. T. E. Brown, in his prefatory note to the book, called it a witch-song of the ruggedest and most fantastic type. In his own introduction Moore explained the name as that of an ox. Berrey Dhone, Brown Berrey, seemed to him to commemorate the wild pranks of a notorious witch called Margayd-y-Stomachey, Margaret the Stomacher, from her costume, who lived at Cornaa in the parish of Maughold at the end of the eighteenth century. She was said to have been a tall powerful woman, as strong as two men, with a very bad reputation. A pool in the Cornaa river called Poyll Berrey Dhone was where she was supposed to have drowned the ox before flaying it. Moore's informant told him that his own father had seen this woman when he was a boy. The song itself is a search and a theft. The singer asks whether Berrey is in, and where Berrey walks, if not on the green strip beside Barrule. The company go to the mountain to lift the turf and to see whether Berrey will come home at night. The singer walks over Carraghan and over Snaefell, over Slieau Beg, over Pen-y-Phot and over Slieau Ouyr, and each time Berrey was behind the door, once with the slate on his head, once as sure as a rock, once between the hoops of the store. Then the poor man was walking in the wet and the dry, but the old thief with the sack had flayed the ox and eaten it with the fat. The second part names Margad-y-stomachee, who lived at Cornaa and had breeches and a jacket for the journey, and brave yellow and green skirts for walking at night. While the people were at their dinner there was a yellow glimpse in the glen running with the hide, and while they were at supper Margaret was skimming the dish. A quarter of Berrey Dhone went to Ramsey, half the liver and half the heart to the Lord and Lady of Ballayoughey. She was sent to the gallows, but she got favour, came home by Mullagh Ouyr, and picked up a goat. W. Walter Gill, in A Manx Scrapbook of 1929, read the name the other way about. For him Berrey Dhone was the witch, the Queen of the Maughold Witches, at some uncertain date in the past, and the ox was one of the shapes she took, so that she had become confused with the cattle-stealing legend of a more human person, Margad y Staminey, who dwelt in Glion y Spreeagh in the Cornaa valley. He thought the words in Moore's book were a conflation of at least two separate songs. He recorded Lhing Berrey Dhone, Berrey Dhone's pool, in the Cornaa river above the Corrany bridge, where girls from a farm nearby went on the first moon of harvest, walking barefoot over a row of small stones set across a trench, and repeated a rhyme asking Berrey to show them their true lover's form. He was told that two of her pupils could lever up North Barrule from its base so that she and her coven could enter, and that she visited the haunt of the Buggane of Gob ny Scuit on the mountain in her bovine shape. He added a record, without saying where he found it. In 1700, he wrote, the churchwardens of Kirk Marown presented Ann Gelling for cursing the minister as the kindred of thieves and the seed of Bery Doane. Gill wondered whether she was the Caillagh Bhera of Irish tradition, who kept a famous bull. The ballad itself supports Moore. Berrey is found behind the door with the slate on his head and between the hoops of the store, which is where a carcass in a cask would be, not a woman. The thief who flayed the ox is a separate figure, the old woman with the sack, and the closing Manx lines name her as Margad-y-stomachee who lived at Cornaa. Gill's Queen of the Maughold Witches is a later reading laid over the song, and his suggestion that the words conflate two songs is what allows it. The one thing that could alter the picture is the Kirk Marown presentment of 1700. If someone was cursed in that year as the seed of Bery Doane, the name was a byword long before the woman Moore's informant's father remembered at the end of the eighteenth century, and Moore's story would be a late attachment to an older name. Gill reports the presentment and does not say where he saw it. It has not been seen for this site. What is not in doubt is the ground, the Braaids of Cornaa, the green thorn trees, the pool in the river and the hills the singer walks over, all in the north-east of the Island, and the song, which was still sung to a tune that Gill thought called up a vision of Vikings carousing in camp and hall.

