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.