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.