The earliest printed account is William Harrison's, in the second series of Mona Miscellany published by the Manx Society in 1873, under the heading Caillagh-ny-Gueshag, a Manx Prophet. Harrison compared her to Mother Shipton, said she had been held in great veneration in her day, and admitted that who she was and where she lived had been forgotten. His material came from John Quirk of Carn-ny-Greie, who told him of a small chapel called Cabbal-cheeill-Vout near the Foxdale river in Kirk Patrick, between Ballahig and Slieau Whallin, of which the Caillagh was said to have predicted that when it was washed away by the stream the Quirks would no longer remain in Slieau Whallin. The last proprietor was often reminded of it, and used to say that as much of the chapel remained as he could cover with his big coat, until a flood swept it away and the last of the Quirks died without issue soon after, about sixty years before Harrison wrote. Two more sayings followed, that there would be a smithy chimney in every house before the end of the world, and that out of grey stones people would get their bread. She had also predicted that Manx people would travel dry shod from the Point of Ayre to Scotland, and the first series of 1869 had already given the proverb, in its own words, that "the Manx and the Scotch will come so near as to throw their beetles at one another". A. W. Moore took the material over in 1891 under the spelling Caillagh-ny-Ghueshag, explaining that caillagh meant an old woman and had come to mean a hag or witch, and that hers was the name of the most famous of them, the old woman of the spells or the Sorceress. He placed her in the higher order of magical beings with Manannan and the enchantress Tehi Tegi, a sorceress or rather prophetess, a sort of Manx Mother Shipton who appeared to have been superior to most of her kind. She was an adept at chiromancy, faaishlaght, and could perform a charm or incantation, pisag, but her posthumous reputation rested on what she had foretold, which Moore thought related to very trifling events. He repeated the Keeill Vout prophecy, dating the disappearance of the chapel and of the Quirks of Slieau Whallin to about seventy years earlier, the smithy chimney, the bread from grey stones and the beetles, adding drily that the Point of Ayre was extending slowly towards Scotland but that thousands of years would be needed. Sophia Morrison's Manx Fairy Tales of 1911 gave the figure a new name, a new sex and a new home. Her Caillagh-ny-Faashagh was the greatest wizard of all in the old days, who lived not above ground but in a quarry, in a hole under the rock on the lonely mountain side, which was why people called him the Prophet Wizard of the Wilderness. At dark he roamed the mountains crying Hoa, hoa, hoa like the bellow of a goat, in a voice so terrible that the earth trembled, and he could take any shape he liked, a goat with eyes as big as two dishes that followed a man's lantern along the mountain road, or a man as tall as two men who chased a woman at Garey Mooar. He would not foretell unless asked. He had foretold the battle of Santwat in 1098, when the Neb ran red from Glen Crew to the sea, and the finding of the Foxdale lead mines, telling a man who asked how he would get rich that the riches of the Isle of Mann lay hid behind Barrule, and, in Morrison's words, "a battle between the Irish and the Manx at Creg Malin". To an old maid who cast lead spoons he foretold the end of the world, when the mountains would be cut over with roads, iron horses would gallop over them, and there would be an inn on the top of Snaefell. Mann and Scotland would come so close that two women could wring a blanket between them, and the chief rulers of Mann would be compelled to flee. W. Walter Gill, in 1929, brought the names back together. Fai'ag, he wrote, was a pronunciation of faihtag, prophecy, so that Morrison's Prophet of the Wilderness and the weather hag of the first of February, the Caillagh ny Groamagh, and Harrison's old woman of the spell were all much the same personage, so far as such shadowy abstractions could be classified. He added one more saying attributed to her, that three feet of Finn's feet from the wall of Rhullick y Dhoon, the earthwork on the crown of South Barrule, lay all the treasure of the Isle of Man, which he took to be a prediction of the Foxdale mines. What the sources show is a cluster of prophecies about the Foxdale and St John's country, attached in the 1870s to an unnamed old woman whose name was already only a name, and by 1911 to a goat-shaped wizard whose cry of Hoa, hoa is the cry Train had recorded in 1845 for the dooinney-oie, the night man of the mountains.

The earliest account in print is in A Vocabulary of the Anglo-Manx Dialect, compiled by A. W. Moore with the co-operation of Sophia Morrison and Edmund Goodwin and published by Oxford University Press in 1924, fifteen years after Moore's death. Under Caillagh it names her the Caillagh-ny-faishnag, the hag of the prophecies, who was also called the Caillagh-ny-brasnag, the hag of the faggots, and the Caillagh-ny-groamagh, the hag of the sulks. She was an Irish witch who had been thrown into the sea to drown, and who floated to the Isle of Man and came ashore on Candlemas morning. The day was bright, and she set to work to gather brasnags, sticks for firing, to light a fire and dry herself. Under Breeshey, St Bridget, the same book gives the weather rule that went with her. Every ditch had to be full of rain or snow on St Bridget's Day, so that the old caillagh could not gather the brasnags. If she could lay in a stock of firing on that day there would be bad weather in the spring, but if she could not gather the brasnags there would be fine weather. W. Walter Gill, in A Manx Scrapbook of 1929, recorded a different story of her, gathered in the parish of Patrick and printed in his place-lore of Malew. Near the top of Ballagilbert Glen, on the Silverburn below South Barrule, is a small depression called Caillagh ny Groamagh, the Old Woman of the Gloominess, into which she fell, or which she scooped out by falling, when trying to step from the top of Barrule to the top of Cronk yn Irree Lhaa. The impression of her heels and her backside were said to be plainly visible in the soil. Gill set beside this the Irish Caillagh who broke her neck jumping from height to height among the Lough Crew hills, and the Scottish Cailleach Bheur, who is the personification of bad weather itself. Apart from her fall, the Manx Caillagh was known for her influence over the weather, and it is as a weather figure that she survives. Her alternative name, Gill explained, was Caillagh ny Fai'ag, which is a pronunciation of Faihtag, prophecy or prediction, and he thought that a third old woman, the Caillagh ny Ghueshag who foretold things, was much the same personage as far as such shadowy abstractions could be classified. Laa'l Vreeshey, St Bride's Day, the first of February and the first day of the Manx spring, was the day the Caillagh came out. If the weather was fine she came out to gather sticks to keep her fire going for the rest of the year. If it was wet and stormy she stayed in, because the sticks would be wet. From this the rest of the season was known, but contrariwise. If the day was fine the summer would be wet, because she would not need to come out again, and if the day was bad she would see to it that fine weather followed, for her own sake. Gill's informant added that there were people who had seen her flying over in the shape of a big bird, carrying the sticks in her mouth. What kind of bird was not known, but Cronk yn Irree Lhaa was thought to be her customary home. The weather rule is older than the figure in the printed record. A. W. Moore, in 1891, gave the Manx sayings for St Bridget's Day without any old woman attached to them. If Bridget's Feast-day was white, every ditch would be full, meaning a wet mild spring after snow, and as long as the sunbeam came in on Bridget's Feast-day, the snow would come before May Day, meaning a cold spring after a mild one. He noted that Candlemas, the following day, had taken over the same prognostics as St Bridget had been forgotten, and that the belief that fair weather on that day meant a long winter was universal throughout Christendom. The Caillagh, then, is the Manx form of a rule about the first days of February that is known across Europe, given a person, a fall, a nest of sticks and a hill of her own. Gill also noted a Danish version of the same weather-controlling old woman reported in the journal Folk-Lore in 1891, and a German saying that women rule the weather in February.

Cormac mac Cuilennáin, king-bishop of Cashel, compiled a glossary around the year 900. It is the earliest dictionary in any non-classical European language. In it, Cormac describes Manannán as "a celebrated merchant who was in the Isle of Man. He was the best pilot that was in the west of Europe. He used to know by studying the heavens the period which would be fine weather and the bad weather, and when each of these two times would change." A weather forecaster. The god of the sea, the ruler of the Otherworld, the one who could make a single man look like a thousand — reduced to a merchant with a knack for reading clouds. This is what scholars call euhemerisation: taking a divine figure and rewriting him as a historical person. Christian scribes did it routinely. They could not have pagan gods in their manuscripts, so the gods became kings, or merchants, or clever men who could read the sky. The storms became weather forecasting. The Otherworld became a trade route. Moore, writing in 1891, traces the process clearly: as early as the ninth and tenth centuries Manannán "had suffered the change known as euhemerisation, from an immortal he had become a mortal." Yet the Voyage of Bran, written a century before Cormac, has Manannán riding a chariot across the ocean and seeing flowery plains where mortals see waves. The earlier text is more mythological, not less. The reduction came afterwards, deliberately. Someone decided to make the god smaller. It did not work. The fog still comes in from the south. The rushes still go up the hill. The fishermen of Peel and Port St Mary, for centuries, went to sea with an understanding that the sea belonged to someone, and you did not go out on it without acknowledgement.

Cronk y Voddy is the site of Manannan's Chair (Stoyly Manannan or Manachan), a large eroded rampart in the parish of German, on the Staarvey Road between Lhergydhoo and Knocksharry. Within it stands an earthen mound in the form of a seat, from which the legendary Manannan Mac Lir is said to have dispensed the law; a tradition also held that this mythical king of the Island was buried within.

A supernatural smith who resided on the Isle of Man, "of so long-lived or mythic a nature as to be found living in all ages of pagan history." Cuillean — or Guillean — forged the magic sword, spear and shield for Concovar Mac Nessa, king of Ulster. The oracle of Cloghor directed Concovar to travel to the Isle of Man and commission the weapons from Cuillean, and the supernatural power they carried won him the sovereignty of Ulster. Brash, writing in Antiquitates Manniae, argues that Cuillean may be identical with Manannán mac Lir. The points of identification are several: both are intimately connected with the Isle of Man, both are forgers of supernatural weapons, both are located in Ulster where Manannán is said to have reigned over the provincial fairy kingdom, and both fell into disrepute among the Christians. "Cuillean, too, fell into disrepute among the Christians, as did Mananan." The Manx Gaelic phrase giolla Guillen — "the servant of Guillean" — survived into modern usage as a synonym for an imp of the devil, carrying the memory of the old smith long after the stories themselves had faded. Cuillean's cave was on Slieve Gullion in County Armagh, still remembered with a mixture of awe and unease in local tradition when O'Kearney recorded it for the Ossianic Society.

One of the most feared actions of the malevolent fairies was to steal children, especially before baptism. If a child were taken, a decrepit and emaciated fairy would be left in its place. The prettier the child, the greater the risk. Protective measures included laying an iron poker on the child when left alone, tying a red thread around the child's neck, and carrying bread and cheese to give to the first person met on the way to christening. Salt and iron were the most reliable protections. The changeling tradition reflected a world where children were vulnerable and the community had rituals to express and manage that anxiety.

A system of domestic customs designed to maintain good relations with the fairy world. A fire was kept burning in the house through the night so the fairies might come in and enjoy it. Bread was left out for them. Water crocks were filled with clean water before bed, used by the fairies for bathing and thrown out in the morning, never used for any other purpose. Women would not spin on Saturday evenings as this displeased the Mooinjer Veggey. At every baking and churning a small piece of dough and butter was stuck on the wall for fairy consumption. The mountain ash or cuirn, in the form of a cross made without a knife, was placed over the threshold. Yellow flowers growing in a hedge offered protection. These were not quaint survivals. They were practical measures in a world where the fairy folk were neighbours.

Moore records the tale. All the fish were summoned to choose a king. The herring was elected, and all the fish came to pay homage — all except the fluke, who arrived late. When the fluke heard that the herring had been made king of the sea, he twisted his mouth to one side and said "The Herring, king of the sea!" — and his mouth has been on one side ever since. The story connects directly to one of the most distinctive oaths in Manx law. The Deemsters, in their oath of office, swore to execute the laws of the Isle "as indifferently as the herring's backbone doth lie in the midst of the fish." The herring's backbone runs perfectly straight through the centre of the fish — and so the Deemster must hold the balance of justice, favouring neither side. The same fish that ruled the sea by election governed the courtroom by metaphor. The oath is ancient. The six days of creation are invoked, and the herring backbone is the standard of impartiality. The tale and the oath belong together: the herring earned its kingship by consent, and the Deemster earned his authority by the same principle. Both systems — the fish and the court — worked because they held the centre.

The tradition was brought into Manx print by R. R. Brash, in his chapter on Mananan Mac Lir in the Manx Society's Antiquitates Manniae of 1868. Mananan, the supposed coloniser and first ruler of Man, from which he took his name, was in Brash's account identical with the merchant or navigator Orbsen, so celebrated in Irish bardic history, from whom Lough Orbsen, now Lough Corrib in Galway, was named. Brash quoted O'Flaherty's Ogygia: the merchant Orbsen was remarkable for carrying on a commercial intercourse between Ireland and Britain, and was commonly called Mananan Mac Lir, Mananan on account of his intercourse with the Isle of Man, and Mac Lir, sprung from the sea, because he was an expert diver who understood the dangerous parts of harbours and from his prescience of the weather always avoided tempests. He gave Keating's genealogy, Mananan the son of Alladh, the son of Elathan, son of Dalboeth, an immediate descendant of Nemedius, progenitor of the Tuatha De Danann, that weird and mystic colony still believed to rule the spirit or fairy land of Erin, to reign paramount in the lis, the cave and the mine, and to occupy genii palaces in the deepest recesses of mountains and under the deep waters of the lakes. Keating further stated, Brash wrote, that the proper name of Orbsen was Mananan, and that the lake was called from him because when his grave was digging the lake broke forth, a myth common to almost every large sheet of water in Ireland. In O'Flaherty's own time, the middle of the seventeenth century, Lough Corrib was still called Lough Orbsen, and in his West Connaught he described the field of Magh Ullin, now Moycullin, where Mananan was slain: there Uillin, grandchild of Nuadh of the Silver Hand, King of Ireland, overthrew in battle and had the killing of Orbsen Mac Alloid, commonly called Mananan, the Mankish man, Mac Lir, son of the sea, for his skill in seafaring. A. W. Moore took the whole of this into the first chapter of his Folk-lore of the Isle of Man in 1891, where Manannan is otherwise called Orbsen, whence Loch Orbsen, now Lough Corrib, is still vividly remembered in Derry and Donegal with an enchanted castle in Lough Foyle, and, by the traditions of the Isle of Man and the eastern counties of Leinster, rolled on three legs like a wheel through the mist. Moore traced the corruption of the name through O'Flaherty, Orbsen to Oreb to Orib to Corrib, and attributed the grave story to O'Flaherty's West Connaught where Brash had given it to Keating. W. Walter Gill, in 1929, set the lake among the waters that were thresholds. Both the Kingdom of the Dead and the Fairy Kingdom, he wrote, were reached in very old and widely diffused belief by a water transit, a sea strait, a lake or river, and sometimes a well, and he noted in the same place that Lough Corrib was said to have issued from the burial place of Manannan MacLir. The god of the Manx sea has a grave, then, in Irish tradition, and the grave is under a lake that came out of it, which is the shape the Island's own tradition gives to Manannan's departure, into the sea and out of sight.

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.

The case is known from the Lord's own court books, the Liber Scaccarii and the Liber Placitorum for 1616 and 1617, which are held by Manx National Heritage and were read for this site from the FamilySearch images in September 2026. It does not appear in Train's chapter on Manx superstitions or in Moore's Folk-lore of the Isle of Man, both of which print later and milder cases from the church records. Margaret yne Quane and her son John Cubon lived at Lambfell in the parish of Kirk German, in Glenfaba sheading. The word yne in her name is Manx inneen, daughter, so she carried her birth family's name through her marriage, as married women in these books commonly did. Her husband is not named anywhere in the record. John Cubon held a four shilling share of the quarterland of Lambfell in the 1617 setting roll, alongside a senior John Cubon and two John Cotters, with a share in a mill and a share of the waste, so he was an adult landholder rather than the child of the later published accounts. The record opens on 20 November 1616 with a memorandum in the Liber Scaccarii. Margaret Quane of Kirk German had been committed to prison in Castle Rushen for charms used and practised by her tending to sorcery and witchcraft, as appeared by the examinations of divers persons upon oath. She was now bailed at the instance of two neighbours, William Stevenson and Patrick Quaile, each bound in ten pounds that she would appear at the next Head Court of gaol delivery and abide the censure of the law. On 22 December two more neighbours, Thomas Kelly and Hugh Cayne, entered the same bond for John Cubon, son of the aforesaid Margaret Quane. On 28 December both were sent back to prison by the officers of the spiritual court, which had by its own law and trial found them guilty of witchcraft and sorcery. On 28 February 1617 the church delivered them to the Lord's gaol by its censure. The procedure is the one the Spiritual Laws prescribed, and which Moore printed in 1891: presentment to the Chapter Quest, the Bishop's prison while a jury of the parish inquired, and delivery to the Lord's gaol and court if a notorious fault was proved. On 2 June 1617 a list of the names of the twenty-four Keys was drawn up and bound in with the bail entries. The next day the Head Court of gaol delivery sat at Castle Rushen before Captain Robert Molyneux, the Comptroller John Halsall and the Deemsters Thomas Sansbury and Ewan Christian. Sir William Crowe the Vicar General, Sir John Cosnahan and Sir Hugh Cannell the Register showed their proceedings in writing, which were read openly in the face of the court. The Deemsters, howbeit, for their better satisfaction to have a more formal and judicial trial according to law, advised with the twenty-four Keys, who consulted that Margaret should have a further public trial by another jury. A jury of twelve was empanelled from every sheading but Rushen, with Thomas Quirk sitting for German. She was brought to the bar and put herself to the jury, who found her guilty of sorcery and witchcraft, and the Deemsters pronounced that she should be taken by the Coroner of Glenfaba to the place of execution and there burned till the life departed from the body. At the same court John Cubon appeared, put himself to the trial of the jury now empanelled in his own right, was found guilty, and was sentenced in the same form. The record calls him plainly her son and gives no age. The man who suspected them is named in the Glenfaba pleas of May 1617, where the moar of Kirk German presented the bloodsheds of the parish. Phillip Costen had drawn blood from Phillip Cubon, from John Cubon and from Margaret Quane. A note in the margin releases him by consent of the court of all the bloodwipes upon the Cubons and yne Quane, because he avouched that he did it in defence of his life, or to avoid other harm that might befall him by their witchcraft, wherewith they were by him suspected and against some of them lately proved. The court recorded the act and the reason given for it, and accepted them. It did not record a belief. Rhys, collecting on the Island about 1890, was told that if you could draw blood, however little, from a witch or from one with the evil eye, they lost the power of harming you, and that formerly this was sometimes acted upon, the man who fancied himself in danger sidling up to another on leaving church and inflicting a slight scratch. The 1617 entry and the 1890 belief are set side by side here, nearly three centuries apart, and the reader can judge the resemblance. The books follow John Cubon to the end. The Receiver's Kirk German fines for 1617 leave his line blank, with the note that his goods had fallen to the Lord. In the Glenfaba pleas of October 1617 a Thomas Cubon sued John Cotter for the four shilling parcel and lost, because Cotter had bought the ground in the Lord's right, to whom it fell due by the death of John Cubon, convicted for witchcraft. The Kirk German setting quest of 1619, sworn by four neighbours, two of whom had been in the case from the start, struck him from Lambfell for that the ground by his execution in the law fell due to the Lord, and entered Cotter as tenant on a composition of twenty shillings. For Margaret the record ends with the sentence. She held no land, so no fiscal or manorial entry had cause to name her again, and her execution is inferred from the sentence and from her son's, not documented. The date and place of either execution are recorded nowhere. Neither the temporal books nor the recited church proceedings name any act, victim or harm, only charms tending to sorcery at her committal and sorcery and witchcraft at the verdict.

The earliest account is George Waldron's, in his Description of the Isle of Man of 1744. He had never met anyone who took mermaids for more than the poets' Tritons until an old Manxman who had used the sea many years told him, with a thousand oaths, that he had frequently seen them, and when Waldron mentioned this at Port Erin in his first fishing season on the Island the people there wondered at his incredulity and gave him a story. In the time that Oliver Cromwell usurped the Protectorship few ships resorted to the Island, and the solitude of the sea gave the mermen and mermaids, who are enemies to any company but their own, frequent opportunities of visiting the shore, where on moonlight nights they were seen to sit combing their heads and playing with each other, and jumped into the water the moment anyone came near. People who lived near the coast spread large nets of strong cord on the ground and watched, and caught one, a female, lovely above the waist and all fish below with fins and a spreading tail. They kept her three days, tenderly, but she would neither eat nor drink nor speak, and fearing some calamity if she died among them they opened the door, and she glided on her tail to the sea and was met there by a great number of her own kind, one of whom asked what she had observed among the people of the earth. Nothing very wonderful, she answered, but that they were so ignorant as to throw away the water they had boiled eggs in. Waldron heard the strangest of the stories at a creek between two high rocks on the same coast. A very beautiful mermaid became so enamoured of a young man who tended sheep on the rocks that she would sit by him and bring him coral, fine pearls and shells so glorious in colour that they dazzled the eye, with smiles and pattings of the cheek and every mark of a sincere and tender passion. One day, when she threw her arms about him more eagerly than usual, he feared she meant to draw him into the sea and struggled free and ran, and she resented it so highly that she threw a stone after him and glided into her own element and was never seen on land again. The youth, though only slightly hit, felt from that moment so excessive a pain in his bowels that the cry was never out of his mouth for seven days, at the end of which he died. The poet Collins, in a note to his Ode to Liberty of 1746, gave a third: a mermaid enamoured of a young man of extraordinary beauty, whose proposal was received with horror, punished the whole Island by covering it with mist, so that all who tried to trade with it never arrived or were wrecked on its cliffs, which is one of the explanations of the mist of the Island beside Manannan's. A. W. Moore, in 1891, gave the Manx name. The mermaid had no special name in Manx, being called simply ben-varrey, woman of the sea, and had the same form, half fish and half woman, as in the tales of other countries. John Rhys confessed in 1891 that mermen and mermaids disported themselves on the coasts of Man but that he had made no careful inquiry about them. William Cashen of Peel had it from the Dalby fishermen that mermaids were very fond of crabs, and told of Joe Clinton, fishing for crabs among the rocks at the Niarbyl at low water, to whom a mermaid came up and said in Manx, give us a crab and I will tell your fortune, and dived away with it calling that so long as he lived on the land he would never be drowned in the sea. Sophia Morrison, in 1911, told the Mermaid of Gob ny Ooyl, who had her haunt up Bulgham way and was a friend to the Sayle family at the bottom of Cornaa gill, so that they were always in luck's way and got their living mostly by the sea.

A melody the Manx people said had been learned from the fairies themselves. A farmer wearing mugwort for protection went into the hills and heard the fair folk playing music. He went back three times to memorise the tune, each time returning home later until finally arriving at sunrise to be met by an angry wife. But he had the tune, and it passed into the tradition of the island. Fairy music made safe by the protective herb, captured and carried back to the world of men.

In 1896, a gold model boat was found at Broighter on the shore of Lough Foyle in County Derry. It is eighteen centimetres long, with two rows of nine oars, benches, a paddle rudder, rowlocks, and miniature tools. It was buried in a salt-marsh, probably as a votive offering to a sea god — probably Manannán mac Lir — sometime around the first century BC. The craftsmanship is extraordinary. Someone spent weeks on it, getting every detail right, and then put it in the ground where nobody would ever see it again. That is what an offering looks like. Not showy. Not loud. Just the best work you can do, given to the sea, in the dark, and trusted to reach where it is going. O'Donovan recorded that Manannán was still vividly remembered in the mountainous district of Derry and Donegal, and was said to have an enchanted castle in Lough Foyle — the same stretch of water where the boat was buried. The hoard also contained a gold torc, a gold bowl, and other gold ornaments, all of exceptional quality. The collection is now held by the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin. The Broighter boat is the earliest known physical evidence of devotion to a sea god in the Irish Sea world. It predates the written sources by a thousand years. When the Manx people carried their bundles of rushes up South Barrule at Midsummer, they were performing a version of the same act: offering the best of what they had to the one who kept them safe.

The earliest printed notice is George Woods's, in 1811. Nearly opposite the turning to Kirk Marown, he wrote, stood the walls of Old Kirk, formerly called St Trinion's, said to have been erected in consequence of a vow made by a shipwrecked person, and the ruinous state of the building was ascribed to the malice of some unlucky demons who, for want of better employment, amused themselves with throwing off the roof. Joseph Train gave the tale in full in 1845, in an appendix note headed The Buggane of St Trinion, citing Woods for the vow and a Tour of 1836 for the tradition that the church was never finished. A mischievous buggane, or evil spirit, tossed the roof to the ground as often as it was on the eve of being finished, accompanying his achievement with a loud fiendish laugh of satisfaction. The only attempt to counteract him that tradition had conveyed was made by Timothy, a tailor of great pretensions to sanctity of character, who undertook to make a pair of breeches under the roof before the buggane could begin his old trick. He seated himself in the chancel and worked in great haste, but before he had finished, the head of the frightful buggane rose out of the ground before him and asked whether he saw its great head, large eyes and long teeth. Timothy kept stitching, and to each question replied that he saw. He put the finishing stitch into the breeches and jumped out of the church just as the roof fell in with a crash, ran with the buggane's laugh behind him and its extended jaws at his heels, and leaped onto consecrated ground where the buggane had no power to follow. The angry sprite lifted its great head from its body and pitched it at the tailor's feet, where it exploded like a bombshell. Timothy was unscathed, and the church of St Trinian remained without a roof. A. W. Moore reprinted Train's text in 1891 as the story of the most notorious of these fiends in Man, and Jenkinson's guidebook set it beside the Reverend Cumming's more sober suggestion that St Trinian was a corruption of St Ninian, since the church had belonged to the Priory of Whithorn in Galloway. Sophia Morrison retold it in 1911 with the monks choosing their site in the broad rough meadow between dark Greeba mountain and the high road, the buggane's haunt in the mountain above, and a little tailor called Tim who took cloth, needle, thread, thimble and scissors to the church on the first evening after the new roof was put on and worked by candlelight while a head with a mane of coarse black hair and eyes like torches rose through the pavement, followed by shoulders, arms, a body black as ebony and wrinkled like a blacksmith's bellows, and a cloven foot, each greeted with I see, I see, until he threw the burning snuff of a candle in its face and finished his breeches. The buggane is the least fixed of the Manx spirits. W. Walter Gill wrote in 1929 that the name covered almost all apparitions of the gloomier sort, black dogs in particular, and that some of them swelled up and changed their shape while you looked at them. This one is fixed to a place, the roofless church in the field by the Douglas road, and has a name for its adversary and a piece of tailoring for its plot. The two features of the tradition that are oldest, on the printed record, are the vow that built the church and the demons that unroofed it, both in Woods in 1811. The tailor and his breeches are Train's addition of 1845, from a source he did not name beyond a tour of 1836.

The earliest account is A. W. Moore's, in his Folk-lore of the Isle of Man of 1891. Beside the water bull the Island had a monster called Cabbyl-Ushtey, or water-horse, sometimes called the Glashtin, which Moore compared to the Irish Phooka, who appears sometimes as a bull and sometimes as a horse, and to the Scandinavian Nykr or Vatna-Hestr, the water-horse that lives in salt or fresh water and associates with ordinary cattle. In 1859 it was reported that an animal of this kind was to be seen in a field near Ballure Glen, and hundreds of people left Ramsey to catch a sight of it, but they were doomed to disappointment. The people about Glen Maye believed that the glen below the waterfall was haunted by the spirit of a man who one day met the Glashtin or Cabbyl-Ushtey, and thinking it an ordinary horse got upon its back, when it ran off and disappeared in the sea and the rider was drowned. Moore drew on J. F. Campbell's Highland tales for the wider family: the water-horse who falls in love with a lady and is found out by the sand in his hair when he lays his head on her knee, and who as an old woman sucks the blood of a shieling full of damsels save one who escapes over a burn which he dare not cross, from which Campbell concluded that the old Celts must have had a destroying water-god to whom the horse was sacred. John Rhys, collecting in 1891, found that what he took to be a kelpie was called by his informants a glashtyn, which Kelly's dictionary defined as a goblin, an imaginary animal that rises out of the water, and that one informant was definite it had nothing human about it but was a sort of grey colt frequenting the banks of lakes at night. In the second volume of his Celtic Folklore he set the Manx glashtyn with the Lowland kelpie and the Norse Nykr, a northern Proteus who takes many forms but prefers that of a grey water-horse, and used the water-horse to explain the kings with horse's ears in Welsh and Irish legend. W. Walter Gill, in 1929, distinguished the Cabbyl Vooar or Big Horse, the sea-going water-horse of the shore, from the grey Glashtyn of the rivers and pools. The Cabbyl Vooar was seen at low tide and towards twilight on the seashore or about the tracks up the cliffs, white like a breaking wave or dun like the rocks, and could travel under the sea as well as over the land, and anyone reckless enough to mount him was carried into and under the tide. Gill also told the Glen Maye tale as the oldest tale of all, a thousand years old, in the words of his informant. A man walking home from Peel late one night saw a horse standing under the trees at the foot of Raby hill and swung himself onto its back to finish his journey riding. Away it went at a gallop, and as he leaned forward on its neck he was startled to see that its ears were human ears. Knowing by this that something was wrong he threw himself off in the nick of time, for the horse leapt the hedge and bolted for the river, and the rider escaped drowning at the cost of a broken leg. Gill knew the story of a girl seized by the water-demon and escaping by cutting off a piece of her dress at Glen Maye, Colby Glen, Sulby and Ballure, and he set the Lonan Nikkesen of the Awin Ruy pool among the same creatures, a drowner of girls whose name came from the Norse, and whose tradition, he added, did not originate in the Isle of Man.

The cloak of mist is the most enduring motif in the Manannán tradition. When enemies approached the Island, Manannán mac Lir would wrap it in fog, hiding it from sight. The Traditionary Ballad, composed between 1504 and 1522, records it plainly: “when he would see ships sailing, he would cover it round with a fog.” The Supposed True Chronicle elaborates that Manannán “was a paynim” who “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 the cloak is cloagey druiaght — the invisible cloak. Charles Roeder recorded it in 1904. It is a Manx word, not borrowed from the Irish, for a specifically Manx tradition. The Irish equivalent, feth fíada, appears in several of the major Irish mythological texts. In the Wasting Sickness of Cúchulainn, Manannán arrives “in a magic mist,” takes back his wife Fand, and shakes his cloak between her and Cúchulainn so they can never meet again. Cúchulainn takes a draught of forgetfulness. The cloak does not just hide islands. It separates lovers and erases memory. Morrison places Manannán at Peel Castle, where he once caused a single man standing guard on the battlements to appear as a thousand, sending the enemy fleet away in terror. In another version, he made boats from sedges, creating the illusion of a great fleet in Peel Bay. A god who fought with fog and grass — easy to dismiss, but hard to forget. The cloak survives in everyday Manx speech. When the sea mist settles along the coastline, someone will say it: Manannán’s cloak. A piece of mythology so embedded in daily life that people repeat it without thinking about what they are saying, or who they are remembering.

The earliest description in print is William Kennish's, in the poem Old May Eve in his Mona's Isle of 1844, written as a Maughold man remembering what old Manxmen had told him. When the eleventh of May came round, each horse was stalled, the cows were called home before sunset, and the sheep were driven off the mountain into the yard, so that they might be spared from witches by counteracting skill. The rank bolugh, a yellow meadow weed thought to have a charm against witchcraft, was strewn along the cow-house floor and round the threshold of the door, and crosses of the rowan tree were formed by the young men and tied to each cow's tail and round the lintels of the byre, to further check the witches' fiendish ire if the bolugh charm should fail. For if the witches once laid their spell on the cattle, they would pine away by slow degrees and baffle all the goodwife's skill that year to fill her butter crock or make a cheese. Joseph Train, a year later, added the Manx name. In former times, he wrote, small crosses were made of twigs of the mountain ash, called in Manx crosh keim, and disposed over the door of every dwelling house, stable and sheepfold, with a piece of iron of any description, and made fast to the tail of every cow. The date is Old May Eve, the night of the eleventh of May, the eve of Laa Boaldyn reckoned by the old calendar, when fairies and witches were held to be more active than at any other time of the year. William Harrison reprinted Kennish's lines in the Manx Society's Mona Miscellany in 1869 and glossed the bolugh as the mugwort. A. W. Moore, in 1891, gave the custom in the form in which it is now generally told. On May Eve green leaves or boughs and primrose flowers were strewn on the threshold, and branches of the cuirn, or mountain ash, were made into small crosses without the aid of a knife, which was on no account to be used, and stuck over the doors of the dwelling houses and cow-houses. He recorded that a branch of the cuirn in the cow-house on May Eve was one of the most efficacious charms to prevent milk being bewitched, and that on Good Friday a stick of cuirn was used to stir the fire in place of the iron poker. The tree, he thought, had been regarded with special veneration. It was planted with the thorn and the ash beside the sacred wells, where votive offerings had been placed within living memory, and its leaves, like those of the elder, were picked on May Eve and fixed to doors and windows against witchcraft. John Rhys, collecting in 1891, found the same practice in use. On Old May Day systematic efforts were made to protect man and beast against elves and witches, and people carried crosses of rowan in their hats and placed May flowers over the tops of their doors, while crosses of rowan were fastened to the tails of the cattle, small crosses which had to be made without the help of a knife. He exhibited a specimen at a meeting of the Folk-Lore Society. A twig of cuirn, he added, was as effective against fairies on the Island as in Wales, and he traced the word to Irish caorthann and Scottish Gaelic caorunn, the same sacred rowan that lies behind the old Irish names Mac Cairthinn and Der Chairthinn. William Cashen of Peel, whose notes on the fishermen were published by Moore in 1895 and gathered into his Manx Folk-Lore in 1912, carried the cross to sea. On May Eve the crosh cuirn was put into every boat. The men would travel for miles into the country to get it, and would deposit it in some secret place in the boat, where it had to remain until the following May Eve. In the cottages of his youth the crosh cuirn was always behind the door, renewed every May Day Eve, and no evil thing could pass in where the crosh cuirn was.

The earliest record of the name is in a charm. William Harrison printed, in the Manx Society's Mona Miscellany of 1869, from the church record of 1722, Daniel Kneal's charm to staunch a horse's blood: three Maries went to Rome, ny Keyme as ny cughtee, Peter and Paul, one Mary of them said stand, another said walk, the other said may this blood stop as the blood stopped which came out of the wounds of Christ, me to say it and the son of Mary to fulfil it. Harrison rendered the pair of Manx words as the fairies and the sprites. A. W. Moore printed the same charm in 1891 and translated them as the Spirits of the Church stiles and the Spirits of the houghs, and in the introduction to his chapter on hobgoblins gave the two beings a character: the Cughtagh was a spirit whose abode was in caves by the sea and whose voice was the soughing of the wavelets, and the Keimagh haunted the churchyard stiles and guarded the graves. Charles Roeder, listing the oldest Manx charms in the Isle of Man Examiner in 1902, gave the invocation to the spirits of the church stiles and the houghs among those that might be traced to very early times. That is the whole of the Cughtagh's record on this site's shelf: a name paired with the Keimagh in a charm sworn to a church court in 1722, and Moore's one-sentence account of what the name meant. Neither Waldron, Train nor Rhys names it, and no story is attached to it in any held source. The sea-cave spirit of the Manx coast is otherwise the buggane, which W. Walter Gill found roaring in a cave near Spanish Head with a head like a big horse and eyes like a pewter plate, and Moore's separation of the cave-dwelling Cughtagh from the buggane may rest on the word alone.

The Night Man, a familiar spirit peculiar to the Isle of Man, though bearing a faint resemblance to the Irish Banshee. One of the two familiar or household spirits known on the Island alongside the Lhiannan-Shee. While the Lhiannan-Shee was a guardian, the Dooinney-Oie was a warning spirit whose appearance foretold danger or death.

Crossing points on the Island where tradition holds the fairies pass. Travellers say 'hello fairies' when crossing. Not antiquarian curiosity but living practice, observed by visitors and residents alike into the present day. Part of the accommodation between the visible and invisible worlds that defines Manx cultural identity.

The interior of Fairy Hill in Rushen was supposed to be the palace of the Fairy King. Many a tale was told of the midnight revels of the fairy court of Mona. The fairies were especially fond of the glen at Glentrammon, and were always abroad during the harvest moon. The fairy hills were the ancient tumuli, the burial mounds of an older people, and the connection between the fairy world and the land of the dead ran through everything.

The earliest notice in print is John Feltham's, in his Tour through the Island of Mann of 1798, who listed among the principal residents of Kirk Andreas Mr John Tear of Ballawhane and added that this gentleman's family had long been in possession of some valuable medicinal preparations, which they liberally distributed to the relief of the poor. That is the whole of it, and it is the only eighteenth-century notice of the family that has been found. Half a century later Joseph Train, gathering material for his Historical and Statistical Account of 1845, found that fairy doctors were still employed throughout the Island, though a Wesleyan preacher named Corjaig had affirmed some years before that he had watched all the fairies of the Island leave Douglas bay in empty rum puncheons, scudding before the wind towards Jamaica. At Ballayochie eye-biting in man or beast had been cured until lately, at Ballasalla there lived a very extensive dealer in propitiatory charms, but the most noted of all was Mr Teare of Ballawhane in the parish of Andreas, who was applied to when the prescriptions of the other practitioners had failed. The messenger sent to him was neither to eat nor drink by the way, nor to tell any person his mission, and the recovery was said to be perceptible from the time the case was stated to him. Train met him. In the spring, he wrote, farmers would suspend sowing for days rather than commit the seed to the soil without the doctor's benediction, and at Laxey in July 1833 the innkeeper Fargher had asked him to rid a wheat field of sparrows, which he did by performing some ceremonious rites in the field, after which the paper-makers and miners who watched it for the rest of the season saw the birds flock round it without one daring to enter. Train described the seer as a little man far advanced into the vale of life, healthy and active, in a low-crowned slouched hat too large for his head, with coat, vest, breeches, stockings and shoes all of undyed loaghtyn wool. Mr Kelly, the chief magistrate of Castletown, introduced them at the inn at Port St Mary and made Teare swear before him that he never called evil spirits to his assistance, and the two then spent the evening together. The doctor said the crab that lies always in its hole is never fat, told stories of persons born with the caul, and held that the failure of the seed potatoes that summer was the malevolence of the fairies, since all the potatoes he had taken under his protection had vegetated vigorously. At parting he advised Train to carry the cross-bone from the head of a bollan fish, which would keep him from straying on the mountain roads by day or night. A. W. Moore, in 1891, set the practitioners in their place. When the ordinary remedies against witchcraft and the evil eye failed, recourse was had to the charmers or witch-doctors, fer-obbee and ben-obbee, men and women who used formulas and ceremonies to cure diseases and occasionally to cause them, and who counteracted the spells of fairies and of witches alike. They administered herbs and applied fasting spittle, and for the more recondite branch of their profession used charms and incantations. All of them were more or less suspected of dabbling in sorcery on their own account, but as their powers were on the whole used for good they were tolerated. The powers were held to be hereditary, and to keep them intact they had to pass from a man to a woman and in the next generation from a woman to a man. A daughter of Teare's was still practising, and the fishermen went to her to have their nets charmed. John Rhys heard the same descent rule, father to daughter and daughter to son, in 1891, and recorded a charmer near Kirk Michael who gave fishermen a packet of herbs to boil and sprinkle over the boat, telling them plainly that he could not put the fish in their nets but could remove any mischief in the way of their luck. The Andreas charmer he heard of cut up wormwood, or cabbage sprouts when there was none, sent the crier round Peel to announce his arrival, and died in poverty at Ramsey. Moore's Manx Worthies of 1901 put the Teares of Ballawhane beside the Clucases of the Strang in Braddan, bone-setters through three generations, and two women bone-setters of Andreas and Douglas, as the Island's herbalists, fairy doctors and bone-setters.

A young sailor, coming ashore at Douglas on a fine moonlit night, was crossing the mountain toward his sister's house at Kirk Malew when he heard the noise of horses, a huntsman's halloo, and the finest horn in the world. He counted thirteen riders, all dressed in green, gallantly mounted, riding so close he could have touched them. He was so delighted he would gladly have followed. When he reached his sister and told the story, she clapped her hands in relief: those you saw were fairies, and it is well they did not take you away with them. Waldron recorded the story as though it had happened to someone he knew.